The mold. Blue Umbrella. Chris Redfield. Ethan and Mia Winters. The Baker family. Doppelgangers. Vampires. Werewolves. Dragons. A guy who can control metal using his mind. The telepathic little girl who's actually an old woman. Living dolls. A Jigsaw-style serial killer. Insect people. First-person. Third-person. DLC. Online modes. Gold editions. Between RE7 and RE8, the fictional world of the mainline Resident Evil games has become more bloated and indecipherable than ever before. You might ire the imagination and creative liberty here, Capcom's willing to run with even the most tangential ideas, but the series that solidified survival horror as a genre has lost its identity. Ignoring crude nostalgia, there's a reason so many people like Resident Evil 2 Remake: it's simple and it's grounded. Resident Evil 9, or rather Requiem, seems more contained than Village, the nadir of the series, but there are early warning signs in that first trailer.
horror game back to Raccoon City (albeit in its ruined, post-obliteration form). It also, apparently, reanimates Alyssa Ashcroft, one of the several playable survivors in RE Outbreak, who makes a minor off-screen cameo in RE7. The RPD building makes an appearance in Requiem's first trailer. There seem to be some zombies. The title screen at the end of the trailer is reminiscent of the font and box art for the stripped-back-to-a-fault Resident Evil 1 remake from 2002. In fact, it looks like the cover of the original Silent Hill.
These are minor signifiers that RE Requiem may be more sober than RE7 and Village, and truer to the spirit of the classical games. If you're feeling more pessimistic, you might get the sense that RE9 is resurrecting tried-and-tired series material in lieu of fresh ideas.
That seems very possible. It's nearly 30 years since the first Resident Evil was released, and given all the games, spin offs, TV series, movies, and books - not to mention the innumerable other survival horror games that have emulated RE's substance and style - it's difficult to imagine how any developer, no matter how willing or talented, would be able to manifest something truly new. A victory lap around some of the series' most famous places and people seems much more straightforward, if you have a cynical (or perhaps just more experienced) view of how big games are conceived.
More concerning is how, even within the space of a three-and-a-half-minute reveal trailer, Resident Evil Requiem is already starting to feel overwritten. The best Resident Evil games - 1, 2, 3, and 4 - are also the most narratively straightforward: escape the mansion, escape the city, kill Nemesis, rescue the president's daughter.
The first Requiem trailer makes nods to a character with a traumatic backstory. Someone gets suffocated by a hooded killer, using a plastic bag. The tagline says "requiem for the dead, nightmare for the living." There's something self-serious about RE9 already. It feels tonally closer to the original The Evil Within, or try-hard psychological horrors like Layers of Fear or Visage.
Resident Evil used to - and still should - have a sense of humor. It's splatterhouse. It's schlock. It's soap opera. Go back to those original, pre-main menu disclaimers: "This game contains scenes of explicit violence and gore." Or maybe Leon's action-hero quips from the original RE4 trailers: "Monsters. Huh. Guess after this there'll be one less to worry about." The bluntness and 'dumbness' is, paradoxically, part of what makes Resident Evil inventive and smart.
If the choice is between a Resident Evil 9 that's flawed but nevertheless attempting something new, versus a reheat of past ideas, icons, and imagery, in service of cheap recognition and sentimentality, then yes, the former is better.
But what I really hope for is a Resident Evil game that has distinctive mechanics and concepts, but is nevertheless rooted in the playful, horror-movie-double-bill tone of the originals, where the heroes are jocks, the monsters are big, goopy flesh-and-blood barrels, and the story can be summarized in two sentences. That's not what I see in Requiem right now, but I hope and believe that Capcom will surprise me.
Until then, you might want to try some of the other best zombie games out now.
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