Any dream of living my Sweeney Todd fantasy died with Resident Evil Requiem. There's something disturbingly romantic about a pie shop owner playing house with a bloodthirsty killer, but watching Grace navigate a literal human meat plant has made me see my favorite musical in a squeamish new light.
The disposal facility beneath Rhodes Hill Chronic Care is the scariest part of the already terrifying new game. Making my way through the barely-lit passages, rushing from pillar to post with electrical plugs in-hand, all while trying to skirt the hungry jaws of the undead lurking throughout is nerve wracking enough. But nothing prepared me for the all-out SAW trap I'd experience just moments later…
Tenderized
Resident Evil Requiem review: "A soaring piece of survival horror theater that balances intense action with absolute terror..."
"Ew," I think to myself, followed by a nod of disgusted approval. I've just turned on a machine not unlike something one might find in a slaughterhouse, the kind in which animals are dangled upside-down by their hind legs to be moved through the factory. But in Resident Evil Requiem, the only meat on the menu is long pig.
The machine springs to life as soon as I pull a lever. Carcasses jerk before starting their journey through the space, ankles shackled to a conveyor belt on the ceiling, some wrapped tight in bodybags, others clad in nothing but a thin pair of slacks. Every block of six or seven bodies or so, I spot small gaps between them. Instinctively, I decide to try and keep pace with the dead procession to make my way through the room, before one of them grabs my ankle and takes a bite out of it.
As body after body lunges itself at Grace, I barely blink. This kind of shlocky silly terror is par for the course for Resident Evil. So much so, it takes me a few minutes to work out why the image of hundreds of bodies being transported this way unnerves me so much. That is, until I finally make it to the bodies' destination.
The processing plant is familiar, as I'd previously found myself on the other side of the lake of blood that divides the well-lit room only a few minutes earlier. Now, with power restored and the heavy shroud of darkness lifted, I'm presented with the whole thing's gruesome purpose as bodies start plopping into the cursed waters one by one.
From my new vantage point, I eye the ladders poking out of each side, half expecting an old TV set to crackle on as Jigsaw asks if Grace wants to play a game. That doesn't happen of course. But it might as well have. As soon as I drain the pool with a nearby valve, exposing corpses aplenty left on the bottom, my eyes flicker to the humongous meat grinder on Grace's left. This is a processing plant, alright, but I don't think anyone intends to eat these people.
Just like clockwork, as soon as I drop into the pool area, the ladders retract. An alarm goes off, the blades start spinning, and the supposedly dead bodies I'm ankle-deep in start getting to their feet. So begins one of my favorite yet incredibly stressful moments in Resident Evil Requiem.
...or you die
If Grace was in a Saw movie, I'd be yelling at the screen in triumph.
The conveyor belt underfoot whirrs into action, so I pull the left joystick back to keep Grace from moving towards the grinder. All the while, I need to kneecap and potshot the slow-rising zombies to stagger, disable, or straight up slow them down enough so they stay still and feed themself to the sharp-toothed machine right behind them.
Each mulched body pops in a spray of bone and blood as soon as it touches the grinder, painting the walls, the floor, the ceiling, and one another with rot-blackened guts. But these zombies do not go gently into that good night; their mangled vocal chords have time to let out one last scream before being torn asunder and disposed of.
I only have to stick it out for a handful of minutes before a mechanical voice informs me, with great relief, that "processing is complete". The ladders drop down, and I climb out of the swimming pool of death somehow unscathed. If Grace was in a Saw movie, I'd be yelling at the screen in triumph. Instead, I'm just straight shaken-up. It doesn't get any better when I have to crawl through an air vent and end up dropping into – you guessed it! – a vat of liquefied zombie.
Grace splutters, gasping for breath as she emerges, the thick, viscous fluid having stained her hair a rather pretty shade of pastel pink. She retches a few times, which is very understandable for someone with zombie mush in their lungs, but I'm so anxious about something reaching out from the depths for another little snack that I force her up the nearby stairs as fast as she can go. Which, of course, is not very fast at all.
I keep replaying this one level in my mind and marvelling at the sheer brilliance of it. Not only does Capcom succeed in delivering a truly gnarly moment of terror and tension, it makes you feel uncomfortable on an ethical level. As a lapsed vegetarian, I feel grossed out and guilty about the reality (well, videogame-ified reality) of meat production. But as a horror fan, it's a ghoulish delight to see something that reminds me so vividly of Saw 3's infamous pig vat trap while feeling totally, disgustingly unique.
Here are our five favorite things about Resident Evil Requiem that will any horror fan sated... and screaming
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