Resident Evil Requiem preview: the goriest, wildest sequel yet

Capcom’s undead are more captivating and unnerving than ever before

It’s easy to mistake the Civic Care Center as a renovated version of Resident Evil 2’s iconic police department building, because the layout is broadly similar: There’s a grand, two-story lobby with a puzzle door at the center, and that lobby is flanked by two large wings to the east and west. From what I’ve seen, Grace’s sections of Requiem have a lot in common with the looping gameplay rhythm of RE2 and its remake’s early hours — and that’s a good thing. There’s a room with a typewriter and storage box just off the lobby, and you’ll find yourself back at this familiar starting point pretty often. As you access more keycards, rooms, and items, that saferoom becomes your jumping-off point for a series of mini-expeditions as you venture further into the building.

Grace’s section of the demo is more than just a retread of “stuff you liked in Resident Evil 2” — though that alone would be enough to get me excited. For one thing, Requiem’s zombies aren’t a gaggle of generic, jumpscare-happy shamblers. They’re the staff and patients of this facility, and each one has unique behavior patterns that reveal glimpses of the story and provide clues for how to outwit them. Tipsy revelers wobble around clutching wine bottles and singing to themselves in a swanky part of the administrative area, hinting at a fundraiser or celebration gone terribly wrong. Over in the medical area, a shuffling patient trails his IV stand and mutters indignantly about loud noises. Others howl from the pain in their eyes when Grace turns the lights on in the corridor, and hurry to shut them off. This makes encounters feel unique and memorable, and it’s also a more engaging approach to environmental storytelling than people leaving unusually detailed journal entries all over the place. Those notes are still around — where else would people keep their safe combinations? — but their use in Requiem feels a bit more restrained and plausible than elsewhere in the series.

While I played as Grace for the bulk of my demo, I also got to step into Leon’s steel-toed boots for two brief sequences, each lasting about 20 minutes. His sections of the game are more action-focused, which means instead of sneaking past enemies and carefully managing your inventory, you’re free to head into an encounter with guns blazing. What’s more, Leon’s strength and resilience are better suited to hand-to-hand combat, which means splattering heads with gooey melee finishers and using a chainsaw to mow down multiple enemies in one swing. It makes for a thrilling catharsis in contrast to all the tense scares of Grace’s section.

Speaking of goo, this might be the goriest Resident Evil game yet. Leon’s primary finishing move is a hatchet to the dome, which unleashes a massive fountain of blood. There are literal buckets of blood scattered around the Civic Care Center, as well as mangled bodies with their guts and eyeballs hanging out. What’s more, instead of the scripted death animations seen elsewhere in the series, Requiem’s game-overs happen in-engine and vary depending on the circumstances. During an early screw-up as Leon, I was taking on a group and neglected to consider who might be behind me. One of the zombies picked up the chainsaw Leon had just dropped and cleaved him in half, Darth Maul-style. As he screamed and enemies swarmed, the saw dropped to the floor, spinning carnage through the jumble of everyone’s limbs. There’s more viscera on display than ever before, but I never felt like Requiem veered too far into Saw territory, at least in the segments I played.

Pointing out that a AAA video game has impressive graphics in 2026 feels extremely No shit, Sherlock, but Requiem’s beauty does deserve special mention. A lot of that comes from the attention paid to humdrum irregularities and imperfections in its character and environmental designs. The wooden trim on the walls of the Civic Care Center is nicked and dented beneath about 30 gummy layers of landlord white paint. (If you jabbed your thumbnail into it, you’d leave a little mark and never hit wood.) Leon’s leather jacket is supple and buttery, like something Todd Howard would wear to The Game Awards. His salt-and-pepper stubble is just a little patchy and grows in irregular directions, longer and denser in some places than others. He has the widely spaced crow’s feet of someone who’s done a lot of squinting and grimacing over the years, as opposed to someone who inherited his mom’s endearing smile-crinkles. During cutscenes when you’re controlling Grace, you can see the cold sweats kick in, making her face dewy and pale. I’ve seen a character sweat in a video game before, but I can’t recall ever clocking a specifically cold sweat elsewhere.

Other than simply gawking at everything, the highlight of my demo was a boss fight pitting Leon against a Chunk, a massive mutant toddler who pads around on all fours, shoving anything in reach into its maw to quench its insatiable appetite. It’s not dissimilar to Metaphor: ReFantazio’s horrible giant baby, but you get to shoot this one in the face with a shotgun. (You can also shoot it in the ass, though it’s sadly far less effective.) You encounter this terrible tot in the attic of the Care Center, which means plenty of tight spaces to navigate — and lots of flimsy, unplastered walls for this big boy to blast through. With a thoughtful balance of thrills, strategy, and bonkers enemy design, this sequence was a perfect encapsulation of what makes the action-heavy installments of the series (like Resident Evil 4) so much fun.

With Requiem, the team at Capcom has promised players a supercut of the franchise’s most beloved games. After spending three fun-filled hours mangling corpses and consuming every green herb I see, I can confidently say it delivers on that promise, and is shaping up to be a truly superlative entry in the series. Now, I’m left feeling like big baby Chunk — hungry for more.

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Resident Evil Requiem launches Feb. 27 for Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X.