After I played through Resident Evil Requiem for the first time, I warned a friend of mine with debilitating arachnophobia that there was a segment about midway through Capcom’s latest horror game that is so spider-heavy that he might as well throw any thought of playing the game out of his mind forever. But luckily, modders foresaw this, and have already put out arachnophobia mods for the game.The ways in which these mods go about removing spiders from the game range from strictly practical to completely absurd.
Mods to remove spiders from games are pretty common because it turns out spiders themselves show up in a lot of games, and for some players, their presence can be a dealbreaker. Whether they’re low-level enemies in an RPG dungeon or giant bosses like in Requiem, if your phobia is bad enough, it can keep you from playing a game entirely. So when a game like Requiem puts a major focus on the eight-legged creepy crawlers, Capcom has to know this will nudge at least a few people out of the pool. Well, mere days after the game’s February 27 launch, modders have already given those players who want to see Grace and Leon’s story through without fighting a giant spider a few options.
One mod on Nexus Mods replaces the big spider Leon fights in Requiem’s second act with “formless blobs.” Another swaps the models for the various arachnids with different creature models, including birds, rats, and even the big guy himself, Mr. X. The most humorous one is a mod that turns the big spider into Thomas the Tank Engine, which could be scarier than a giant spider depending on who you are. Resident Evil fans have looked to the sentient train to alleviate some of the horrors before, most notably by modding out Resident Evil 2‘s Mr. X for the train back in 2019.
Ultimately, the spider segments in Resident Evil Requiem are pretty short, but if the threat of an eight-legged bug is enough to make you skip a game entirely, there are now at least a few options for you on PC. Now you can just be scared by all the other horrifying monsters in Grace and Leon’s way like the rest of us.
