Nestled in a cabinet deep inside Resident Evil Requiem’s ruined Raccoon City Police Department lies an off-brand console, approximating the original PlayStation or Sega Saturn. Studious players can find this knockoff system surrounded by all manner of Capcom games from the era, like Mega Man 8 and Street Fighter 2 Alpha. Capcom games often reference each other–look at any Dead Rising–but Requiem goes one step further by stashing a copy of the original Resident Evil inside this electronics-filled coffin. This small inclusion turns a silly Easter egg into an immersion-breaking one and acts as a fitting microcosm for Requiem’s bigger problem: it’s distractingly obsessed with its past.
The hyperfixation on nostalgia is pernicious, though, and doesn’t fully take hold until the latter half of the game. The links up until then are somewhat tenuous, but still present. Requiem’s new character, Grace Ashcroft, isn’t allowed to be completely new–she has to have a connection to an old game, as the daughter of Resident Evil Outbreak’s Alyssa Ashcroft. Its beginning mostly introduces new threads and faces, but Grace isn’t even allowed to carry the game by herself–the way her predecessor, Ethan Winters, does–as she’s joined by series pretty boy Leon S. Kennedy.
Resident Evil games usually have multiple playable characters and those often, at least partially, pull from a recognizable roster. Leon’s inclusion isn’t automatically a red flag. But once the story starts unfolding, it’s hard not to see Leon’s inclusion as a lack of confidence in Grace’s ability to carry the game, and a semi-cowardly way to appeal to fans. A charitable read is difficult to sustain, since this wave of callbacks kicks into overdrive once players don the zombie ass-kicker’s curtain haircut in Requiem’s latter half. Leon is the conduit to nostalgia in this portion of the game.
The references are all of varying intensities, though, and the smaller ones start when stepping into the desolate museum-turned-police station from Resident Evil 2. Players hear the understated and iconic melody of “The Front Hall.” Wesker’s thirsty picture of Rebecca Chambers from RE2 is a reward for those who follow a few simple clues. There’s zombie clawing at the vending machine just like in the RE2 remake. Capcom also makes sure to point out how the corpse in the first hallway is missing its jaw, as if a reference that obvious needed to be spelled out.
While the last one is heavy-handed, these small nods are just the pretext to the most egregious callbacks. Zeno, the character who looks like Albert Wesker and only pops up in a few short scenes prior to showing up at the police station, further shows off his Wesker-like attributes by dodging bullets just like the slain former Umbrella Corporation researcher could.
It is heavily implied Zeno is a clone of Wesker; Zeno shares the same voice actor as Wesker in the Resident Evil 4 remake and is later called an “imitation,” a label he scoffs at. Wesker was blown up in a volcano with two rockets–two more than the daily recommended dose–but that didn’t stop Capcom from ginning up any reason to bring back a spiritual successor. Instead of making a new character to fill that role, Capcom resorted to necromancy, a cheap practice for those unwilling to move away from the warm comfort of familiarity.
But why stop at just one (alleged) clone? Zeno summons a Mr. X lookalike Tyrant to punch Leon and crush RPD walls like it’s 1998. Even though the concept art reveals a different model number–he’s T-501, while the original Mr. X is T-103–they behave nearly identically. Even the more traditional boss fight that follows Mr. X chasing Leon through the RPD recalls the final encounter in Leon’s scenario in RE2 without any meaningful variation; flipping which side the clawed hand is on doesn’t change much. Instead of coming up with another worthy Tyrant mutation to change things up, Capcom went with the safest and most boring option, and didn’t even bother to give him a cool hat this time. The trophy or achievement that pops upon killing him is called, “I Remember That, Too,” a fitting title that’s a little too on the nose.
The other fights at least attempt to change things up more, but are still mined from Resident Evil’s past. The Plant 43 and big spider battles are reminiscent of bosses from the first game, yet they each play out differently because of Requiem’s more complex and modern combat mechanics. The random and unnamed “Commander” who players slice up in a melee-centric bout is assuredly Hunk–the masked goon who often pops up in Resident Evil’s extra modes–even though he means little to Requiem’s story.
Even the final fight can’t help itself. The crusty big baddie Victor Gideon transforms into a blob that’s almost identical to Nemesis’ final form in the Resident Evil 3 remake. Leon even makes a comment about it, despite him never having fought against Nemesis in the games. Victor is infected with a Nemesis parasite, so it’s not completely random, but that doesn’t absolve the game from once again just copying a previous fight.
