Resident Evil 2 director demands 'not scary' version of Requiem

"I can't sleep alone at night anymore," said Hideki Kamiya

Resident Evil Requiem is busting records with series-high sales and glowing reviews, and now the director of 1998's iconic Resident Evil 2 has a request for Capcom. In a post on X following the March 10 announcement of upcoming Requiem DLC, Hideki Kamiya jokingly asked the Requiem team to offer a "not scary mode" in a future content update.

Instead of fleeing the frenzied undead in the creepiest medical facility on Earth, Kamiya imagines a kinder, gentler version of Requiem, "where the zombies get all cute, the blood splatters turn into cherry blossom petals, the music becomes this upbeat, feel-good kind of tune, and you can just purely enjoy the puzzles and battles in a fun mood," he wrote. "I wanna play it, but it's so scary that I can't sleep alone at night anymore, so I just can't bring myself to play... Think about how people like that feel..."

As the director of the original Resident Evil 2, Kamiya's no stranger to scares. This is, after all, the game that introduced nightmarish enemies like Lickers and Mr. X to the series. Despite his survival-horror pedigree, it's not the first time Kamiya has expressed his squeamishness about frightening games. Back in October 2024, he said something similar about Hideo Kojima's iconic P.T. demo in another X post: "Man, I wanna play it again... It was so fun... But it's too scary to play alone..."

Nearly a year after that, in September 2025, he half-seriously pondered a project of his own like P.T. — with some caveats. "If P.T.'s revival is impossible, Kojima-san should just make another game in the same style," he wrote. "If Kojima-san won't do it, maybe I should try... though I'm not a fan of horror so it wouldn't be horror... and I don't even have any ideas anyway..."

In Kamiya's defense, he's not wrong about the scares in Resident Evil Requiem. There are all sorts of terrifying things in this game, including literal buckets of blood and guts, minivan-sized arachnids, and a massive thresher used to mulch hordes of infected into slurry. I suspect Kamiya will be waiting a very long while to get truly a gore-free version of Requiem, but in the meantime he might consider downloading the Shrek mod, which transforms the titanic toddler Chunk into a smiling yet lethal version of the Scottish ogre.