Note: This piece discusses late-game events in Resident Evil Requiem.
Resident Evil Requiem is afraid. The shadow of the series’ past has grown too long and large, looming over everything and blocking the path to new horizons. Eager to forge a new path, Requiem forces players to confront all the accumulated gunk, bits of lore and classic iconography that have clogged the pipes. The result is a Resident Evil deeply concerned with the idea of Resident Evil itself. And to free the series from the past, there’s only one solution: stock up on shotgun shells, sharpen your hatchet, and start busting heads.
It’s always a tricky thing to suggest that a video game is “about” itself or “about” the strangeness of the medium. All games, to some extent, call attention to their form. Tutorials pop up, musical themes are remixed, a long-dead character returns in a DLC character pass. But sometimes a game truly is a reflection by the creators on what’s gotten them this far and what, if anything, needs to change. Resident Evil Requiem, particularly in the moments where players control long-stranding franchise hero Leon Kennedy, is deeply anxious about this weird horror game business. We’ve been doing this awhile and all that lore, all those games, have created a kind of spectre that, at least in Requiem’s estimation, is holding back new possibilities.
Central to Requiem’s plot is a complication arising decades later for characters exposed to the original T-Virus: Raccoon City Syndrome. The trauma of Raccoon City, the inescapable draw of that event, is literalized into a slowly creeping necrosis that is killing Leon, Sherry, and other survivors. Leon’s central motive, equal to stopping the bad guys, is to remove this stain from his body. Almost thirty years since his debut in Resident Evil 2, the game which most prominently highlights Raccoon City’s downfall, Leon—and, by extension, the franchise itself—cannot escape the gravity of that event. In fact, all previous attempts to leave the past behind have failed.
The most obvious manifestation of this failure, even though it produced exceptionally good games, is Capcom’s recent string of high-budget remakes of Resident Evil 2 through Resident Evil 4. After 2017’s Resident Evil 7: Biohazard adjusted both the perspective the series was played in and opted to avoid obvious connections to prior titles, the next two titles were lavishly produced remakes of the games set during the Raccoon City incident. When the series picked up again in Resident Evil Village, a game more focused on werewolves and evocations of Hammer Horror aesthetics, that game failed to avoid the temptation to tie everything back to the original games. A crucial late-game plot point reveals that Ozwell Spencer, Umbrella Corporation’s founder, got his start under the tutelage of Village’s villain, Mother Miranda.
For his own part, as much as Leon is eager to purge the lingering poison of Raccoon City from his blood, Spencer is equally anxious to remove Umbrella’s long shadow from the world and the series. Requiem’s endgame reveals that Spencer, feeling immense guilt for what he’s done to the world, developed his final masterpiece: a serum called Elpis that can cure any T-Virus infection. Tired of zombies and Tyrants and the violence that came from his life’s work, his final gift is a chance to wipe it all away. Seemingly sharing a similar weariness, Requiem conspires to have players dispose of the accumulated iconography that has congealed in the series’ bloodstream like a clot impeding the flow of newer stories and fresh directions.
To achieve this, Requiem needs the player to confront familiar places and battle well-known enemies. The mid-game drops Leon back into Raccoon City where, like a white blood cell, he sweeps through the streets to blow away the lingering hordes of zombies and freaks that lie beneath the dust. What follows can feel like a desperate “best hits” collection of fights—long decayed shamblers, a massive plant beast in the style of the first game’s Plant 42, a grey-faced Tyrant like Resident Evil 2’s iconic pursuer—where Leon systematically uproots the weeds tangling the series’ garden. Far from some mere wink-and-nod nostalgia-fest, this death drive is reminiscent of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, a game which similarly tossed series iconography into a blender, tasking protagonist Solid Snake with their disposal in order to save the world. In each game, the past threatens to kill our heroes unless they perform this ritual cleansing to the rest of the series. Nothing can be spared or else the world is doomed.
Both games also perform a similar trick: returning to an old location to see how decrepit it has become. For Leon, it is the wreckage of the Raccoon Police Department, which many players have come to know intimately from their time playing Resident Evil 2’s remake. In Guns of the Patriots, it is Shadow Moses Island, the setting of the original Metal Gear Solid. In both cases, these complex playgrounds that once held so much power and came to potently live in the imagination of players are revealed for what they are: nothing but a collection of old memories and crumbling foundations. These places felt like fortresses in their original games, dangerous and constantly testing our abilities. In the course of a little more than a dozen years, they have become ruins. And when you go back, there’s nothing to find except a sense that even the most important things have passed into nothing. All you can do is slip through the dust and do one final clean sweep to make sure that whatever might be lurking in the shadows can’t crawl back later. Which is bloody but necessary work.
The most tenacious of Leon’s enemies is the Commander, an enemy soldier who is almost certainly HUNK, the Umbrella commando who survived Raccoon City and gained a reputation as “Mr. Death,” an unkillable war-god who can escape any and all crises. Leon battles him in Requiem‘s most compelling boss encounter, a one-on-one melee battle. Cut for cut, like a surgeon removing cancer or a medieval barber performing a good bleeding, Leon excises this seemingly eternal icon and finally removes one of the final lingering pieces of that past from the series. Inspecting the corpse reveals that the Commander also showed signs of Raccoon City Syndrome. Even the unkillable super soldier could not escape the poison, literal and metaphorical, eating away at the heart of the series. All we can do is put him out of his misery.
Phrasing it this way can be harsh. Are you saying that the amazing games that put this series on the map are outdated and passe? Not exactly, but in a media landscape replete with desperate nostalgia grabs from Ghostbusters: Afterlife to Tron: Ares and everything in-between, fans are awash in infantilizing art that is eager to arrest their development and keep their horizons dim. The games industry, faltering and scrambling to avoid collapse, falls back to nostalgia instead of branching in new paths. The Last of Us has been remastered and remade twice since 2013, franchises morph into gacha slop where you can collect all your favorite characters from childhood, and Fortnite is a Ready Player One nightmare land that has deeply damaged the notion of what a successful game even looks like anymore. The past is killing the industry.
It remains to be seen if Resident Evil won’t fall back into old tropes and familiar faces but Requiem asks a question about the franchise: Hasn’t this gotten a bit out of hand? It proposes a simple solution to the problem: fight, fight damn it, and do anything it takes to stop the calcification that has lingered for decades. Slash these creatures to bits, bleed the familiar dead, find that final vaccine that can sweep away the infection eating at everything. Only then can we truly be free.
