12 hours with the superb Resident Evil Requiem (and 9 hours with Resident Evil 2 Remake)

Uh-oh, the new Resident Evil game has infected me with the RE virus

Grace Ashcroft in Resident Evil Requiem. Screenshot: Capcom, captured by Game File

Resident Evil Requiem, out on Friday for PC and consoles, is an excellent Resident Evil game about Resident Evil games.

It’s the kind of game deep into the existence of a franchise where someone might try to put a newcomer at ease about the need to play anything that’s come before.

Pay no attention, they might say, to it being the ninth “numbered” RE (there’s sort of a 9 in that “Re9uiem”)... or that it’s the 11th, if your counting system includes the numbers “zero” and “Code Veronica.”

Should Resident Evil Requiem sell at least a million copies (it will), it’ll be the 36th Resident Evil release since 1996 to do so.

This new Resident Evil starts comprehensibly enough to be a standalone adventure. We are introduced to Grace Ashcroft, the United States’ most-trembling FBI agent, who will soon be skulking through the darkened hallways of a hotel (inexplicably without any back-up). Next, even scarier, Grace is kidnapped and wakes up in the unnervingly trashed Rhodes Hill Chronic Care medical facility. This place is an architectural conundrum of locked doors, shuffling zombies and barely enough bullets. Grace tries, shivering with fear, to survive. This is all played out, by default, from a first-person perspective to intensify the feeling that something bad might always be creeping up from behind.

That alone qualifies Requiem as an impeccably paced horror game that invites players to carefully search hallways and solve puzzles, avoiding zombies just enough to empower a curious Grace into an effective, if still-terrified, killer of regular zombies, one burly butcher zombie, and some singing/screaming zombies, too.

That said, Resident Evil Requiem is a far poorer game if it’s the only Resident Evil you’ve played. I say this as a previously casual Resident Evil player whose REsume as of a week ago was as follows: