Resident Evil Requiem hands-on preview – the scariest Resi ever

GameCentral plays 30 minutes of Resident Evil 9, aka Requiem, and comes away not only impressed but gleefully terrified.

Despite having invented the term survival horror the majority of Resident Evil games are not all that scary. Most are tense, at least in part, but it’s only really Resident Evil 1 (especially the GameCube remake) and Resident Evil 7 that are consistently frightening, and even then they tail off into straight action territory by the end.

There are definitely scary moments in Resident Evil 2 and other games but it’s perhaps one of the secrets of the franchise’s success that you don’t have to have nerves of steel to complete them, which could explain why most other horror games usually only sell a fraction of the average Resident Evil game.

Apart from one sequence (you’ll know it if you’ve played it), 2021’s Resident Evil Village was arguably the least scary entry ever. But along with 2023’s Resident Evil 4 remake, which is also in contention for being the least frightening, it was the best-selling in the whole series. So it’s very interesting to discover that Requiem is absolutely terrifying.

To what degree Requiem is intended to be a soft reboot continues to be unclear. The plan to create a first person trilogy starring Ethan Winters certainly seems to have been cut short, but the first thing you discover with the Requiem demo is that a first person view is still the default way of playing it. While you can switch to third person whenever you want, that requires going into the menu, rather than having a button dedicated to it.

The assumption by fans has been that Capcom realised the third person view in the remakes was proving popular – and that a first person view meant people weren’t getting attached to the character of Ethan – but that revelation likely only came several years into the development of Requiem. Either way, as soon as you start playing it’s very obvious why Requiem is keeping the first person view as the default.

At the moment (I’m writing this before Gamescom, so there might be a new trailer during Open Night Live) the story set-up for Requiem is still unclear and despite rumours of Leon and other fan favourites being playable the only one that’s been confirmed so far is new character Grace Ashcroft, FBI agent and daughter of obscure Resident Evil Outbreak character Alyssa Ashcroft.

While at first that seemed like just a random deep cut, Alyssa was also briefly mentioned in Resident Evil 7, in her role as a newspaper reporter, which implies that there has been no major U-turn in terms of Capcom’s plans.

The inital trailer portrayed Grace as an inexperienced agent, not used to fieldwork, while the demo begins with a scene from that initial reveal, where Grace is hung upside down on a gurney, with a needle in her arm that’s extracting her blood.

She escapes and finds herself in what is presumably the mysterious Wrenwood Hotel from the trailer. Despite a cut scene showing a doctor attending to Grace there’s no one around when she escapes and yet there’s a curious detail where the room’s light switch works, as does a table lamp, which immediately seems ominous.

Exploring the hallway outside, the whole hotel is in darkness, with only a little light seeping through the windows and some evil looking red emergency lights. The graphics are superb, a clear step up from Village and Resident Evil 4, and together with some excellent sound design makes the whole situation immediately terrifying.

I wander into a room filled with what seems to be medical supplies but the back of it is pitch black and so I have to retreat and explore the main corridor, which has more locked doors, including an old school Resident Evil one that requires a cherub key. There’s a single, overhead light in this area and after retrieving a cigarette lighter I go back to the darkened room to explore, where I find the doctor’s very dead body.

This is a great jump scare moment and creeping around in the dark, with only a flame to light your way is hugely atmospheric. The doctor’s body falls to the floor and suddenly a huge hand grabs it, and a hideous monster lifts it up and bites its head off. Grace has no weapons of any kind, so I run in a blind panic but get confused over the layout and find myself in a dead end from which there is no escape.

Trying again is even scarier because I know what’s going to happen, but after this time successfully escaping it becomes clear that the monster does not like bright light and immediately retreats from it, breaking into the ceiling above and invoking memories of Alien Isolation. For reasons I was not quite clear on, all the lights in the starting room are now out, so I creep about nervously, ominous sounds all around, and once again try to explore the medical room.

This is all the scarier because I don’t know what I’m supposed be doing there and while there’s a green herb to pick up the moveable trolley doesn’t seem to do anything obvious, except allow access to a cupboard… with nothing in it. It makes a lot of noise moving it though, so I retreat and explore further down the hallway, finding a gate blocking the way to a brightly lit foyer.

A fuse box nearby is missing a fuse and while I find a replacement I also need a screwdriver. The only option seems to be to go back to the medical room, where I discover that pushing the trolley a bit more allows me to use it to climb up to a cabinet and retrieve a screwdriver. It also involves knocking a TV monitor onto the floor with a loud smash, which doesn’t seem to have any immediate consequences but ratchets the tension up further.

Inevitably, the monster reappears, right by the only surviving light, and my only option is to lead it into the starting room and run around the central table and out behind it. It’s not particularly slow and Grace is not particularly fast, so this is especially harrowing, but I jam the fuse in the fuse box and leap through the gate… only for the monster to grab Grace’s leg and drag her back into the dark, to an unknown fate.

All of this is fantastically creepy, and I end the demo genuinely frightened. Which is exactly what you want from a horror game. A horror game where you’re not horrified is like a comedy where you’re not laughing: a failure and usually a pretty miserable waste of time.

In terms of gameplay there’s nothing complicated going on – and I’m not even sure this is an actual segment from the game, or something created specifically as a demo – but it’s surprisingly reminiscent of the first few hours of Resident Evil 7, while also seeming to take fairly obvious influence from Alien Isolation.

There was nothing overtly cheesy or comedic in the game, although you could say the design of the creature is a bit over-the-top, and hard to take seriously in isolation, but it certainly doesn’t seem that way when it’s chasing you down a dark corridor. Interestingly, it appears to be female, so one obvious guess would be that it’s Grace’s mother and/or the doctors were intending to turn Grace into a similar creature.

Why you’d do an experiment like that in a hotel I have no idea, but I can’t wait to find out, because the demo impressed me like no other preview in a long time. Especially as there’s still so much that we don’t know about the game, since even if the rumours about other characters aren’t true the trailer clearly shows a bombed out Racoon City and that was not part of this demo.

It’s an agreeably long time since there’s been a bad Resident Evil game, but Requiem is already off to a fantastic start and could well end up as one of the series’ very best. The demo ends with a promise from Capcom that it is merely the ‘overture to our darkest symphony’ and they don’t seem to be lying.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (previewed), Xbox Series X/S, and PC
Price: TBA
Publisher: Capcom
Developer: Capcom
Release Date: 27th February 2026
Age Rating: 18

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