Reviews
‘Resident Evil Requiem’ Bridges the Old and New for a Terrifying, Action-Packed Experience [Review]
For the last decade, the Resident Evil franchise has been one that has had its feet in both the past and the future.
Resident Evil 7 pushed the series forward by giving us not only a new perspective, but a new protagonist, everyman Ethan Winters, and a new threat, the Mold. Despite its success, Capcom did not immediately continue from there, instead deciding to go back and remake the classic Resident Evil 2, giving you the characters you know and love with a modern mechanical twist. Since then, we’ve got more games in both these branching paths, all very successful in their own right, continuing to both move the franchise into new places and satisfy fans’ nostalgia.
Resident Evil Requiem, the ninth mainline entry in the series, also embraces this dichotomy. With its dual protagonists, it not only gives us a new face in the franchise lore, Grace Ashcroft, but brings back the legendary Leon Kennedy, assuring new and old fans will have something to grasp onto. There is some tension here, as Requiem at times dives a bit too much into fan service while still wanting to move the overall narrative into new territory, but for the most part, it’s able to give you that classic Resident Evil vibe without being too pandering to the audience.
Credit: Capcom
As you’re doing the initial game settings, one of the more interesting aspects of this game is made immediately apparent. Much like how the “Winters’ Expansion“ for Resident Evil Village allowed you to do, you can play Requiem in either first person or third person, a setting you can change at any time. Importantly, though, the default is that Grace is first person while Leon is third person, setting the tone for the types of experiences you can expect for each character. Grace’s sections feel more like Resident Evil 7, where your limited field of view contributes to a greater sense of tension, while Leon’s feel like Resident Evil 4, more of an action-packed third-person shooter. Going into the game, I was concerned that this would make the game feel disjointed, but the swapping does a great job of matching up with and justifying the normal power curve of a Resident Evil game.
So who is Grace Ashcroft? She’s an entirely new character with a connection to the PS2 online multiplayer title Resident Evil: Outbreak. Her mother, Alyssa, was a reporter who survived the original Racoon City incident as shown in Outbreak, giving you the first taste of the many ties to the original games that Requiem provides. As an analyst for the FBI, Grace is investigating a series of murders that not only lead her right back to the same place Alyssa was murdered years ago, but also put her directly in the path of Leon’s investigation. Right off the bat, you can see how they are seeding this narrative to tie into the long (and pretty convoluted) history of the franchise, going all the way back to the early games.
Credit: Capcom
Grace doesn’t feel like she’s just there as a plot point to reach back into the history, but rather comes across as another strong addition to the pantheon of Resident Evil protagonists. While she’s not as capable in a fight as Leon, her compassion and problem-solving skills bring to life what could have been a pretty simple role. It’s a great balance with Leon, who’s now older but still just as wisecracking, and their dynamic during the times they get to interact feels great.
At the beginning of the game, both of their investigations lead to the Wrenwood Hotel, the aforementioned site of Alyssa’s murder, and this section does an awesome job as a thesis statement for the rest of the game. Here, we’re reintroduced to the classic Resident Evil monster that started it all, the humble zombie. Since their introduction in the original, we’ve seen all sorts of wilder creatures, but smart twists to the formula make them feel new all over again. The Grace section here makes them feel truly scary as you count your extremely limited ammo, and playing as Leon makes them feel like exciting targets that aren’t overly challenging, but can overwhelm you if you’re not careful.
Credit: Capcom
As someone who initially didn’t like Resident Evil 4 because of its switch away from actual zombies, this was a refreshing return to form for me. The way they slowly stagger, making for a harder target, has always worked so well for me in both first and third person. This adds challenge to a relatively behaviorally simple enemy, but Requiem adds a neat twist that feels relevant to both the gameplay and lore. Many of the zombies here remember some of their past lives as humans, shambling their way through routines that help differentiate them from each other.
One of my favorite examples of this new gimmick was a zombie standing by a light switch muttering, “Lights off.” This was in Grace’s section, so ammo needed to be rationed, which meant tricking him by turning on various lights to move him around the hallway was the way to go. Grace’s parts are full of enemies like this, and it provides variety to the enemies in a manner beyond just making them bigger and more mutated.
