Resident Evil 9 (also called Requiem) is all about going back and forth. I played the game for about three hours, and it feels like the whole thing is built like a pendulum swinging. It takes you from exciting highs to scary lows. What really surprised me was how fast the game gets into this rhythm of ups and downs.
You might think when I talk about this back-and-forth, I’m only talking about how the new character Grace and the returning character Leon work together. There is a push and pull between them. At one point, the game shows a cutscene where Leon jumps in and basically kills a monster in one hit that had seemed unbeatable when it was chasing Grace.
The two characters show different sides of Resident Evil. Grace plays in first-person, similar to RE7, and brings back the scary feeling of the older games. Grace searches areas for keys to unlock new parts of the hospital-like places, using limited supplies to stay alive. Leon plays like RE4, in third-person with more straight-up action. With Grace, I’m always saving my game at special machines as I move slowly and carefully. As Leon, when I find one of these machines, he can’t even use it – I guess he doesn’t need to save because his parts seem more straightforward and have checkpoints.
It goes deeper than that. Leon has a move to block attacks, but Grace doesn’t. Leon gets better weapons more easily; as Grace, you’re lucky to find bullets for your basic pistol. So yes, there’s a difference between them. But honestly, that’s not really what I’m talking about.
Grace’s part of the game is really the heart of this hands-on experience. Even though Grace and Leon might each get about half the game time, Leon moves through areas twice as fast as Grace. That’s what happened in the demo, which had three main parts: Leon arriving at the Rhodes Hill hospital in a quick action scene, Grace exploring the hospital while desperately looking for supplies to stay alive, and then Leon going through the same areas Grace had explored, but with lots of action.
About two hours of the three-hour playtime was with Grace. The Rhodes Hill medical place looks like a classic Resident Evil area – partly open, with keycard doors, locked boxes, and lots of zombie enemies to either fight or avoid. The missions have you going from one part of the hospital to another looking for items you need to escape – all while a scary evil doctor watches you on cameras and sometimes shows up in person. The zombie situation gets worse over time too.
This is where I was most impressed with the pendulum idea, that back-and-forth movement that Requiem director Kōshi Nakanishi told me was built on a pattern of tension and release. As Grace, I was always scrambling around looking for anything to help me – but it swings. Hard. One minute I’d be backed into a corner, with almost no health, breathing heavily in real life as I hide in a small room and hope the enemy either didn’t see me or won’t come in. Tick; the pendulum swings. Then, after searching the map for a while with the ‘you’re almost dead’ red tint on the screen edges, I find stuff. Some healing plants, some bullets. Tock; I’m back in the game.
Speaking of enemies, this is where Resident Evil 9 might have its most interesting twist so far. It’s a simple idea that’s been used in many zombie stories: that zombies might keep some of their human traits after changing.
In RE9, this shows up as zombies with habits or skills beyond just walking around. Some are sensitive to light, and you can mess with them by flipping light switches in the halls – they’ll then walk to the switch and try to turn the lights off, which is a good way to lead them away or separate groups. You can also stun these guys by shining your flashlight right in their face.
You’re in a hospital, so there are some guys who were clearly getting eye treatments and have another problem – they can’t see, blinded by medical covers. These zombies move around very violently, but luckily they’re only attracted by noise. In other cases, the leftover human traits are simpler. A maid keeps cleaning after death, paying little attention to you unless you bother her. An undead cook keeps cutting meat in his kitchen, using a big knife carelessly – and if you’re not careful, Grace will be the next meat on his table. Singers keep singing in their zombie state, and can make ear-splitting screams if they see you.
There are also ‘Chunks’, which basically means, well, fat zombies. Zombies with a lot of body fat, so regular bullets don’t do much damage. A fancy name for very scary bullet sponges, basically. And worst of all are ‘Blister Heads’, which is what RE9 calls zombies that have been downed but then come back to life later, with their heads swollen into a terrible bulbous shape. I really hated this one; you’d go into a room you had cleared out to grab an item or use something, and then hear the sound of an enemy you thought was dead getting back up behind you. Cue swearing.
