Resident Evil Requiem: Survival Horror in the Age of Collapse

 Resident Evil Requiem: Survival Horror in the Age of Collapse

Graham Swanson

It always felt like the world has ended here. The streets are empty. The homes are remote. The buildings are quiet. There's sirens in the distance. There used to be a store with the door in the alleyway where someone could rent tapes and N64 games. Ever since seeing the Zombies drift across the flaming streets in Resident Evil 3, I imagined them roaming around town like part of the scenery.

Now something electric is droning somewhere in the fog. When the pandemic happened it only made this place seem more deserted. Empty shelves. Footage of cities on fire. I like to think the zombie I was afraid lived in the alley when I was tiny is still living there. 

Old fantasies seem quaint to the Global trauma of the new millenium, and the new fears have not eroded the irrational fear of a zombie in the alley. Tech companies and shadowy ethics. Evil corporations. AI and how it merges with flesh and brain. Climate change (its 70 degrees in Nebraska this February). The aftermath of the pandemic, and even political violence and re emergence of fascism. The Horror genre was reborn befor our eyes and we didn't notice it until it stared back, Today, a game like this feels like a challange, not a dare like it did at our slumber parties. You're not playing with your friends.

It's one confronting the horrors of the New Millenium and the collapse of the world! The shutdowns, food prices, fascism, wars, disease, tech companies, public violence, failure of institutions, the overreach of science, will become the enemies the player must slay. It’s called Resident Evil Reqiuem. Development began in 2020, and it’s releasing on February 27^th, 2026. It promises to be more frightening than Resident Evil Village, but will also welcome newer, younger players to the world.

Younger players that know only a post Covid World.

The aspect of Horror that 90’s Resident Evil mastered is the grotesque transformation of the human body into an outrageous monstrousity. Each enemy in this franchise is someone who suffered from mutation, infenction, or experimentation. The real terror that these older games explioted was the loss of personal autonomity. The threats of the game pressure the player to succumb to the infection and become another shadow wandering in the fog.

In Resident Evil Reqiuem, we will see many aspects of Post Coivd Horror. “Screenlife” techniques, social isolation, information that can’t be trusted, dead bodies lined up at hospital, panic becomes contagious as the hospital quarantines, fear and horror become the real virus. Indeed the game starts off with Grace, a young bookworm who is too young to remember Racoon City. She wakes up isolated in an emergency room cold, alone, with gore and lifeless bodies assunder, the only lifeline is a phone device that barely works.

Resident Evil stands not just as entertainment but a cultural mirror that reflects the fears of the society that plays it. Corporate power, instiutional distrust, the loss of body. While in some games the goal would be to restore the world, it’s too unstable, so instead Resident Evil offers the player survival. The “Evil” it refers to is not some malevolent supernatural force that exists for no reason, it was manufacutured and manipulaed by powerful people.

In Resident Evil 3 and Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, an invisable virus sweeps the Earth. It’s hardly noticably at first with mild symptoms, so it spreads quickly. As worse symptoms emerge, everyday things, like buying, falls under the shade of risk. Once mundane things like drinking fountains become death traps. Strangers become unwelcomed. The ordinary- like a jet fan- becomes a lethal body part.

In the past plagues were seen as divine punishment against moral corruption. Resident Evil reflects a very contemporary fear, that evil is not done to the world by supernatural forces, but it is manufactured and inflicted by the society that is meant to protect them. Ironically, the vary science that helped create vaccines that defeaed the plague, in the world of Resident Evil, is now being used to create super viruses, and weaponized abominations. If something is killing you in the New Millenium, it’s not a demon that will destroy you, it’s not nature, but human innovation. Indeed the technological innovations of our time have been used to inflict horrors onto the people, as represented in Resident Evil Village by the man with a Jet Fan as a head.

The monsters of Resident Evil are the victims of this evil misuse of power. They are tragic figures who embody the fear of what happens to use when a society collapses. They deform, lose their humanity, and become cannibals. The loss of idenity. The horror of having that idenity taken and warped without consent. The echos of vulnerability. Mortal danger to a body from something so small one can’t even see it.