Credit: Capcom
Zombies in both parts of the game also have a Crimson Head-like mutation called Blister Heads. It doesn’t feel quite as prevalent or terrifying as it did in the Resident Evil remake, even though it provides the same type of threat – zombie corpses can revive as a tougher version. While Leon can deal with them more easily, I definitely remember times as Grace where they would pursue me nearly all the way across a level, showing up to complicate an encounter after I thought I lost them.
Much like the majority of the newer RE games, Requiem contains a few stalker enemies that menace Grace. These don’t have quite the same personality as the Baker Family, Lady Dimitrescu, or even Mr. X, but they do have their own visual flair to them that makes them creepy. Their size makes them particularly unique and threatening, often feeling like they barely fit in the spaces they occupy as they hunt you through the halls. For me, stalker enemies can be a bit of a mixed bag, as they end up feeling a bit like an obstacle rather than a threat after a while, but these creatures were cleverly used so that they weren’t omnipresent in the whole level, instead reserved for specific sections to keep them fresh.
Credit: Capcom
Speaking of levels, this game features classic survival horror style level design, excellently represented in the Rhodes Hill Care Center, where Grace spends a large part of the game after being kidnapped. This place is textbook Resident Evil, a densely laid out area with new sections unlocking through puzzle solving that always cleverly loops back on itself for easy navigation. It’s my all-time favorite type of level design, as it rewards players’ mastery and familiarity with a location through clever use of non-tedious backtracking. I love the feeling of opening up my map and instantly being able to picture every room while I’m planning my route to an objective, and the Care Center is this feeling perfectly distilled. There are some really fun little puzzles that feel both grounded and absurd, which is a line that the franchise walks perfectly. Most of the other areas in the game are a little bit shorter, but they still exhibit the same level of mastery over design as its centerpiece location.
These places are also presented with a stunning level of graphical fidelity. Right from the start, it blew me away with a gorgeous rainy scene walking through the streets, every element looking sharp as you walked through crowds of people. The character models all look stellar, with the zombies doing some great damage effects as they get blasted away. The more mutated monsters also look equally ghoulish, thanks to a grotesque art style that feels consistent with the series, even if it doesn’t tread as much new ground as I would like it to.
Credit: Capcom
Crafting returns from previous games, with a unique twist on Grace’s end. Instead of having gunpowder to make ammo, she needs to collect infected blood from zombies to be combined with parts to create the items she needs. These can be anything from ammo to health items to the new and extremely useful injector that can be used to blow up zombies or destroy their corpses. This can only be used if you are able to sneak up on them, adding another weapon to her arsenal, albeit one that comes with a good deal of tension.
Leon has the standard gunpowder-and-scrap crafting resources we’ve seen before, which isn’t as thematically fun, but works better for him in context. A fun touch to the game is that when you go into your inventory, Grace has the classic limited slot inventory, while Leon has the RE4-style inventory Tetris, both of which feel appropriate for their specific sections.
In addition to having his own version of the stealth kill, Leon has some tricks up his sleeve that add an extra wrinkle to the combat. Certain enemies will have weapons like spears or axes, and once those are dropped, Leon can pick them up to throw or swing them. It’s a great way to save some ammo during a tense firefight, but it does come with the added risk of having to rush toward the corpse, which is likely surrounded by other enemies. The classic chainsaw shows up again, but this time Leon can get his hands on it. Once you kill the guy wielding it, it spins wildly on the ground for a bit before you can pick it up and swing it yourself. After that RE4 chainsaw guy that’s haunted my dreams forever, it was a great little power fantasy moment for you to be able to finally use it to turn the tables.
Credit: Capcom
While the first half of the game is focused on Grace, once you get past the Care Clinic, the majority of the game is focused on Leon, allowing for some clever twists on the RE4 style of combat. There are some really great setpieces that figure out how to change up the formula in fun ways, keeping it fresh and exciting. I won’t spoil anything because part of the fun of some of these encounters was going into them blind, but there’s one scene in particular that makes great use of the environment that was tactically clever and exceptionally tense.
It’s no big secret, in fact, it’s been a huge part of the marketing for the game, that the story of Requiem will take you back to the ruins of Racoon City. For me, this was part of where the game started to dip a bit for me. It’s the section where the focus on the past is the strongest, and I felt like some of the elements felt like they were a little too much nostalgia-bait for me, added just to make fans point at the screen when they recognize something.
