Last week, I traveled to Cologne, Germany, to attend Gamescom and play more than two dozen games. One of those games was Resident Evil Requiem, the ninth mainline installment in Capcom’s long-running survival horror series. Although it was the same demo from June’s Summer Games Fest event in Los Angeles, featuring Grace Ashcroft in a decrepit care center attempting to escape from a monstrous creature stalking the halls, it was still my first time playing it.
You can read my hands-on preview thoughts on that demo in my Gamescom preview round-up here, but it was only half of my Requiem experience last week. I also sat down to interview Requiem director Koshi Nakanishi and producer Masato Kumazawa. In our 30-minute interview, we discussed the type of horror the team is aiming for in Requiem, why it was time to return to Raccoon City and zombies, the differences between the game’s third-person and first-person gameplay, and more. Enjoy!
Interviewing The Director And Producer Of Resident Evil Requiem
Left to right: Requiem producer Masato Kumazawa, Game Informer’s Wesley LeBlanc, Requiem director Koshi Nakanishi
Game Informer editor Wesley LeBlanc: Every Resident Evil has a theme. Biohazard was about a southern backwoods family, and Village was Resident Evil’s take on classic Universal monsters. How would you describe the horror theme of Requiem?
Director Koshi Nakanishi: We’ve been emphasizing in marketing materials, “Return to Raccoon City,” and that we’re returning to the main storyline of the series and looking to push it forward with horror. And you’ll see, if you’ve played the demo, using characters like Grace and the creature you saw, we introduce this storyline and theme, and they’re quite unique as an approach for Resident Evil.
Producer Masato Kumazawa: One of the elements that you can expect to return is zombies; they are back. We are focusing more on the monsters, a variety of different enemies from the creature you saw in the demo to the next level, the next version of our zombies.
You trip as Grace in third-person but not in first-person. Why is that?
Nakanishi: We originally planned to just switch the camera hud, but we realized that if you take the camera out from first to third, because of the way Grace is animated – as a first-person model – it looks like she’s just walking around straight, with no reaction. It was unnatural. First-person is already more immersive, but that immersion has to be represented in other ways in third-person, which is why we have extra reactions like tripping. If we added tripping to first-person, moving the camera like that would make you motion sick. In third-person, it’s about seeing her fear and reaction to the scenario, and going through the rest of the game, we start building in more reactions. There’s no point in adding these in first-person because you wouldn’t see them.
Kumazawa: There are surprise reactions she does in the demo. In third-person, something might happen, and you see her jump, whereas in first-person, there’s a bit of a camera move instead. When she takes damage or gets hit, there’s no need to do much in first-person, but there are specific animations in third-person to let you feel and show how much she got hurt.
With tripping and other animations that theoretically slow down gameplay, is it fair to say third-person is harder?
Nakanishi: We don’t want to be unfair, so we’ll give you a little peek behind the curtain: when you trip, you can’t see it, but the creature doesn’t move. Third-person never feels like an unfair advantage.
Why return to the Ashcroft family now, and why pick a family from the Outbreak series?
Nakanishi: Alyssa Ashcroft was actually the perfect character for our needs in this game; there really was no other character in mind. Returning to Raccoon City after all this time meant looking back on the incident itself and Umbrella and the themes we haven’t visited in a while. Alyssa is a survivor of the incident, and she goes on to journalistically investigate and find the truth and expose the cover-up. But she pays the price for curiosity, presumably gets too close to the truth, and someone or some entity has her killed to silence her. Grace, being the character to take up the torch from her mother after all these years, wants to find the truth after the incident and the murder of her mother. Two generations of Ashcrofts are the perfect choice for our storytelling and moving the main series forward.
Can you talk to me a bit about the hulking creature design in the demo? What are some of the inspirations behind it?
Nakanishi: We had a lot of different concepts through the design phase. So, to be honest, there’s not any one particular inspiration from other works. The main objective has been, with quite a few games with stalker enemies and different variations, for her to stand out from the pack. The main single-sentence summary of her: As soon as you lay your eyes on her, you know this isn’t right; you need to get away from this.
Requiem has a few definitions. What does it mean in the context of this game?
Nakanishi: It’s along the lines of remembrance for the dead. As we discussed earlier, Alyssa and Grace are a key family relationship that kicks everything off: Alyssa’s murder, Grace’s grief, her desire to avenge, her desire to solve her mother’s murder, and the aftermath of the Raccoon City incident.
Can you expand on the line: “This is merely the overture to our darkest symphony yet?”
Nakanishi: The musical allusions are a call back to the title. Using a musical metaphor to say this is a requiem for the mass of the dead; even when you watch the SGF presentation or if you’ve played the same section yourself, and think this is dark and scary – this is just the beginning. It’s our way of tying together the title and the metaphor and saying, “If you think this is scary, you haven’t seen anything yet.”
Does that mean Requiem is the scariest Resident Evil yet?
Nakanishi: That’s a bit of a tricky question. I directed [Resident Evil 7: Biohazard]. I know for a lot of players, it was too scary, so scary they couldn’t finish it. I’m not aiming to make this the scariest Resident Evil ever. It will be very scary, but I want you to get through the whole thing and enjoy it. It’s about a release of tension and catharsis and actually surviving it, but it’s certainly up there in terms of how scary Requiem is.
Kumazawa: The camera perspective changes are part of this. If you feel it’s too scary in first-person, jump out to third-person. But overall, we’re aiming to have a rollercoaster ride of a thrilling, well-paced storyline. If we’re at max horror the whole time, people can’t take it and put the controller down. We want, “Wow, that was scary,” and then some exploration and puzzle-solving, then some action combat, and then we bring you back into the fear.
Can you talk about the persistent theme of family across this trilogy?
Nakanishi: We don’t really think of [Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, Resident Evil Village, and Resident Evil Requiem] as a trilogy. 7 and 8 are a duology. Ethan’s story concludes at the end of Village. Requiem is the ninth mainline title, but it’s moving back to the series’ mainstream, as it were, […] to push the storyline forward. In that sense, I don’t think family is a main theme of Requiem. It’s part of it, but not as emphasized as the past two mainline titles. Part of Grace’s motivation is things like finding out what happened to her mother, but that isn’t the complete theme of the game.
What’s it like within the team, finally returning to Raccoon City in a new way after all these years?
Nakanishi: There are a lot of Resident Evil fans on the team, so naturally, we find it very exciting, and it’s fun to finally tackle the idea of what’s happening inside the city. The fans, though, they go to the next level, with even more speculation and questions. We do have a lot of expectations to live up to, but we’re confident you will love it.
Resident Evil Requiem hits PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC on February 27, 2026.
In the meantime, check out the latest Resident Evil Requiem trailer, and then read about why Leon S. Kennedy was considered a “bad match” for Resident Evil Requiem.