I saw Resident Evil Requiem gameplay, and Capcom is cooking up some impressive horror

If you're a survival-horror fan like me, Resident Evil Requiem from Capcom was one of the biggest announcements during all of Summer Game Fest 2025. For this ninth mainline entry, Capcom is promising to once again return to its foundation of horror, while also providing high-adrenaline action.

I got a taste of the first half of that promise when I attended a theater presentation from Capcom, taking a look at 20 minutes of hands-off gameplay that shows FBI agent Grace Ashcroft thrown into an utter nightmare.

The hands-off demo began with little additional context outside of the reveal trailer. Grace wakes up inside a heavily dilapidated building with no idea of where she is, hanging upside down and hooked up to something slowly draining her blood.

Straight away, it's clear this game is aiming for astounding visual quality. Capcom's impressive RE Engine has powered fantastic-looking visuals ever since it was introduced, especially in the Resident Evil games, but things are taken to a new level here. Sweat drips down Grace's neck, and dim lights pierce the room with amazing believability, while Capcom notes the demo was played on a PlayStation 5 Pro.

After getting free, the first-person gameplay begins. Everything is dark and moody, with only a handful of flickering lights, while dark halls are briefly illuminated by cracks of lightning as a storm rages outside.

Grace explores carefully, slowly opening doors and trying to find anything that can help her escape. Notably, there are no weapons to be seen at this stage, with Grace limited to just a lighter. In a new twist for the Resident Evil series, Grace can also gather bottles, throwing them as a distraction for enemies.

She seriously needs them, because it becomes clear after a while that the building isn't entirely abandoned, and something is coming after Grace. It's a nightmarish creature, with gigantic, clawing hands. It's covered in blood and bandages while towering over everything else, practically filling a room as it shambles around.

With no weapons, Grace can only evade or distract this thing temporarily, made all the more difficult by how it climbs up into the ceiling, burrowing through the building and making it hard to tell exactly where it is at a particular point.

While Capcom cuts from point to point to avoid spoiling the exact solutions, it's also clear that Grace's gameplay is going to revolve heavily around puzzles. Different doors need different keys; she'll need to find some way of reaching a tall shelf, and so on.

It's a very classic structure for a Resident Evil game, just with the stress level amplified as she is at least initially bereft of weaponry.

As the demo drew to a close, Capcom pulled a "one last thing" moment in perhaps the most creative way I've ever seen. As the shambling monstrosity closed in on Grace, the gameplay suddenly paused. The team opened the options menu and flipped a toggle from "First-person" to "Third-person."

The cheers in the room were deafening.

Resident Evil Requiem isn't the first game in the series to let players swap between first and third-person gameplay — 2021's Gothic-infused entry Resident Evil Village added the option through the Winters Expansion DLC — but Requiem is the first game to be built around this idea from the start. I'm excited to see which option players end up preferring, even if I'll probably stick with first-person myself.

The presentation wowed me, and I'm already sold on the survival-horror vision that Capcom is constructing as it returns to Raccoon City. There's a mutated elephant in the room, however, and that is that the storied Japanese publisher is promising fierce action for this game as well.

That action was nowhere to be seen in the demo, and while I'm sure she'll prove capable, I'd argue it'd be tonally inconsistent if Grace suddenly goes full guns blazing.

Maybe there's another, more familiar co-lead currently being hidden?

We won't be waiting years to find out, as Resident Evil Requiem is slated to launch on Feb. 27, 2026, across Xbox Series X|S, Windows PC (Steam), and PlayStation 5.