Resident Evil Requiem preview: Simple horror tropes create intense action

I am a coward. It’s important that you know this about me, as it explains why I did so well when playing this 20-minute snippet of Resident Evil Requiem. It’s a game where being overly headstrong is punished, and it wants to constantly keep you on the back foot.

The section begins with our protagonist, Grace Ashcroft, strapped upside down to a gurney while her blood is slowly being drained from her body in a strange facility that clearly hasn’t paid its electrical bill lately, given how dark the place is. 

The darkness is one of the game’s most effective tools though. As you wander through the halls, this pale white line effect moves about the edges of your vision, highlighting the point at which extreme dark becomes pitch-black; it keeps you constantly aware of the areas that you can’t see, leaving you to constantly worry about what might jump out of them.

It’s a showcase of just how the series has come to truly master the fundamentals of horror. Jump scares are few and far between to maximize their impact; the rest of the time, they fill you with this growing sense of unease. It isn’t long before you get your first encounter with the monster for this section — some strange, grey creature with stringy hair and bloody teeth that looms over you, it looks almost like someone’s hurried pencil sketch given 3D form.

Those are the only major details I can recall about it, because the game makes a point to make sure you never get too good a look at it. You get one panicked glimpse as it jumps out at out near a pale red light, and then you have to turn away and run to safety, only imagining the twisted way in which it moves as you hear it scampering up behind you — turning to look being certain doom.

In the light, it would probably look quite goofy, but the game never gives you a chance to take the threat off of it. After it initially chases you, you’ll discover that it finds being in bright light painful, which gives you a glimmer of hope that might keep you safe, only to slowly increase the feelings of dread as the lightbulbs in each room begin to burst one by one as you explore the area, trying to find a way out.

It makes very effective use of such a small area. In this section, there are just three main rooms connected by a corridor, but you’ll have to use every inch of it multiple times as you pick up the items needed to free the fuse required to repair the elevator that will take you to safety. Plus, now you know there’s a monster stalking the halls, it can tease you as it slowly ramps up the tension. 

I needed to find a screwdriver to progress, and conveniently, there’s a toolbox on a high shelf just out of reach. So I began to push a cart that I could climb on, and of course, as I shifted it, metal boxes and other loud items would slip off it and create crashing noises that made those distant footsteps grow louder and closer. RE9 knows that you know horror tropes, but it doesn’t waver or try to subvert them; instead, it sticks to its guns, knowing that you’ll still feel the intensity of your predicament.

The experience is clearly designed for first-person, but you can switch to the classic Resi third-person camera at any time. While playing in this mode does lose some of that oppressive intensity of not knowing what’s beyond your peripheral vision, you do get a much more visceral sense of Grace’s state of mind. When in first-person, it’s easy to forget that she’s all bandaged up and recently had a couple of pints of blood drained from her body, but as you see her limp in third-person, or stumble and scamper to her feet mid-chase, it does a lot to remind you how helpless you are.

While it was only a short snippet of the game, this taste of Resident Evil Requiem has me excited for more, and assures me that the series hasn’t lost a step when it comes to making cowards like me hide under tables.

Resident Evil Requiem releases on February 27, 2026, for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S

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