Resident Evil Requiem’s perspective shifting and its impact on horror
On the 27th February 2026, Capcom is set to release Resident Evil Requiem, their ninth entry in the mainline Resident Evil series since 2021’s wildly successful Resident Evil Village.
Set to continue on from, and thus revive, their Resident Evil Outbreak IP (seemingly without its notorious ‘Virus Gauge’ this time), Capcom will be presenting us a story following FBI agent Grace Ashcroft, daughter of murdered Alyssa Ashcroft, as she investigates a slew of murders taking place around a decimated Raccoon City.
From what has been seen so far in the Capcom’s various trailers and gameplay teaser for the game, Requiem (RE9) will follow a similar gameplay format to Biohazard (RE7) and Village (RE8), also developed using the RE engine. Grace will be exploring claustrophobic environments and dealing with Umbrella’s monsters, solving ‘puzzles’ and uncovering various mysteries along the way. While RE8 in particular managed to hit a sweet spot between horror and high camp, à la the buxom Lady Dimitrescu. Grace’s journey through Raccoon City seems to lean far more into the horror aspects seen in RE7.
Interestingly though, and potentially standing against such experiences, RE9 will allow players to switch between first and third-person perspectives while playing the game, potentially a blessing or a curse depending on your own preferences.
Feeling like the decision was influenced by the third person RE7 mods, Requiem’s released gameplay has Grace moving through the dark hallways of a medical facility from both perspectives as she avoids a large, hideously-designed stalker-type enemy. Issues with scaling aside, impact definitely varies between the first and third-person and, at the moment, it feels like switching to the latter gives a sensation of literally backing away from the game’s horror, making it more contained and manageable in the process.
We do not have the game yet though so it isn’t possible to fully say how perspective shifting will be incorporated into RE9. The option may be incorporated in such a way to support, even amplify, the intensity of the game and it seems like this is the intention at least with how perspective has been used in the game’s cutscenes.
What I am curious about though is how it will support our exploration of a post-apocalyptic Raccoon City, particularly the destroyed Raccoon City Police Department (RPD). This is following the events of RE2, RE3 and RE Outbreak where a government-approved bomb was dropped on Raccoon City in a combined attempt to eliminate the city’s mutated citizens and destroy evidence of the t-Virus responsible.
While dampened slightly in the games by their more bombastic set pieces, this aptly-named Raccoon City Destruction Incident is still a horrifying event in the RE series. Bombs don’t discriminate and while the city’s transformed residents may have been annihilated when one was dropped, so too were any remaining citizens affected by the virus.
This, after all, is what drives the plot in RE Outbreak, the aim being to find a way out of the city before the bomb hits.
Given the series history, it is interesting that RE9 includes the option to explore these decimated ruins. While fictional, Requiem’s Raccoon City bear an increasingly uncomfortable similarity to other urban landscapes we see on our screens. Currently, we have what Permanent Observer for the State of Palestine Riyad Mansour has referred to as the “most documented genocide in history,” a statement bolstered by the work of journalists like Bisan Owda and Anas al-Sharif (deceased) whose content has prioritised social media.
We are also learning about areas like Sudan’s El Fasher, where the bloodshed caused by the (allegedly UAE-backed) Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has been so extensive that satellite images of blood-soaked areas have been produced. These images are surreal, particularly given how regular we can come across such instances of extreme imperial violence while in the safety of our own home.
In RE9 we seem set to encounter similar images of violence, where players will be able to get up close to the aftermath of the state-sanctioned bombing of Raccoon City. We will be moving through a (literally and figuratively) flattened landscape as a federal agent for a country with an extensive military-industrial complex, protecting ourselves from the ghosts of those impacted by it.
Regardless of whether we sit there with a keyboard or controller, we experience all of this through a screen that may have shortly before shown us instances of death and destruction in some other part of the world, switched now to a game that has us exploring a somewhat similar environment.
Assuming there are no technical issues, it will be interesting to see how the option of switching between a first and third-person perspective will impact experiences of RE9, particularly when exploring Raccoon City’s ruins. Considering the current events in areas such as Palestine, Sudan and Ukraine, Raccoon City seems set to be yet another landscape bearing the scars of corruption and disregard for human life, the difference here though being that we can enter and explore it from the safety of our own home.
What I question is how much distance perspective shifting will give us from the horrors of such an environment and the ghosts that occupy it, and whether this distance is something we can afford to have at the moment.
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