Two hours with Grace in Resident Evil Requiem turned me into the most anxious person alive

I wouldn't choose to die here, next to a dirty toilet in Resident Evil Requiem, but I'm comforted by the fact that there are worse fates. Or, actually, no – there aren't really. So I decide I want better for protagonist Grace Ashcroft, and I make her stumble out of the bathroom before the maid with blood on her lips realizes my neck smells incredible.

My bandaged flesh must give off the juicy scent of chicken, or sticky honey ham, based on how often these infected freaks decide to descend on my Grace and chomp on her limbs. I'm nauseated by the lengthy death animations that show me Grace crying blood from the force of an enemy's banshee shriek, getting chunks of fat torn out of her arm; at some point while I play this three-hour demo of Resident Evil Requiem, I jot down the note, "everyone is eating me in all kinds of ways."

But I want to be afraid while I play one of Capcom's Resident Evil games, and, so far, Resident Evil Requiem is delivering what might be one of my favorite survival horror experiences in the franchise's 30-year history.

Bad medicine

"The front teeth go deep in the heart, perhaps," mutters the crazed surgeon to himself – as far as I can tell. I'm being a good little FBI agent and crouching in the shadows, decoding vague puzzles about the moon and the stars, but I don't really know what's going on.

After playing a short, third-person chapter as devastatingly charming special agent Leon S. Kennedy wielding a chainsaw (read about it in our Resident Evil Requiem Leon preview), being Grace feels more fragile. Leon drops hand grenades and roundhouse kicks like a pro, but Capcom producer Masato Kumazawa tells GamesRadar+ Grace is meant to represent the player more realistically than any other Resident Evil protagonist. So it's better for Grace to run from everything with eyes.

From my time with Grace, Capcom's succeeded in making her reflect the nervous anticipation I always feel when starting a new Resident Evil game. Before I toggle off what seems to be her default first-person camera for the sake of my motion sickness, I notice her hands shaking as she grips the DSO-issued revolver Leon handed her – the Requiem.

Leon was on a mission, he knew the name of the man who kidnapped me and dragged me to this bizarre medical care center. But with blood dried to my elbows – I don't know whose – and my health bar often depleting so much that it visibly makes me woozy, I'm floundering in the dark.

Literally, in the dark. I don't turn the lights on in any of the center's marble-tiled hallways unless I'm trying to distract one of its mutated guests, who seem like classic Resident Evil bad guys when I'm making quick judgments about their lack of dental hygiene. Their faces are stuck in crusty grimaces, the sunken skin under their eyes is splotched black like the series' various, infamous molds. But I'm struck by the way some of them are willing to kill over the privacy lights-off affords. And, though they keep trying to mash me into porridge, I don't want to take that dignity from them.

Capcom seems to have taken after Dead Island 2's painfully realistic zombie system and, in a change for the franchise, chooses to humanize its enemy mobs rather than have them only shamble around like Boris Karloff. Instead, I can tell every creature I see used to be a person – maids, nurses, patients, and doctors – by the way they move. There's a burly cook with a cleaver, slapping mystery meat in the kitchen until it splatters all over the white-tiled wall. The women flitting around in aprons moan about stains, their brains too melted from bioterroristic something to realize it's them, repeatedly pressing their palms into the splinters of a broken mirror, who are causing the mess.

Housekeeping

At first, I try to avoid confrontations with any of these lost souls who want to use my arteries as their soda straws.

Grace's breath is ragged. Unlike the useless Ethan Winters in Requiem director Koshi Nakanishi's nonetheless fantastic Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, whose bad choices make me want to drown him in the sewer, Grace is only hapless because she's out of her depth. I need to keep her safe – especially because the healing green herbs I occasionally find throughout the center seem so few, and Grace is already lurching around like she'd rather pass out. It's a frightening immersion tactic, and I follow Grace's lead without meaning to – my movements are becoming more erratic whenever I spot an enemy, because I know Grace can't take any more pain.

