Listen, I’m always going to have a Leon-sized hole that needs filling and from playing his portions in the latest Resident Evil 9 Requiem demo, I’m pretty sure I’ll be taken care of (for the year, at least). The roundhouse kicks, the corny one liners, and the brutal blood-splattering finishers – things I loved from the recent Resident Evil 4 remake round out what’s otherwise a terrifying survival horror experience. And the crux of that survival horror is stealth and having the proper mechanics in place to make that tension tangible. So, not only does Grace’s side of Requiem evoke a petrifying sense of dread atop the classic puzzle-solving of the series, it’s also a fantastic expression of the kind of stealth-action gameplay I’ve been wanting for a while.
Our previous Resident Evil 9 Requiem preview by my colleague Dale Driver touched on plenty of sentiments I share; most notable for me being the refreshing balance between the drastically different playstyles of Grace and Leon as dual protagonists. Grace being timid and having to rely on moving slowly and carefully, contrasting with Leon being the action hero who blasts through every zombie. But it’s the Grace sections where Capcom is doing something really special with stealth gameplay that feels natural and forward-thinking.
Capcom has made a big deal out of zombie behavior where their presumed personalities as humans feed into how they move and react in the game world as zombies. One example being the zombie fixated on light switches in a dark hallway you have to pass through as Grace – instead of taking him head-on with your limited resources, you can slip by and hit a light switch down the hall to distract him to clear the path to the other end. While this isn’t a complicated situation on its own, it’s a microcosm of how Requiem is challenging you as Grace, where observation and environment are just as important as staying out of sight. The game doesn’t outright tell you this, so thinking outside the box can lead to more elegant solutions.
This notion of watching out for zombie behavior is flipped around at times, too. Like when walking through the dining room where zombies are just feasting on the dead bodies on the table, not giving a damn about your presence and leaving you alone. I wasn’t sure if they’d react to me poking around picking up items, yet I still treaded carefully and let them do their thing. Naturally figuring out how these enemies respond to you and their surroundings is a fascinating way to give variety to navigating the labyrinthine halls, and a touch of detail that isn’t often seen.
What’s more frightening is the butcher who roams the kitchen. Early in the preview, you have to slip through by pushing a cart to clear the path across the kitchen, and you have to do this undetected, which requires you to pay attention to his patrol pattern. It’s simple enough, and making a mistake means he’ll chase you down and show you how terrifying he is; one hit and you’re dead. But later in the playthrough where you have to revisit that general area, he begins patrolling the hallways around the kitchen, and here, his presence is truly felt. Hearing his footsteps set off alarms in my brain that he began lurking, and the tension that created changed how I navigated an area I already mapped out.
I would duck and peek out from adjacent rooms to see if he was coming, and make a mad dash to where I needed to go hoping for the best and not looking back. One time, I was peeking from the parlor room thinking I was out of sight, but the butcher caught me peeking just a little too confidently and pulled up on me – I now had this cat-and-mouse chase, luring him in one direction before juking him to get out of the room.
Probably the biggest comedy of errors during my playtime came from dashing to the cold storage room where my next objective was. I had a straight shot from, like, three hallways down and I risked it all by booking it and letting fate take the wheel. Just as I got to the last stretch, there was the butcher turning the corner and ending up right in front of me along his new patrol pattern. I backpedaled in a panic, pumped my one remaining shot from the superpowered Requiem pistol and the rest of my 9mm rounds, but it wasn’t enough; so I just took the L and reloaded my save.
The first time I got hit with a jump scare was when Chunk burst out into a hallway after I picked up a quest item. It began chasing me and it was easy enough to run to a room for safety since it couldn’t get through normal-sized door frames. But the rest of the surrounding hallways were fair game. And like many Resident Evils with puzzles, backtracking to this area later on filled me with dread. Thankfully, Chunk wasn’t as overbearing, but it’d more frequently completely block certain paths, forcing me to either take the long way around or wait things out until the coast was clear. But on my first attempt, I wasn’t exactly sure what its behavior pattern would be. And that’s a key part of making stealth gameplay interesting and horror work well – it’s that unpredictable nature of hostility.
These stalker-type enemies aren’t meant to be killed (as Grace, at least), and they’re also not quite like the persistent threats of Mr. X from Resident Evil 2 or Nemesis in Resident Evil 3. Each one seems to play different roles and present a different kind of dread throughout Requiem, which I suspect will lead to more variation. Even thinking back to the very first Requiem preview I played last year with the monstrous patient roaming the halls of the patient wing in Grace’s opening section, that was closer to a specifically scripted sequence. But it was a much more close-quarters stealth challenge where the windows of opportunity to escape were tighter. So, already, that’s three unique enemies playing into a horror experience in their own ways.
Requiem being primarily a survival horror game means it’s going to be a bit outside of what I traditionally expect from stealth-action games; or rather the stealth mechanics you see in so many action games. Hiding in tall grass, waiting for enemies to turn their backs, and getting a one-hit kill undetected is a tired trope at this point. Grace does get craftable single-use items for stealth kills, and I hope we’re challenged by limiting quantities so we have to really consider when to use them. But even then, Requiem doesn’t just deal in patrol patterns or throwing an object to cause a distraction, it also deals in vulnerability and the fear of unpredictability for Grace’s chapters. It’s not just the fear of getting detected, but the consequences that come with it.
Grace’s portion of Requiem was about an hour-and-a-half to two hours of playtime. And after that, I was pretty exhausted from the tension. Don’t get me wrong, I was exhausted in a good way. However, that’s what makes the interstitial Leon sections so important. They’re a reprieve and an outlet to get all that stress out, a palette cleanser to balance things out and look at some of the same environments from a different perspective. This also offers a sort of best-of-both-worlds for the series, the slow and deliberate pacing of Resident Evil 7 alongside the top-tier action from Resident Evil 4, as examples.
After getting hands-on with a total of about four hours of Resident Evil 9 Requiem at this point, and sharing that experience with colleagues, I’m more excited for the series than I have been in recent memory. It’s the old mixed with the new, but all in a modern package with two protagonists I already like a lot. No shade to RE7 and RE Village, but Ethan Winters doesn’t compare to Grace, and definitely not my guy Leon. And with a thoughtful mix of action and stealth gameplay, February 27 can’t come soon enough when Resident Evil 9 Requiem hits PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC.
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