There are levels to it, but all of these battles, especially when taken together as a unit, come across as pandering in one way or another. It’s as though Capcom had to contrive ways for every one of Leon’s bosses to contain some sort of reference, regardless of whether it fit, and didn’t prioritize new ideas. And it’s not references themselves that are bad. Obviously, a series with this long a history is going to continue threads and have callbacks; it’s more how they’re implemented and how much Requiem tries to push forward.
Repeatedly dabbling in the past like this is a surface-level way to tie a game’s story to the franchise’s history. Doom director Hugo Martin spoke about this when rebooting the recent shooter trilogy in an interview with IGN, noting how designers have to look deeper when examining how to translate older games to the new era and can’t overly focus on giving people what they think they want.
“A big part of good design, it doesn’t matter what it is–a car, a movie, or anything–you’ve gotta evaluate it in the 50,000-foot view and be able to distill it down to the core elements that make it great,” said Martin. “A lot of that stuff is kind of operating at a subconscious level and I think the fun part of our job is to really ask, ‘Why do they like that?’ The science of what makes something appealing is what makes the job of a designer, and what I find to be endlessly interesting. It’s really, really compelling work.”
He continued by bringing up the recent era of Star Wars films and how it failed to hit with many viewers.
“Once you can figure that out, like, ‘Why do people like Star Wars?’ Why does someone look at the new Corvette C8 and just have the reaction, ‘God, that’s gorgeous?’ I can tell you, for a fact, that the work that went into that was tremendous. If you understand what makes something tick, it’s that, ‘Oh my god, that is just awesome!’ That means we really got you, regardless of whatever it is.”
Requiem evokes some of the worst parts of recent Star Wars media. The infamous “Somehow, Palpatine returned” line from Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker could just as easily be applied to Mr. X in Requiem, as the two handwave away the hard work that comes with writing a cohesive story that earns its references. It’s just a shortcut meant to show people what they already know regardless if it is deserved. Requiem spins up a technical reason why this Tyrant exists–Zeno is plundering Umbrella’s wares and therefore has access to its bioweapons–but fan service is the leading reason. This Tyrant means nothing to the player, and Requiem doesn’t attempt to make the case within the 10 minutes he’s on the screen.
The Darth Vader encounters in both of Respawn Entertainment’s recent Star Wars: Jedi games also come out of nowhere, and while they’re not bad sequences, they mean little to the actual story at hand and leverage nostalgia in place of solid storytelling. All of the digitally de-aged Luke Skywalker cameos in the recent Star Wars streaming shows also come across as desperate attempts to get viewers to point at the screen, Leo DiCaprio meme-style. Repeatedly trying to loop back to the same known quantities–be it the Skywalkers or the Raccoon City gang–is a tired way to continue a series. Easter eggs can be nice until everything is an Easter egg.
Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, Resident Evil Village, and even Resident Evil 4 were partially successful because they embodied what Martin spoke about with Doom. All three included many of the general core Resident Evil tenets, without hyperfixating on the same old elements. They carried over the tense combat, creepy foes, inventory management, and the puzzles Resident Evil is known for, yet supplemented those core ideals with plenty of new systems and fresh characters or settings. So while Umbrella was still a constant and a couple familiar faces returned in those three entries, there was a better balance between old and new, and Capcom tried to avoid just recycling the recognizable. These are widely viewed as some of the best Resident Evil games, and their ingenuity and deep understanding of the series play a crucial role in that sentiment.
Requiem understands some of those deeper elements, but drowns them out with excessive key-jingling as it draws your attention to reference after reference. It’s incredibly distracting in the game’s final half, when it feels like most of its beats come alongside winks and nudges. This is clear in its final scenes, when Leon and Grace are waiting to die in the darkness, before a masked character drops in from the heavens to save them and name drops Chris Redfield. It’s a mid-credits-esque stinger that comes from nowhere and saves them before the credits have even rolled, which is a ridiculous shortcut that sums up Requiem’s many narrative follies. Leon even says he will probably cross paths with Chris again one day, seemingly teasing a future entry or DLC and that there are still more keys to jingle.
Resident Evil has a past it should be proud of, but Requiem takes it too far and suffers because of it. Nostalgia is like one of the series’ many superviruses. A small dose can make the user more powerful, while overdosing on it can lead to a gelatinous mess with many obvious weak spots.