The biological fear exists because of the presense of an evil Corporation, Umbrella. They represent the fear of systems. They experiment on people in secret labs and destroyed Raccoon City in Resident Evil 2. In the real world, they reflect the nature of pharmacutical companies, their monoplistic nature, privatized research, and the opaque decsion making, all of which has led to a total failure of public trust. Those who remember the Covid 19 pandemic can retell stories of people who refused to even believe the virus was even real, let alone that the vaccines would do them any good. Men like Luigi Mangione lost more than confidence in healthcare companies. The very companies founded to make us healthier became monsters themselves.

Resident Evil suggusts that man created his own monsters. Today humans beings are not hunted down by the Dinopethicus. They are subject to threats man made.

A zombie outbreak is can be PREVENTED unless someone wants them to get loose. This narrative frameworks mirrors real world axiety that the insututions that once protected people are infact preying on people. The erosion on the empty streets is the loss of confidece people once had for authority, capitalism, and the Democracy itself.

The horror unfolds in two phases.

Phase 1: The virus
Phase 2: People entrusted with public safety are complicit in the danger.

Resident Evil isn’t just about gore and mayhem. It’s the tragedy of the victims and the gothic downfall of these seemingly all powerful entities. They become the architecture of horror as the locations trap the player. Enclosed within a nightmare, shut in with living horrors. The isolation of a post Covid world breathes new life into this survival horror convention!

Every open space serves to isolate the player. A huge mansion can become an oppressive labarynth. Police stations can be over ran by the undead. Destitute village can become a death trap. Pathways narrow, locked doors, and faint visability increases psychological pressure.

“The World’s a mess” can be said in many different ways, but Resident Evil’s story has aged well even to a micro region. In Nebraska these parallel themes should be explored. How the vast open plains becomes a prison. The Tecumseh Prison Riots. The Fall of Lexington.

On broader scale, people are lonlier in the 2020s than in decades prior. We interact with technological conveniences rather than in person connection. We go out side less. Some people who went inside during Covid never left.

The use of architecture to reinforce this dread is a gothic convention that goes back to the Castle of Otranto. Big buildings are not just office space. They are acts of aggression, symbols of oppression. With black spires and skyhigh butresses, to black windows that dominate the sunlight. The message is elegant and clear.

You are not alone. You are not safe. You are weak, small, defenseless. Even if you escaped the confines of the nightmare, the world outside is waiting to EAT YOU. Things may appear beautiful but that’s only to disgusie danger. Things can appaer peaceful, but somewhere in the world, shit is on fire. (I believe there are gun battles in Mexico as I write this).

A Reqiuem bell rings. Resident Evil returns but what is “Reqiuem” referring to? The loss of life, the fall of powerful companies, the collapse of the international free market system, the decline in instritutional trust? I say we look at the characters. Leon Kennedy is back, but there’s a new character too, Agent Graace of the FBI.

Leon survives not by fixing the system but by enduring its failure. Rings of flawless heroism don’t hold water anymore. People flock to see Deadpool, not Superman. Political instability, economic downfall, violence in the streets. We don’t expect triumph anymore. This is the era of resilance.

 Koshi Nakanishi,The Director of RE Reqiuem, says that the gameplay is divided between Leon and Grace. Leon has already survived two games, RE2 and RE4. His segments in the game are high pressure encounters wheras Grace feels more like a Silent Hill character. She’s careful, cautious, and will be more involved in slower parts of the game. Unlike Leon, she does not fight as well, and is easily frightened.

Grace comes from within a powerful institution that is responsible for public safety. She is a technical analyst, and wants to know what killed her mother. She winds up in the quarantined ruins of Raccoon City. She’s on her own to investigate. Her discovery will be a reqiuem to the sense of control and order we once enjoyed, an old world that no longer exists. Her survival will depend on breaking the ilussion that it even existed in the first place.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3764200/Resident_Evil_Requiem/

https://www.playstation.com/en-us/games/resident-evil-requiem/