Resident Evil Requiem’s Star Wars-Level Pandering Drags the Whole Game Down

Nestled in a cabinet deep inside Resident Evil Requiem’s ruined Raccoon City Police Department lies an off-brand console, approximating the original PlayStation or Sega Saturn. Studious players can find this knockoff system surrounded by all manner of Capcom games from the era, like Mega Man 8 and Street Fighter 2 Alpha. Capcom games often reference each other–look at any Dead Rising–but Requiem goes one step further by stashing a copy of the original Resident Evil inside this electronics-filled coffin. This small inclusion turns a silly Easter egg into an immersion-breaking one and acts as a fitting microcosm for Requiem’s bigger problem: it’s distractingly obsessed with its past.

The hyperfixation on nostalgia is pernicious, though, and doesn’t fully take hold until the latter half of the game. The links up until then are somewhat tenuous, but still present. Requiem’s new character, Grace Ashcroft, isn’t allowed to be completely new–she has to have a connection to an old game, as the daughter of Resident Evil Outbreak’s Alyssa Ashcroft. Its beginning mostly introduces new threads and faces, but Grace isn’t even allowed to carry the game by herself–the way her predecessor, Ethan Winters, does–as she’s joined by series pretty boy Leon S. Kennedy.

Resident Evil games usually have multiple playable characters and those often, at least partially, pull from a recognizable roster. Leon’s inclusion isn’t automatically a red flag. But once the story starts unfolding, it’s hard not to see Leon’s inclusion as a lack of confidence in Grace’s ability to carry the game, and a semi-cowardly way to appeal to fans. A charitable read is difficult to sustain, since this wave of callbacks kicks into overdrive once players don the zombie ass-kicker’s curtain haircut in Requiem’s latter half. Leon is the conduit to nostalgia in this portion of the game.

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