But I can't let her rest when there are enemies, enemies everywhere, sniffing me out even while they're distracted by lapping up blood on all fours in an ornate dining room, looking like wolves in crisp slack pants. Fortunately, my arsenal of weapons grows beyond just the one gun and one bullet Leon hands to me like a pity invitation, and I slowly become more comfortable coaxing people's muscles off their bones through a combination of firearms, dull knives, and chemical agents.

The hemolytic injector, for example, lets me both instantly kill enemies and stop them from mutating into Dead Space monsters that respawn with gooey, throbbing heads. All it takes is a sneaky jab to the back of the neck, and my chosen target erupts everywhere like a bloody cyst.

"Ugh," Grace reacts to her first insta-kill. "That's too effective."

But I can tell she is – and by extension, I am – getting better at this mass murder thing. Even when confronted by a hungry creature covered in bulging, gray elephant skin, who somehow squeezes his humongous body through tiny doorways and takes the drywall with him, her hands no longer shake. Let's leave that guy for Leon, though.

There are more pressing matters on my agenda, like kneeling down every once in a while to slurp up infected blood from buckets and downed enemies with my Blood Collector tool, which leads me to an endearingly morbid level-up system. Once I analyze my samples in the center's lab, I use the computer to "activate" atoms in a molecule that looks like a skill tree. Doing this expands the number of items I can craft, which includes ammo and health by the end of my demo, and it makes the care center feel frighteningly lived-in. It's like a vision of a past life, or a future prison. I'm reminded of the derelict house in Resident Evil 7, one of my favorite locations in the series, because I feel like I drive by it every once in a while, on lonely dirt roads.

Resident Evil Requiem also borrows some of Resident Evil Village's gothic whimsy, I realize after I manage to unlock a beautiful door that's been haunting me – dark wood, with a leaping unicorn carved into its creamy surface. I find a gambling lounge behind it, with a limited number of antique coin-operated vending machine upgrades. I plop in four of those coins, which I've found inside vases and locked drawers when no one's looking, and I grab a steroid to enhance my health bar just in time. It seems the cook with a cleaver has followed me home.

Kitchen nightmares

Regardless of whether it's a skinny thing with smears of shit in his hospital sweatpants or that fat monster with lipomas all over its butt, Grace can hardly dodge anything in Resident Evil Requiem.

I don't know if she never learned how to dodge in FBI school, or if dodging simply doesn't fit into her personal beliefs – either way, I kite the cook around the roulette wheel as he makes inappropriate comments about how I'm "MEAT!" and, to his disappointment, still contain all my bones.

I'm getting sweat on my PS5 controller each time I shoot him in the face, and he swings that dirty knife of his instead of falling to the ground in an unconscious puddle. Slowly, slowly, I turn his cheeks to blood, and his forehead, and the skin around his teeth. While Grace isn't necessarily built for close combat like this, there have been plenty of moments where my stalker enemies give me no other choice.

Layer by layer, the cook turns to fish fillet. He drops his pantry keys, and I tumble my way back to the kitchen and reward myself with a metal charm I keep in my quickly overflowing inventory – it says it'll increase my knife power. I'll take what I can get in this circle of hell.

In my time with its demo, Resident Evil Requiem impresses this lesson upon me: the world is dangerous and wrong, yet you are part of the world. Leon is a lovely caricature of himself, offering godlike forearms and ability to quip ("I think I want a second opinion," he says, brooding, after a doctor swings a chainsaw at his face). But Grace is water turned to ice. In even my short time with her, I see her harden into a person who won't cower when witnessing pure evil, because she's used to it. And that, even amid all its wonderful gore and incredible efforts to make me feel immersed, is the scariest thing about Resident Evil Requiem.

Need more frights? Check out our best horror games ranking for more! Resident Evil Requiem releases February 27, 2026 on PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch 2.