Resident Evil: Requiem plays the greatest hits…but I already have the albums
Jill Valentine has bleached her hair and gotten a desk job. When her boss sends her to a serial killer crime scene, zombies happen. This is when she realizes she’s in a Resident Evil and needs a male sidekick to do the combat parts. So Chris Redfield gets vectored in to take turns playing the game with her. They go to a — stop me if you’ve heard this one — creepy mansion with a secret lab underneath it. Resident Evil: Deja Vu.
Capcom has been remastering Residents Evil for so long that someone over there got the bright idea to do a compilation game where a sequel was supposed to go. Going into a remaster, I know it’s going to be familiar. That’s the point. But sequels face the challenging task of balancing continuity with innovation, of hewing to conventions without grinding blindly against them. How familiar should a sequel be? There’s no easy answer, but there are wrong answers. Resident Evil: Requiem is one such wrong answer. Perhaps if it had been called K-Tel’s Resident Evil, that the innovation begins and ends with the word after the colon, that I’ve quite literally been here before. Here is a game so invested in callbacks that it chokes on its own tail.
Of course, one man’s derivative is another man’s back-to-basics. Call it an homage. A return to form. A nod, if you will. I suspect this is how Requiem is intended to be experienced. If you don’t still get a little thrill at the prospect of a feeding zombie slowly turning its head to reveal…surprise, it’s a zombie!, then this may not be the game for you. By the way, I think that’s the one old timey trick Requiem doesn’t do.
But the time I spent Requieming lapsed from “homage” into “cloying familiar” far too quickly and for far too long. I walked along torturously linear labyrinths, many of them built to evoke some sort of “hey, remember this bit?” wink. At the end of each I was sure to find whatever ludicrously irrelevant doo-dad-as-key unlocked the next torturously linear labyrinth. Oh, look, now there’s a circular set of rooms where I’ll be playing ring-around-the-rosie with something hard to kill, if not unkillable. Here comes the chainsaw! Here comes a dumber-than-ever driving sequence, basically a barely interactive cutscene! Now everything is put on hold for a forced stealth sequence!
These are the places narrative goes to die. Requiem is mostly ammo scrounging survival horror, as primal as being Alone in the Dark. It’s got unlocking and upgrading weapons for later playthroughs, but this time compressed into a single playthrough, as if Capcom knows I’m not going to bother replaying this one. It’s got all the same boss fights, once more, for old times’ sake. This is your life, Resident Evil! And then, finally, Albert Wesker! Don’t worry, it’s not a spoiler because they changed his name.
Jill Valentine’s name in this is Grace, and she has to play the running-scared and stealth bits on her own, because co-op isn’t a Resident Evil thing anymore. She also gets all the annoying escort missions because Chris Redfield can’t be bothered. Chris Redfield gets to do the fun combat arenas, but there aren’t any zombie sieges because those aren’t old-school enough. I’m pretty sure Chris Redfield’s name in this is Chris Redfield, but I can’t tell one beefily bicepped protagonist avatar from another without a girl alongside to scream his name when he dies and has to reload. This Chris Redfield looks like a Japanese videogame developer’s version of a young Clint Eastwood, because he’s supposed to be an old man since his last character model. Time comes for us all, Chris.
“You haven’t changed much, have you?” he growls after he’s killed a licker. He’s speaking to a now empty room, as he’s wont to do when delivering his 80s-era one-liners to stuff he’s just killed. By the way, is it a spoiler to mention there are lickers in this game? Because there are, and they haven’t changed much, because there’s not much to them. In 1998, they were a cool way to have something drop down on you from an unexpected vector, and later to force you to move slowly around something blind. Capcom rolls them out for Requiem as if they expect people to applaud when they show up.
Which, to be fair, is probably what some Resident Evil fans will do. But it’s a classic example of both the indolence and fecklessness of fan service. Does no one even try to earn admiration any more? Is it sufficient to just roll out something familiar, something old, something played out, knowing that the faithful will applaud no matter how little it’s changed, no matter how little sense it makes in another context, no matter how much it’s shaped like a hole where something creative should have gone? What does it say about me as a Resident Evil fan that I’ve been over lickers for at least a decade? What does it say about Capcom that Requiem’s ingratiating attempts to repackage content are so transparent? What does it say about storytelling in videogames that the narrative is so irrelevant, forced into gaps between set pieces, graceless and arthritic. Requiem shambles tediously from set piece to set piece, cutscene to cutscene, found file to found file, callback to callback, until it doesn’t. Roll credits.
Normally, at the end of a Resident Evil game, I immediately start a playthrough on a harder difficulty level, leveraging what I’ve learned to fling liberal ammo from my upgraded arsenal at those fuckers who had me running scared the first time around. Not so with Requiem. Instead, with a renewed appreciation for how much worse Resident Evil: Village could have been, I’m going back to Castle Dimitrescu, which doesn’t even have a secret lab underneath it.
Resident Evil: Requiem
Rating:
PC
Resident Evil, this is your life!
