One Resident Evil Requiem Plot Point Makes Absolutely No Sense

1 day ago 13

Grace holding the distressed child Emily in Resident Eivl Requiem

Published Mar 8, 2026, 4:00 PM EDT

Ben Brosofsky has been writing for Screen Rant since 2022 and editing since 2024. He graduated from Vanderbilt University with a Bachelor's in Cinema & Media Arts. Writing serves as a much-needed distraction from tackling a backlog of Steam games that will never be surmounted.

Resident Evil Requiem is a fun story, propelled along by dynamic cutscenes and excellent performances. It's also a shaky one. In its desperate quest to touch on virtually every Resident Evil staple, Requiem lurches between characters and ideas with uneven intensity, clearly more concerned with whether its components are cool than whether they make any sense.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, as Resident Evil has always been a goofy saga driven more by set pieces than logic. Occasionally, however, Requiem pushes its luck. For all the absurdities of the final act, the most ludicrous moment is one that occurs before the midpoint, as the Grace-heavy section of the game ticks along inside the care center.

Resident Evil Requiem's Braille Puzzle Doesn't Add Up

The Information's All There

If you've played through Requiem, you already know where this is going, but let's get the pieces in place first. Grace's segment involves Emily, a young, blind girl locked away in a white-walled room. While Grace is clearly concerned about Emily, she has more pressing matters to attend to. Until she encounters Braille, that is, which spurs her to double back for Emily's help.

A blind girl assisting with a Braille-centric puzzle isn't a bad idea, and done well, it could be a smart marriage of classic Resident Evil puzzles and Resident Evil 4's escort mission structure. Resident Evil Requiem, however, does not do it well. Grace has more than enough information to solve the puzzle on her own, and the story somehow never addresses the obvious leap of logic involved in getting Emily's assistance.

Specifically, Grace needs to press three buttons in a sequence of four inputs. Each one corresponds to either the Sun, Moon, or Star, and Grace has already encountered a photo suggesting the full sequence. In the worst case scenario, she could brute force the solution with six total attempts, and the functionality of previous cabinets with the same setup suggests that there's no penalty for an incorrect attempt.

To take things further, even six attempts would be extraneous. Even without knowing braille, it's easy enough to figure out what each word corresponds to in Braille. Sun is only three letters, for example, while Moon has a repeated letter in the center. It doesn't exactly take a professional linguist to put these pieces together.

Grace Ashcroft Is A Little Too Confused

Scared Out Of Her Mind

Grace Ashcroft with a pained expression in Resident Evil Requiem

From a narrative standpoint, it's possible to give some leniency to Grace's obtuseness in this particular manner. She is, after all, absolutely terrified, something her fantastic voice actress does a wonderful job of selling. In the heat of the moment, the basic logic required to solve this conundrum could conceivably escape her, driving her desperate choice to ferry Emily over for help.

It's also possible to argue that, subconsciously, Grace is just looking for a reason to take Emily along. The bond between the two characters is a central theme in the game, echoing the love that Grace shared with her adoptive mother, Alyssa Ashcroft. Dragging Emily through a dangerous area might not be the best way to ensure their continued partnership, but again, Grace is not having her best day.

Beneath all of this, though, Grace is also an avatar for the player, and it's a little too distracting when you have a brain of your own. I'm not opposed to plot holes when they contribute more to a story than they take away, but this one feels entirely unnecessary. It wouldn't be hard to devise a scenario where Grace could be confronted with Braille that she genuinely needs Emily for, so settling for a situation this ludicrous feels unnecessary.

Resident Evil Is Playing It Fast & Loose

Resident Evil Requiem villain Zeno holding a cigarette

It's all a bit indicative of Resident Evil Requiem's larger struggles with plot, as the game tends to hand-wave anything that would require real effort to hash out. Zeno? He's, uh, not Wesker, but he's not not Wesker. No questions, please. Another secret lab? All these clone girls running around? Half of the final act's ingredients are tossed into the mix without much grounding, resulting in a conclusion that feels only loosely tethered to the game's foundation.

This isn't the first time Resident Evil has mumbled its way through key plot points, with Chris's refusal to explain anything to Ethan in Resident Evil Village serving as another recent example. It's just frustrating how easy it would be for Requiem to make a lot more sense than it does. If the threadbare plots of the original PlayStation games can still register as vaguely logical, a spectacular blockbuster production decades later should be able to manage the same.

As far as the complete picture of Requiem goes, it's not a huge deal, and the game ultimately scrapes across the finish line in a generally satisfying manner. As the series goes forward, though, the foundation is becoming increasingly rocky. If the next few games don't pay a little more attention to the underlying logic of it all, Resident Evil might just lose its footing once more.