As this Grace part goes on, the hospital is split into east and west wings, with a safe area in between. You’ll go back and forth collecting items and keys to solve the hospital’s mysteries, including characters and events I won’t talk about here, and a useful room where you can trade found coins for upgrades to Grace’s abilities and health. Eventually, you’ll end up in a situation where there are powerful enemies in both wings. These aren’t quite full boss enemies, since you can kill them, but more like mid-level bosses that are better to run from. There’s also a sense of freedom to all this – the person next to me at the playthrough did the objectives in a different order than me and made their life harder, because one of their actions brought in a very powerful enemy probably thirty minutes before I did the same – which was interesting to see.
These are the enemies that start to make sense of Grace’s special weapons. First, there’s a powerful pistol from Leon that will blow away most (but not all) enemies. You only have one bullet for this, and making more is very expensive. You’re better off saving it for a really tough situation. A bit cheaper, though, you can make special injections. These make zombies explode; I made one of these and snuck up on the toughest enemy in the hospital’s west wing and stuck him with it – boom. That saved me a lot of bullets and sneaking around, and as a bonus, someone who exploded into bits can’t come back as a Blister Head. Phew.
You can probably tell from these descriptions how those swings happen. Your back against the wall, chased by a group of zombies. But then you gather some crafting materials or ammo and the game flips around. Once you’re into it, RE9 is full of little details that make your fear better, use your fear, or just notice how scared you are. One of my favorite details: if you press to reload when your ammo is already full, Grace nervously pulls the gun’s slide back to check if a bullet is definitely in the chamber and ready to go. As someone who always presses reload every time I enter a scary room in a game like this, I loved this detail: my nervous habits became Grace’s nervous habits.
Fast forward a little while, and it’s back to Leon. If Grace’s part is full of little swings, this is the big swing. Leon is completely different, shown by everything down to a different screen display. Or, indeed, by the fact that his part has a one-on-one fight against one of the enemies that Grace had found almost impossible to kill. After that, Leon ends up in the same area you had just explored as Grace – but with one other small difference.
Because Leon visits this area after Grace, whatever you did as her stays the same. If you led zombies to different rooms from where they normally were, they stay there. Found a box of bullets or a healing plant and didn’t pick it up? It’s there for Leon. Killed a big enemy? You cleared the path for our boy. Didn’t? It’s his problem now – but he has a shotgun.
Resident Evil 9’s directors tell me this isn’t going to be the only pattern the game follows. Leon won’t always be following Grace’s steps – and he won’t always be pure action. Leon will have to handle upgrades, puzzles, inventory management (except he has a big briefcase and not Grace’s small storage), and proper scary moments that fit Leon’s character better. But seeing how these two parts of Requiem work together in this demo is a really interesting detail. Like the freedom in some objectives, it hints at exciting ways to get through the game, and for sequence breaks and speed runs. And anything that lets you do those things is a big plus for player choice in general.
As for Leon himself? Well, playing as him is really fun. Like Grace’s part, this shouldn’t be surprising. If you liked the RE4 Remake, what’s shown here is an improved version of that. While the recent trailer focused on cool-looking finishing moves, in practice Leon is much less scripted. Like the best parts of RE4, you have choices in how to handle combat situations, and pulling off some of those most cinematic moves happens to be pretty difficult.
Anyway, my point is: it’s not just survival horror as Grace and pure action as Leon. There’s clearly more to both. We’ll need to see the final game to really understand that balance – But what I see here is not a game that lacks identity because it does multiple things. Rather, I see a game that’s very comfortable in its place in the series – bringing together the best of Resident Evil. After I played, Requiem director Nakanishi told me this is also how they’ve viewed the project internally – with the remakes of Resident Evil 2 and 4 as examples – bringing the two different styles of Resident Evil together to create something more focused on the series’ strengths – not messy, not less.
All told, this final hands-on can consider mission accomplished: I left it far more excited for RE9 than I went in. I think that crazy team might just pull it off. And certainly, with its different ways to play and its fast back-and-forth rhythm, it feels like a good tribute to thirty years of Resident Evil’s brand of survival horror. I’m really eager to get my hands on the final thing.