The journey to Racoon City also takes place after a pivotal Grace moment, so switching to Leon for an extended period of time makes that lose a bit of impact. I felt like my momentum in this section was coming from the fact that I wanted to get back to playing as Grace, which made the retreading of the past feel a little more frustrating. This could all come down to personal taste, because this section still had strong encounters and level design to back it up, even if it wasn’t as narratively interesting to me.
Credit: Capcom
Fortunately, the final stretch of the game brings the game to a great conclusion. So many people complain about how Resident Evil games kill the horror by becoming more action-packed by the end, often citing the boat sequence near the conclusion of Resident Evil 7 as a prime offender. While that does happen here, the dual protagonist setup helps keep that from feeling unnatural, allowing that arc to feel like an expected climax. The plot gets a bit in the weeds with Umbrella, and the main villains aren’t the most compelling, but the ending was really clever, with a bit more heart than I’m used to from a Resident Evil game.
Resident Evil Requiem feels like the culmination of how Capcom has been presenting the franchise since its resurgence. They’ve found ways to cleverly tweak the formula of both the first-person and third-person versions of the franchise, allowing it to alternate between terrifying and thrilling to keep the pacing fresh throughout the 14-hour runtime. While it may dip a little too much into the nostalgia pool for my taste, that doesn’t discount the excellent level design, exciting gameplay, and great new twists to the classic lore.
Nine games into the main series, Capcom is proving that Resident Evil still has what it takes to provide top-of-the-class, B-movie style horror.
Code provided by publisher. Resident Evil Requiem launches February 27 for the Nintendo Switch 2, PC via Steam and Epic Games Store, PlayStation 5, and the Xbox Series.
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Reviews
‘Unhinged’ Review: Netflix’s Interactive Horror Thriller Is Short But Serviceable Gaming Fare
Netflix has such a strange history in gaming. I wouldn’t be surprised if most people don’t even know that there are free mobile games you can access through the service. Many of them are adaptations of their TV series, like “Too Hot to Handle” or “Squid Game”, while some are mobile versions of existing games, like Into the Breach or Hades.
In addition to mobile games, they’ve also created interactive movie experiences where you use your remote to select narrative options at branching points. Black Mirror: Bandersnatch was a fairly successful version of this, but my sentimental favorite was the one where WWE’s New Day had to escape a murder house boobytrapped by The Undertaker. Even if some of these made a bit of a splash, it seems it never really hit with mainstream audiences the way their shows do.
One of the studios they purchased while trying to break into the game space was Night School Studio, the creators of the spooky narrative series Oxenfree. This struck me as a particularly smart acquisition, as this type of narrative game seems like something that would feel at home under the Netflix umbrella. While they did release Oxenfree II while owned by the streaming giant, it was released on traditional platforms, which led me to wonder when their first Netflix exclusive would show up.
While they did produce a game called Thronglets, a mobile version of a plot element from an episode of “Black Mirror”, the recently released Unhinged seems to be one of the highest profile Netflix games in a long time.
Unhinged is a first-person, narrative-driven thriller starring Zoë Kravitz, Sadie Sink, and Troy Baker. This 30-minute experience, played on your TV through the standard Netflix app, is controlled by your phone, using some clever tricks to make the whole thing feel more immersive. It’s a neat variation on the “interactive movie” subgenre, with a tiny bit of point-and-click adventure game DNA thrown in for good measure, but it doesn’t exactly offer you as many options as something like Until Dawn.
Kravitz plays Ava, a woman who is hunkering down in her apartment complex during a dangerous hurricane. As she talks with her friend Claire, who lives in a neighboring building, about possibly leaving to find shelter elsewhere, she finds herself in a desperate chase with a crazed killer that stalks her through the halls of the building. It’s a decent setup for a very contained story, but I wish there was a little more meat on the bones. The voice acting is great, but there’s not really a ton of characterization for the two leads, and the killer was a bit “generic psycho” for my taste. There’s some implied backstory with other tenants in the building, but it’s not enough to make me feel like there’s a web of relationships that would give the story more emotional weight.
