Resident Evil Requiem Preview @Pax West
And what it taught ME about b2b sales.
Written By Cervando
Nothing. It taught me nothing about B2B sales. Why would it? Hell, I don’t even know what either B in B2B sales is. Like why would a game about monsters in a creepy mansion, following the daughter of a character from a Resident Evil game I totally forgot existed teach me anything about BB-8 sales? ( I assume that’s what the B stands for in B2B).
I’ll tell you what it did teach me, that even after 20 years of playing Resident Evil games I am still jumpy, get sweaty when I am scared, and that Requiem seems to be a game that straddles the lines of what I like about the original Resident Evil games, their remakes, and the more (at least to me) fantastical aspects of RE VII and Village.
BEWARE SPOILERS AHEAD FOR THE REQUIEM PREVIEW PLAY-THROUGH AND WARNING FOR MENTIONS OF BLOOD, GORE, AND SCARY STUFF.
What I Knew Going Into The Preview
I have been a Resident Evil fan since I played through the Resident Evil 1 remake on the GameCube about 23 years ago because my parents did not understand video game age ratings. 12 year old Cervando was quickly engrossed by the lore, the ambiance, and the suspense while also being scared out of his young little mind. Since then I have played through most of the Resident Evil franchise and when I found out that REQ (what I am calling Resident Evil Requiem) was going to be playable at PAX West 2025, I knew I just had to go get in line and go get scared.
I hadn’t done much research about the game before pulling up to PAX, so when I watched trailer and found out that the main character was going to be Grace Ashcroft I got excited. Finally! Playing through the Playstation Port of Code Veronica on my GameCube was going to pay off! I will get to know more about the Ashford family! Alexa and Alfred! Is Grace an experiment of theirs? Maybe a descendant! A clone! A…wait a minute.
I might be illiterate.
AshCROFT ≠ AshFORD
What. The. Hell.
Ok the trailer mentions that this character is an FBI agent, and that her mom was murdered. Oooh! Maybe this is Ethan Winters’ kid! You know, the psychic baby that was apparently dismembered and reassembled in Resident Evil 7 and Village while Ethan fought vampires and werewolves! (Sidebar: I really did not like those games. Yay spooky stuff, but man seriously? Werewolves?) But wait, that girl’s name was Rosemary and she’d probably be too young to play this character.
WHO ARE YOU GRACE ASHCROFT?
So I then rewatched the trailer. Watched a video about the trailer. And watched a video about that video. And I learned that:
“Grace Ashcroft is the daughter of Alyssa Ashcroft. Alyssa was an investigative reporter for The Raccoon Press in Raccoon City and was one of the few people to escape the destruction of Raccoon City at the end of Resident Evil 2/3. Alyssa is a playable character from Resident Evil: Outbreak released in March 2004.”
Ah, yes. Of course, silly me how dare I not recognize the daughter of a character from a spin-off game from 21 YEARS AGO. THAT GAME IS OLD ENOUGH TO DRINK.
Moving on.
The trailer and my investigative journalism (AKA just watching YouTube and going onto the Resident Evil Fandom site) also told me this game was going to see Grace going to the remains of Raccoon City post big-badda-boom. It’s almost as if this dead city is coming back to life with something nefarious. METAPHORS BABY!
Now Grace is tasked with figuring out some of the bad spooky things happening in Raccoon City that may or may not be related to her mom. Honestly the trailer is pretty vague about this, and it is quite intriguing if I am being honest with myself.
The Preview to the Preview
So fully caught up to speed, I went over to the Capcom area in the Expo hall at PAX and proceeded to wait. And wait. And Wait some more. And after waiting some more with fellow Totally Legit Gamer Marianne, we were walked into the preview area. Now, PAX West is big, like real big, and the expo floor is loud. The preview area was surrounded by con attendees, cosplayers, and even a Borderlands 4 rage room just a few hundred feet away. But when we walked into the preview area, it was a square room that was pitch black sans some faint lights pointing at the wall and the light from the game main menu on about 20 monitors. The walls had a print that looked like old victorian era crown molding, painted white, and more importantly it was weirdly quiet. I don’t know what acoustic isolation shenanigans Capcom pulled off, but man it worked, I hadn’t even sat down and was already regretting it. Nevertheless, we put on our headphones, grabbed a PS5 controller and hit Start.
