Resident Evil Requiem‘s Demo Recedes Into the Wallpaper

If there’s one thing horror games love, it’s a creepy hallway. Resident Evil Requiem (or, as it was widely called before its official name was revealed, Resident Evil 9) couldn’t resist that siren’s call. The demo shown at Summer Game Fest this weekend might start with an especially frightening and more specific scenario—its lead character, FBI agent Grace Ashecroft, comes to in a grungy room, hanging upside down and tied to a stretcher, with an IV patched into her arm either removing her own blood or pumping in somebody (or something) else’s—but it wastes no time staring down a spooky hall. After Ashcroft escapes from that opening predicament, she opens the door to her makeshift jail and is confronted with a long, dark, extremely ominous hallway. It’s teasing a pretty recognizable type of playability, I tell you what. 

Of course the hallway is an ideal setting for frights. They’re tight, confined, and bookended by some combination of corners and doorways perfect for zombified creeps to lurk behind. They’re also a place where jump scares make sense. Game designers can use a hallway to dictate the player’s motion and scene’s pacing to a minute degree, giving them the kind of authorial control that isn’t always simpatico with modern games. And with its limited field of vision—you can only see to a hallway’s end—and the way it forces you to walk in a single direction, a hallway lets designers build tension by foreshadowing what comes after it, through scattered glimpses of the next room and distant sounds that reverberate and grow louder the closer you get to them. I get why somebody making a horror game would want to put a hallway in the thing.

It’s maybe not the best thing to highlight in a short preview, though, as Capcom did with the non-playable slice of Resident Evil Requiem that was shown to press at SGF. It’s impossible to see a first-person view of a photorealistic hallway in a horror game context and not immediately think of P.T., Konami’s doomed “playable teaser” of a never-released Silent Hill game that remains one of the biggest “what ifs” in games. Rushing into such a familiar setting made that Requiem demo feel a little uninspired, and nothing that we saw after Ashcroft made it to the end of that hallway (a chunk of play that included at least a handful more hallways) compensated for the “been there, done that” flatness of the thing.