To play the game, you open up your Netflix app wherever you usually watch, then select the game. This will bring up a QR code, which you’ll scan on your phone, prompting you to download a controller app that will sync up to the game. The majority of the way you’ll interact is by pointing at the screen like a Wiimote, which selects on-screen options for Ava and shines her flashlight around the environment.
While this does give it the feel of an FMV game, Unhinged is rendered in a photorealistic graphics style, and while not quite to the level of something like P.T., it does the trick of drawing you into the action. You’re still put on a pretty strict path while moving around, which is done automatically when you select a direction, but moving your phone gives you the ability to look around your environment, even if only slightly.
The real immersive part of the game is the fact that your phone also acts as Ava’s phone. The plot is frequently moved forward by calls and text messages that you answer as you would on your own cellular device. As sound blasts out of your phone, it does put you in the shoes of the main character, momentarily worrying you that the sound of the call or text is going to alert your on-screen stalker. This part of Unhinged truly takes advantage of the format to draw you deeper into the story, though unfortunately it’s so effective that I wished the game found even more ways to use it.
There are a couple clever moments that make for unique ways of delivering twists or doing extremely light puzzle solving, but most of the time it’s just used to allow your friend to give you instructions on how to move the narrative forward.
All these mechanics come together to give the illusion of tension without actually fully delivering on it. When you get to a situation where you’re under pressure, a timer bar will appear on the top of the screen, indicating how long you have to get to safety. It’s a fine gimmick, but it comes off as a little hard to gauge. Since you don’t have direct control over your character, all your actions are very heavily animated, and sometimes your choice ends up taking longer than you think it will not because of the idea behind the choice, but because of the length of the animation. Fortunately, if you die, you’ll just pick back up at a checkpoint right before the choice, and you’ll even be treated with a voiceover discussion between police officers examining the crime scene, describing how you died.
So in theory, there is tension, counting down as the killer gets closer and closer to reaching you, but what you’re actually doing almost never feels like it’s testing you in any meaningful way. Actual choices come up very infrequently, making most of your interaction with the game world just scanning your pointer across the screen looking for an interaction point to progress, hoping the animation doesn’t take up too much time before the timer runs out. I didn’t hit a ton of friction points with it, and there’s even a Story Mode if you want to take out all possibility of death, but I found myself wishing there were more ways to affect the world around me. The phone calls and texts felt really fun and clever, but the rest of the gameplay just didn’t match that, making me wish there was more emphasis on the unique interaction model rather than the more traditional one.
Even though the mechanics aren’t necessarily pushing the tension as hard as they could be, the actual content of Unhinged’s story contains some pretty brutal situations. The villain isn’t the most unique or fleshed out, but he’s responsible for some gruesome moments that raised the stakes to make the game feel more intense. It makes your fight for survival feel that much more desperate, so even if you’re just highlighting icons on the screen, it feels more visceral thanks to what Ava is witnessing.
While I appreciate the game being lean and mean, I wish it was just a little bit longer. Thirty minutes is a pretty short runtime, and it doesn’t feel like the story for Unhinged has the time to come up with something that really sets it apart from other stories of its kind. The focus on the hurricane at the beginning made me think that was going to be more integral to the plot, but it didn’t really do much aside from explaining why the apartment complex was so empty. Thrillers like this live or die on how memorable their killer is, and there wasn’t anything really clever or unique about him. If this game doubled its runtime to the length of a standard Netflix show, it might have given them more room to build character relationships that made the action more meaningful, or at least given it a bit more personality of its own.
Night School Studio is on to something with the format of Unhinged. The combination of on screen and on phone prompts makes the game feel more immersive, drawing you in even when the narrative itself doesn’t feel fully formed or unique. The short runtime is both a help and a hindrance, keeping the pacing tight at the cost of adding any depth to the proceedings. This feels like a great first draft, and I hope that Night School is given the freedom to continue experimenting with the model, as the level of polish shown here was promising.
Even with its flaws, if you’ve already got a Netflix subscription, there’s no reason not to sit down for half an hour to check out Unhinged. If you can keep your expectations in check, it’s a nasty little thrillride that doesn’t overstay its welcome.
Unhinged is streaming now on Netflix.
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