6 days ago
6
Resident Evil 9 (aka Requiem) is all about the swings. After three hours with a clearly more-or-less final build of the game, one rather gets the impression that the entire game has been built around the idea of a pendulum swinging back and forth. Exhilarating highs and stomach-churning lows (of the good sort). What surprised me the most about the hands-on, however, is how quickly Requiem sets that ticking and tocking cadence.
You could be forgiven for thinking that when I talk about this back-and-forth, I'm strictly talking about the interplay between new protagonist Grace and returning badass Leon. There is, after all, an ebb and flow between the two. At one point, the game makes a cutscene-bound statement when Leon swings into action and essentially one-shots a beast that'd previously appeared invincible as it terrorised Grace.
The two represent the different 'lanes' of Resident Evil. Grace's gameplay defaults to first-person, plays similarly to RE7, and is meant to also evoke the classic horror of the earlier entries. Grace scrabbles around zones for keys to dig deeper into semi open-ended environments, having to carefully use scarce resources to survive. Leon channels RE4, defaulting to third-person with more linear all-out action. With Grace, I'm constantly saving my game at typewriters as I make slow and steady progress. As Leon, when I happen across a typewriter I'd previously used as Grace, he can't even use it - I expect he doesn't need to save, because his sections at least in this hands-on appear relatively linear and thus easily checkpointed.
It goes on. Leon has a parry, Grace does not. Leon gets more readily plied with powerful weapons; as Grace, you're lucky to find ammo for your pop-gun pistol. So yes, there is a to-and-fro there. But honestly, I'm not really talking about that.
Grace's play is sort of the heart of this hands-on, as while the Grace/Leon split seems likely to be something like 50/50 in terms of content volume, by dint of how they play Leon tears through the same amount of environment as Grace in half the time. That was certainly the tale of the demo, which broadly speaking was made up of three sections: Leon arriving at the Rhodes Hill hospital in a brief action set piece, Grace exploring the hospital while desperately scrambling for the resources necessary to stay alive, and then later Leon tearing through the same areas you'd explored as Grace in an action-packed rerun.
The better part of two hours of the three-hour hands-on was the Grace section. The Rhodes Hill medical facility is a pretty classic Resident Evil zone - semi-open, with keycarded doors, locked boxes, and plenty of zombified enemies to either engage or avoid. The objectives have you criss-crossing from one wing of the hospital to another in search of items required to escape - all while a creepy Jigsaw-esque evil doctor watches via CCTV and periodically intervenes in person, with the zombie situation gradually escalating over time too.
It's here where I was most impressed by the pendulum, that back-and-forth that Requiem director Kōshi Nakanishi had previously told me was built on the foundation of a "graph of tension and release". As Grace I was perpetually scrabbling around in the dirt for anything I could cling to as help - but it swings. Hard. One minute I'd have my back against the wall, barely any health, real-life heavy breathing in a state of panic as I cower in a side room and pray that an enemy has either lost me or is unwilling to enter the room I'm in. Tick; the pendulum swoops. Next, after a bit of scouring the map with that 'you're almost dead' red tint at the edges of the screen, I find stuff. Some herbs, some bullets. Tock; I'm back in the game, baby.
This didn't just happen once over 90 minutes of Grace; it happened over-and-over again, at a speed and ferocity that just didn't occur with Resident Evil 7 or 8. It is as the director suggested to me months ago - the glorious satisfaction that comes with a pattern of tension and release. The zones, the combat, the objectives, and the way enemies act are all built to needle at that.
Speaking of enemies, it's here where perhaps Resident Evil 9 offers its most interesting twist so far. It's a simple one that has been explored in countless zombie media over the years: that zombies might retain some of their human traits post-transformation.
In RE9 this manifests as zombies with habits, or fine motor skills beyond just shambling around. Some are sensitive to light, and you can mess with them by flicking light switches in the corridors - they'll then dutifully shamble to the switch and desperately paw at it to turn the lights off, making a great way to lure and separate groups. You can also stun these guys by blaring your flashlight right into their face.
You're in a hospital, so there's a couple of guys who were clearly in for eye procedures and have another problem - they can't see, blinded by medical blindfolds. These zombies thrash particularly violently, but luckily they're only attracted by noise. In other cases, the life hangover is simpler. A maid continues to clean after death, paying little attention to you unless you disturb her. An undead cook continues to butcher meat in his kitchen, making sloppy use of a giant knife - and if you're not careful, Grace will be the next on his slab. Singers continue to warble in their zombified state, and can emit ear-splitting screeches if they spot you.
