Resident Evil Requiem is playable in first and third-person, letting you toggle between perspectives whenever you want in the options menu

Capcom offered a substantial – but still all too brief – look at Resident Evil Requiem behind closed doors at Summer Game Fest, and while the meat of that hands-off gameplay demo was played in first-person, there was one more big surprise at the end. The devs revealed an in-game toggle allowing you to play Requiem from a third-person perspective.

While Capcom only briefly demonstrated the toggle, it appears you can use it at any time and move between first- and third-person modes whenever you want. The game seems to be fully playable in either mode – it’s just a question of whether you prefer seeing protagonist Grace Ashcroft or simply seeing through her eyes.

Having this option at launch is a big change for Resident Evil, which has spent the past several years split between old-school, third-person games like the remakes of 2, 3, and 4, and the new-school, first-person games like RE7 and Village.

Village did eventually get a third-person toggle of its own, but it was never an ideal way to play the game. Hopefully, a game designed from the ground up with this perspective in mind will be able to deliver a more robust experience from start to finish.

Either way, Resident Evil Requiem is looking like one hell of a survival-horror game, and one that might just deliver the biggest sense of terror in series history. Capcom’s more than proven its bona-fides in any perspective.

Capcom has delivered many of the best horror games ever made.