RESIDENT EVIL requiem

I don't often do this, but because I've played so much more of this I thought I'd update this post. Scroll down to see what I've added.

Ohoho, it is good to be back.

I played this on my PS5.

RESIDENT EVIL requiem, or RE9, or RE9uiem as I like to call it, is the newest Resident Evil game. If you're reading this then you may already know that I played through (practically) every Resident Evil (and Silent Hill) game a few years back, so suffice it to say I'm something of a fan of the series. Where Resident Evil 7 and 8 sort of function as a standalone duology however, this game very much feels in conversation with the series as a whole and honestly feels a bit like a greatest-hits for the franchise.

About half of the game is structured like, and by default looks and plays like, Resident Evil 7, in that much of it has you playing (in first-person) as new-protagonist Grace as she wanders through the sorts of places you'd expect to find in this series. She'll be solving puzzles, using items on other items, and just generally doing classic Resident Evil stuff. Grace's sections also often introduce powerful enemies without giving you any reliable way of dealing with them, meaning it's usually wise to avoid direct conflict whenever possible. Village was fun, but it was more in line with 4 and the action-y entries while this game seems just as tense as the classics. There were countless times when a jumpscare legitimately startled me, and the sections where you play as an underpowered Grace consistently left me feeling nervous and on-edge. It ruled. 

Creepy stuff.

One reason I found it so tense was because I opted to play the "Classic" mode which forces you to use ink ribbons when you want to manually save. I believe some recent entries have had a mode like this, but I'm not sure whether they were selectable from the jump (or, if they were, I certainly didn't play them that way). Regardless, playing a survival horror game where I'm trying to limit my saves means that, yes, I'll occasionally need to replay long segments when I fail, but it also means that I have that much more of an incentive to not fail. There's some legitimate fear and tension there, a real sense that dying could set me back some amount of time and force me to replay sequences of the game multiple times if I'm not careful, and that honestly took me back to how I felt when I played the earliest games in the series.

The other half of the game puts you in the shoes of fan-favorite character Leon. His characterization feels a bit like it did in 6, but he has the face he had in the remakes and he plays like a cross between the RE4make and RE6. As I mentioned earlier, Grace's sections play like RE7, which itself was a lot like the classic RE games. This game is a hodge-podge of elements from throughout the series and yet, despite it all, it works.

Leon's still dreamy...

I could talk about how they brought in a mechanic from the remake of Resident Evil 1, or how they sort-of-canonize one of the spinoffs, or how they actually seem to be following up on a different spinoff's loose end from, uh, two decades ago, but specific allusions and connections were incredibly fun to discover on my own. And it's not just them incorporating plot points or bringing back locations, there are also mechanical and thematic elements that heavily evoke things found in earlier titles. A lot of love clearly went into this game.

As a bit of an aside, I have a friend who seemed dead-set on spoiling things which was... not great. I didn't get any of the late(r) reveals ruined for me, but hearing about mechanics and a character that both didn't appear until several hours in did kind of put a damper on some of my time with the game. Maybe it seems petty to bring this up, but I happen to like being surprised by things and I really don't appreciate just having the pacing and intent of a story pulled out from under me like that. I mention that because, well, there are some fantastic reveals and references in this.

As a sort of joke, a different friend and I made two Bingo boards before we played the game. One featured a bunch of returning mechanics and elements from earlier games that we somewhat sincerely thought might show up, and the other was effectively just a list of RE characters we could come up with. Somehow, we got a bingo. There were some characters and concepts that were suggested and thrown out (because they seemed too far-fetched) that made an appearance as well. This game is callback city.

There are some deep cuts in this.

Somehow, though, it doesn't feel cheap. Sure, some of it may seem like little more than fanservice to some but personally, as a fan, I happen to like being serviced! This is a series with a rich history, they should absolutely be allowed to lean into and embrace that history when given the chance. Resident Evil 7 and 8 proved they could reinvent the wheel and create new, standalone entries in the series, but this game very much feels like a continuation of what RE1-6 were doing. It may not be a globetrotting adventure, but it's about the BSAA and a conspiracy and returning threats and just generally seems like a game that isn't necessarily meant for newcomers. The series has been on an incredible hot-streak since 7 and this game feels like the culmination of everything that's come out in the past decade.

Lastly, I was playing this and, after going out of my way a bit, found something that I can only describe as part of an ARG. After solving a puzzle I was treated to a cryptic message and some sort of code, and I still don't know what the heck it's all about. I've pictured the thing I found below, but a friend told me about another code he seemingly found in his playthrough and, combined with an arbitrary puzzle I solved involving a roulette wheel and some other stuff surrounding an assortment of other objects, there's clearly something hidden in this game that I have no idea how to solve (though, apparently, the community has cracked it). That's super cool! Obviously I'm reminded of the rush to solve PT, yes, but there's also the RE7 demo, The Beginning Hour, which featured its own obtuse steps you needed to follow to reach the "true" ending. Nothing in the series (maybe barring Gaiden) feels off-limits here.

Stumbling across this organically was wild.

The game does keep track of how many times you've saved, but it doesn't record that information at the end. I ended up saving 16 times, and my PS5 says I spent roughly 26 real-time hours playing the game (though a fair amount of that was spent while paused). I played through this on the "Standard (Classic)" difficulty and I've included my clear screen below.