There's also 'Chunks', which basically means, er, fat zombies. Zombies with a lot of timber on them, meaning ordinance grazes off and does little damage. A posh name for very scary bullet sinks, basically. And worst of all there are 'Blister Heads', which is the name RE9 gives to a previously-downed zombie that after some time reanimates, rising again with its head bloated up into a terrible bulbous mass. I hated (complimentary) this in particular; you'd go into a room where you'd previously cleared it out to nab an item or use something in the environment and then hear the sound of a previously-despatched enemy rising again behind you. Cue swearing.
As this Grace section progresses the hospital is split into distinct east and west wings, with a 'safe zone' atrium between them. You'll travel back and forth gathering items and keys in order to unravel the mysteries of the hospital, including characters and events I won't talk about here and a handy room where you can trade pilfered coins for upgrades to Grace's durability and skill set. Eventually, you'll end up in a situation where there's powerful enemies on both wings. These aren't quite full-blown stalker enemies, for they are killable, but more like mid-boss level foes that are better run from. There's a sense of nonlinearity to all this too - the guy next to me at the hands-on tackles the objectives in a completely different order to me and makes his life more miserable as a result, as one of his actions spawned in a hugely powerful enemy probably thirty minutes before I did the same - which was neat to see.
It's these foes that begin to justify Grace's nuclear options. First, there's a powerful pistol bequeathed from Leon that'll blow most (but not all) enemies away. You only have one bullet for this, and crafting more is expensive as hell. You're best to save it for a real messy situation. A little more cheaply, though, you can craft injectors. These make zombies outright explode; I craft one of these and sneak up on the toughest enemy stalking the hospital's west wing and stick him with it - boom. That saved me a shed load of bullets and a lot of sneaking, and as a bonus someone who exploded into bits can't rise again as a Blister Head. Phew.
You can sense from these descriptions, I imagine, how those swings come about. Your back against the wall, chased by a gang of zombies. But then you scrabble together some crafting materials or ammo and the game flips on its head. Once you're in, RE9 is full of delightful little details that enhance, exploit, or even just acknowledge your dread. One of my favourite details: if you press to reload while your ammo is already full, Grace nervously pulls the gun's slide back to check if a bullet is definitely in the chamber and ready to go. As somebody who compulsively presses reload every time I enter a scary-looking room in a game like this, I loved this detail: my nervous compulsions became Grace's nervous compulsions.
Fast forward a little while, then, and it's back to Leon. If Grace's section is full of little swings, this is the big swing. Leon is completely different, as indicated by everything right down to a different HUD. Or, indeed, by the fact that his section faces off with a one-on-one showdown against one of the enemies that Grace had just found nigh-impossible to kill. After that, Leon finds himself spat out into the same area you'd just been exploring as Grace - but with one other small notable wrinkle.
Because Leon visits this area after Grace, whatever you'd got up to as her remains. If you'd lured zombies to different rooms from where they'd naturally spawn, they remain there. Found a box of bullets or a herb and didn't pick it up? It's there for Leon. Killed a big enemy? You cleared the path for our boy. Didn't? It's his problem now - but he has a shotgun.
Resident Evil 9's directors do tell me that this isn't going to be the only pattern the game follows. Leon won't always be tracing Grace's steps - and he won't always be pure action. Leon will have to juggle upgrades, puzzles, inventory Tetris (except he has a huge attache case and not Grace's meagre storage), and proper existential horror more suitable for the sort of character Leon is. But seeing this interplay between the two halves of Requiem in the section offered in this demo is a most curious little tidbit. Like the non-linearity of certain objectives, it whiffs of exciting strategies for getting through, and for sequence breaks and speed runs. And anything that enables those things is a huge boon for player agency in general.
As for Leon himself? Well, playing as him slaps. Like Grace's section, it perhaps shouldn't come as a surprise. If you liked the RE4 Remake, what is presented here is an elevated version of that. While the recent trailer footage focused on awesome-looking finishing moves and the like, in practice moment-to-moment Leon is much less prescribed. Like the best bits of RE4, you have latitude of choice in terms of how to approach combat situations, and pulling off some of those most cinematic moves happens to be quite tricky.
Anyway, my point is: it's not survival horror as Grace and pure action as Leon. There is clearly more to both. We'll need to see the final game to truly understand that balance - But what I see here is not a game lacking in identity because it is doing multiple things. Rather, I see a game supremely comfortable in its place in the series - bringing together the best of Resident Evil. After I play, Requiem director Nakanishi tells me this is also how they've viewed the project internally - with the remakes of Resident Evil 2 and 4 as 'north star' templates - bringing the two distinct styles of Resident Evil together in order to create something more focused on the series' strengths - not jumbled, not less.
All told, this final hands-on can consider mission accomplished: I left it far more excited for RE9 than I went in. I think that mad lot might just do it again. And certainly, with its varying modes of play and dizzying pendulum tempo, it feels like a fitting tribute to thirty years of Resident Evil's brand of survival horror. I am properly desperate to get my hands on the final thing.
English (US) ·