There is a very long stretch of time early on in Resident Evil Requiem when nothing happens. The game just lets Grace Ashcroft walk through the Wrenwood Hotel, which is a condemned building where her mother was killed eight years ago. There is no music sting. There was no shape darting through a doorway. There is only water somewhere, dust in the flashlight beam, and a hallway that never ends.
Things work best when you wait. A jump scare only works if the scene before it has been loaded well, and Capcom has spent six years figuring out just how heavy that loading needs to be.
The team led by Koshi Nakanishi started this project as an open-world multiplayer game, but they scrapped it in 2021 because players didn’t want it. No matter what else that side trip cost them, it seems to have made them more aware of the need to be careful. The version that came out in February sold five million copies in five days and eight million copies in six months. It was the fastest-selling game in the series’ history. Even though commercial songs don’t always prove artistic points, they do show that a lot of people felt something they hadn’t felt in a while.
The way things work shows you where the fear really lives. Grace always has a lighter or a flashlight with her, and using either one draws the Girl—the mutant that follows her through walls and ceilings and can’t be killed. This means that the tool that keeps you safe can also be used to find you. You make a small bet every time you turn it on. That’s not a scary thing. That anxiety builds up slowly over ten hours and never goes away. It does more damage than a monster jumping out of a closet.
Leon’s chapters, on the other hand, are completely different. He has a hatchet that doesn’t last long, a briefcase full of supplies, BSAA containers for upgrades, and the confidence of someone who has been through this before. The parts he writes aren’t as scary, and they’re not supposed to be. They make your nervous system work again. You take deep breaths. You shoot things. The game then gives you back to Grace, who has four inventory slots and a bottle to throw. The difference between these two situations is more shocking than any single scary image could be.
It’s hard not to notice how much of this is about rhythm instead of content. Fear is something that doesn’t last long. If you keep pushing it, players will either get used to it or quit. Instead, Requiem goes through cycles of tension, a small reward, a break, and then tension at a slightly higher pitch. On Standard difficulty, finding an ink ribbon isn’t just a way to save your game; it’s also a chance to take a break for 90 seconds. The game knows you’ll take it easy. That’s what it thought would happen.
The fact that Grace’s chapters are written in the first person also matters here. In third-person horror, you can see how your character reacts, which gives you a little space. The first person takes it off. When you turn your head, the room turns with you, but you can’t check the corner until you make up your mind.
All of this is part of a bigger argument about where horror games have been going. For years, the genre tried to make things more intense by adding louder stingers, faster monsters, and more gore. Requiem subtly suggests that intensity was never the thing that should have been optimized. Getting ready was.
It remains to be seen if the industry learns from this. It’s easy to copy a monster design. It’s a lot harder to copy the discipline to leave a hallway empty for forty seconds and trust that the player’s imagination will fill in the blanks. That trust comes from thirty years of hard work by Capcom. A lot of studios haven’t made one yet, and they might not have the time to do so.