I love this game. It was the first time I got to play a Resident Evil at release and, because of that, it was maybe the first time I've ever been able to be truly surprised by an entry. They're able to have their cake and eat it too by creating classic survival horror locations while also letting you do sick action-hero stuff in those same locations. I don't know how it compares to other games in the series at this point and I'll still need some time to reflect on how I feel about the game's pacing, but my immediate reaction is to say that this game is fantastic. I had a wonderful time.

UPDATE

Well, I've played a lot more of this in the past week so I thought I'd update this rather than make a new post.  While there may not be a ton of extra modes or bonus campaigns, there are a number of bonus items you can unlock by doing challenges, and those challenges offer a fair amount of replayability. While I suppose it's theoretically possible to knock out multiple challenges in a single run, I opted to instead just play this game a whole bunch of times. I've, um, had a lot on my mind and losing myself in this game has been a welcome distraction.

As I mentioned at the end of the original post, my first playthrough was a "blind" one on Standard (Classic), so both as a way to knock out the objective to never use healing items, and partially just to have a bit of a power trip, I chose to play through the game on Casual. Unsurprisingly, much of the tension and surprise of the original playthrough was gone, but the game does make a second (and subsequent) playthroughs interesting by allowing Leon to access his store from the jump. Being able to start the game with some of the better weapons, even if you can't immediately afford everything, made things seem even more like a power fantasy. It was a lot of fun.

 

After my Casual playthrough, I immediately started another Casual playthrough. One reason I chose to do a second Casual one, rather than to knock out all of the objectives in one go, was because there's a challenge that seemed particularly difficult and I didn't want to overly stress myself out by trying to do too much at once. This playthrough was centered around never using Grace's blood-collector and, more importantly, completing the game in under four hours. I followed a guide so as to help me remember which order to tackle the objectives, but for the most part this was a test to see how efficiently I could get through a game like this.

I've never really been much for speedrunning, I enjoy watching them but tend to move on from games once I hit credits, so this was something of a new experience for me. Despite getting through combat fairly quickly, this was a tense run. I was constantly checking my time to see whether I was on pace, and the longer I went on the more I lagged behind the guide I was following. I ended up cutting it very close. Way closer than I'd have liked.

My final full playthrough was perhaps the most surprising one. After beating the game for the first time, you unlock a new difficulty called "Insanity". While, yes, it is a "Hard" mode where enemies do more damage, it's also, more interestingly, not just that. I was reminded, superficially at least, of Resident Evil: Director's Cut's "Arrange Mode" because this difficulty dramatically alters things to keep the experience fresh.

While cutscenes are the same and plot items are in the same place, most of the rest of the things you can pick up have been shifted around. Ammo and herbs are in different locations, safes have different codes, but, more interestingly, the enemy encounters have also been changed. Zombies will be in places that were previously zombie-free and enemy types will typically appear earlier and in places where they had previously never been. For an example, the very first zombie Leon fights immediately turned into a Blister Head.

Because of this, I used every tool at my disposal to help alleviate the added difficulty. In addition to bringing in new weapons, I took full advantage of infinite ammo (and hatchet durability) to try to level the playing field. I had a fighting chance with these bonuses enabled, and the resulting balancing act was honestly fairly similar to the difficulty I'd encountered on my initial playthrough. I love that they were able to make my fourth playthrough of this game feel (almost) as fresh as my first.

With that Insanity run I got the Platinum, but the other thing I did during my fourth playthrough was the setup for "The Final Puzzle", that ARG-thing I mentioned earlier in this blog. This thing is obtuse. While I believe I would have been able to solve some of the steps on my own, I was following a guide and, man, some of the stuff this asks you to do are strange. You'll need to flush a toilet multiple times and, at one point, wait in place for about fifteen minutes. I have no idea how the community solved this (I think datamining was involved?) but, after doing a number of steps during that final playthrough, I was ready to jump into yet another one to see this challenge through. I, however, was instructed to make a save partway through the game to skip most of the repeated busywork so I, um, did that. The reward for solving this was cute, but certainly not worth all that effort.

The last thing I wanted to mention is something I actually intended to bring up during the initial publishing of this, but it slipped my mind when it came time to writing it. To put it simply: the gore in this game is fantastic. Maybe that sounds a bit juvenile, but hear me out. Enemies' heads will "pop" the way they have in prior games, and just about every zombie kill sends fountains of blood all over the environment. The game delights in its gore, and the fact that corpses will (typically) stick around and walls will often be painted red after fights makes every fight feel that much more satisfying. 

While a game like The Last of Us may shoot for "realistic" violence, this game instead feels like a creature-feature with gallons of fake blood. This series has always felt a bit like a B-movie, and ridiculous amounts of gibs or Leon's entrails being visible after a failed combat encounter only add to that feeling.  The sheer volume of gore on display is almost comical.

Gnarly.

I loved this game. I've reflected on it a bit more and I still think this is in the upper echelon of Resident Evil games. It might not be my favorite in the series, but it combines so many things I've come to appreciate that it's hard not to like. While I'm sure newcomers will enjoy Grace's story and Leon's action, this feels like a game designed for people who've been following this series for a while and, as someone who made a point of playing practically everything, I adored it.