The Forgotten Resident Evil Game That Holds the Secret to Resident Evil: Requiem

With the announcement trailer of Resident Evil Requiem, Capcom has provided some of the first hints about the story being told in the ninth mainline entry in the Resident Evil series. The trailer didn’t include any of the series’ familiar faces, but it did suggest that Requiem has ties with a lesser-known Resident Evil game from way back in the PlayStation 2 era: Resident Evil Outbreak.

Outbreak was released in 2003, between Resident Evil 3 in 1999 and the franchise’s semi-reboot with Resident Evil 4 in 2005, and shook up the series’ formula up to that point. Instead of a single-player experience, Outbreak was Resident Evil’s first major foray into online cooperative gameplay, with as many as four players fighting to survive the T-virus outbreak in Raccoon City that serves as the setting for Resident Evil 2 and 3.

While Leon Kennedy, Clair Redfield, and Jill Valentine were fighting for their lives in places like the Raccoon City Police Department, Outbreak put players elsewhere in the city. Outbreak follows a group of residents as they suddenly find themselves in the thick of things as Raccoon City is overrun by zombies and other mutated monstrosities. There’s also a big emphasis on teamwork, using character-specific traits and abilities alongside Resident Evil’s survival-horror elements, like limited inventory space, slow-moving characters, and largely fixed camera angles, to encourage players to work together to survive.

Outbreak also introduced an insidious element to players’ fight for survival. The characters are all infected with one of Umbrella’s deadly, monster-making viruses at the start of each of the game’s levels. The infection rate in each character increases over time and ramps up even faster when they take damage, forcing players to search for anti-viral items. If the virus overtakes a character, they transform into zombies themselves and attack their former allies.

It’s a little bit difficult to get a complete story picture from Outbreak or its sequel, Resident Evil Outbreak: File #2, which featured the same cast of characters. The games each include a series of five scenarios, with players picking from the eight possible survivors and trying to make their way through a level. But the scenarios aren’t presented in chronological order, or even necessarily linked together as a coherent story. One scenario has characters drinking in J’s Bar in Raccoon City when the first zombie stumbles in and starts biting people, for instance, while another scenario find the survivors stumbling into an underground Umbrella lab, working through the Raccoon City zoo filled with mutated animals, or making their way into the Arklay Mountains and eventually to a hospital overrun by a giant murderous plant.

But thanks to the trailer for Resident Evil Requiem, we know that at least some of what takes place in Outbreak and File #2 is now canonical to the Resident Evil series, and important to the events of the next game.

Grace’s Connection to Outbreak

The Requiem trailer begins by introducing FBI Analyst Grace Ashcroft, a new character to the series, as she receives an assignment to investigate the Wrenwood Hotel. We quickly learn that Grace’s mother, Alyssa Ashcroft, was murdered at the hotel eight years earlier. Alyssa was one of the playable characters in the Outbreak games, and they give a little backstory about her that might inform what we see in Requiem.

In Outbreak, Alyssa is a reporter, and you can find her bylines in the newspapers the Daily Raccoon and Comet News. She’s presented as a dedicated investigator, but her dialogue suggests that because of the Umbrella Corporation’s control and influence in Raccoon City, she hasn’t always been able to publish pieces that could have exposed the company’s wrongdoing.

In the sequel, Resident Evil Outbreak: File #2, there’s an Alyssa-focused level that gives a greater sense of her work as a journalist, as well as the lengths Umbrella has gone to in order to cover up its crimes. The scenario “Flashback” finds Alyssa and the other survivors heading into a private hospital in the Arklay Mountains outside of the city. As she makes her way to the hospital, Alyssa keeps feeling like she’s been to the place before as part of an article she was pursuing, but can’t seem to remember the details. She later discovers, through flashbacks and files you can uncover along the way, that she was right about that strange feeling.

Years earlier, another journalist, Kurt, had become convinced doctors at the hospital were using Umbrella drugs to conduct illegal experiments on the patients there, and Alyssa followed him as he went there in search of evidence. In the course of his investigation, Alyssa saw Kurt eaten alive by one of the virus-infected patients. Umbrella then used its massive influence with police and local officials to cover up the deaths at the hospital, including Kurt’s, and it’s suggested they used pharmaceuticals to suppress Alyssa’s memory of what happened, as well.

Alyssa eventually remembers what happened to her through the course of “Flashback,” and uncovers the truth of the experiments, including one performed by the hospital administrator on his own terminally ill wife, which led her to seemingly transform into the carnivorous plant that infests the hospital. Over the years, the administrator has been leading people who wander into the woods to the hospital, killing them, and feeding them to the plant. Alyssa and the other survivors defeat the administrator and destroy the plant, and with her memory somewhat restored, Alyssa vows to spread the word of Umbrella’s wrongdoing and what happened to Kurt.

Resident Evil Requiem Picks Up the Pieces of Raccoon City

Other scenarios in both games have the survivors eventually curing their viral infection and escaping Raccoon City before the U.S. government destroys it with a missile to contain the outbreak. You can see the missile crater in the Resident Evil Requiem trailer. In File #2, each character gets an epilogue scene if they make it out, and Alyssa’s scene suggests that, like Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine, she made it her mission to blow the whistle on Umbrella. She wrote an article about all the horrors she learned about in Raccoon City, but in the end, the story is mostly buried, thanks to the cover-up perpetrated by the U.S. government to hide its involvement with Umbrella and what happened in Raccoon City.

It’s not clear if any of the other Outbreak characters canonically survived Raccoon City as Alyssa is the only one who has been mentioned in other games. You can even find an article she wrote in Resident Evil 7 detailing the many disappearances in Dulvey Parish, Louisiana, where that game takes place. And now with her mention in Resident Evil Requiem, we know that, in the years after Raccoon City, she raised a daughter, before she met her ultimate fate.

Requiem’s trailer suggests we’ll learn more about Alyssa through Grace, as well as by heading to the hotel where she was murdered. The trailer also implies that Requiem might take players back to the ruins of Raccoon City, highlighting iconic locations like the Raccoon City Police Department. So while it’s not clear now, it’s possible other elements of Outbreak’s story could also be relevant to what happens in Requiem—but we might have to wait until its release in February to find out.

Either way, it’s cool to see the events of a less-remembered Resident Evil game more or less canonized by the Resident Evil Requiem announcement. Furthermore, it appears that after detours in zombified Europe and the deep south, Resident Evil is ready to head back to the city where it all began: Raccoon City.

For more on Resident Evil Requiem, be sure to check out our hands-on preview of Capcom’s ninth, mainline Resident Evil game.