The Actual Preview: I Am a Very Brave Boy
The preview begins with a close-up of Grace, her face sweaty and distressed, as she is slowly discovering she is tied down to a gurney upside down (happens to the best of us) and I gradually took in the environment through the perspective of Grace assessing her situation. The room she is in looks like what I can only describe as a vintage hospital inside of a mansion. Something you’d see in a World War I time piece, except its poorly lit, grimy, and the light is a harsh cool but bright color coming from a sconce. The sound design indicates there’s a storm happening outside and you see sporadic lightning coming in through the windows. At this point Grace realizes there is an IV in her arm connected to an old timey IV glass bottle that is slowly dripping blood out of her arm.
Grace awakens hanging upside down being exsanguinated. Is this a Dexter sequel?
Upon closer inspection she realizes she can grab enough of the IV line going to the glass bottle so that she can pull it. And so drawing upon what I am assuming are years of training at the Academy (FBI Academy, not Star Command, nor Sports and Outdoors) she devises a plan to pull the IV line, have the IV bottle fall and smash, pull the IV line with the neck of the broken bottle, and use that to escape the gurney. She then stands up, the cutscene concludes, and control went to the player (me!).
Now I actually want to point out something important about the mechanics about this game. REQ actually allows the player to choose between first and third person perspective. Obviously first person is mOrE iMmErSiVe, but honestly that was not something I liked about RE7/8. I am a third person kind of guy, and I blame it on the trauma I had at the hands of REmake and REØ. I am also not a total jerk, and recognize that some people prefer that immersion in the horror genre, and so I do think that being able to switch the perspective to whatever style you prefer is a good compromise. Especially, as I learned in a bit when I was RUNNING FOR MY LIFE, the third person perspective does include animations of Grace being injured or running away in panic which I shows that the developers actually put thought and care into both modes and there isn’t a “right way” to play the game. Thanks Capcom!
All my homies prefer third person view for Resident Evil games.
After assuming control of Grace I proceeded to explore the gross mansion/hospital room and see the very dark hallway that connects to the room to what I assumed was the rest of the building. I will point out that my heart rate was at like 160 BPM already and I hadn’t even left the room yet. So I walked around, explored the room, turned on a desk lamp, turned off a desk lamp, and just procrastinated leaving the room. After exhausting all that I could explore in that room, I mustered the courage and stepped outside into the hallway with the storms and honestly jumped a bit as a loud noise came from above me as if someone was moving around in the floor above.
Being the savvy gamer I am, I immediately crouched and went deeper into the dark hallway, and explored some locked doors, found an even DARKER hallway that was only illuminated by some red lights, and a fork in the road. I had a choice: go to my right into what looked like another dark hallway, or go to my left into what looked like a completely dark room.
Being the smart brave boy I am, I went to the dark room, and found a light swtich!…Which only illuminated half of of what looked like an operating prep room with a flickering light and immediately almost died IRL when the silence in my headphones was shattered by a brown old looking medicine bottle rolling on the tile in front of me. Having decided I had spent enough time in this room, I grabbed the bottle, and got the hell out of there.
Figuring a dark operating room was NOT the way I wanted to go, I went back to the cross roads and walked down the dark hallway instead. In this hallway and found a light switch that illuminated this giant white horse statue at the end that also made me jump before I realized it was a statue. When I realized I wasn’t going to be trampled to death, I (still crouched) made my way down the hallway, ignoring some doors, and hearing some loud thumps from upstairs every once in a while. The hallway reached a dead end with a gate that had a switch that didn’t work. Thankfully, there was a a fuse box right next to the switch! Unthankfully, in classic Resident Evil fashion, this fusebox was missing a fuse which only meant I had to backtrack and explore the Scary Doors.
The best way I can describe how I felt when I realized I had to backtrack.
With this realization, I being the brave boy I am, began exploring a door in the horse hallway that I had noticed was ajar. Crouching (still) I went in and turned on a light and saw what looked like a patient room that was full of goodies! Goodies such as
An empty ink ribbon tin (are those coming back?!)
A lighter
Like 3 handgun bullets but no handgun
A fuse that unfortunately was behind a panel that needed a screwdriver to open
All in all, not a bad haul! Though why would someone keep a lighter in a hospital? It’s a no smoking area! More importantly, I now knew where the fuse was, all I needed now was a screwdriver.
Going back to the hallway I was able to turn on the lighter, walk around the dark areas and see a little better before doing what I knew I had to do: exploring the other half of the dark operating room. Mustering all my courage I made my way into the operating room and in with the light of the lighter I saw a door I immediately labeled as:
I am pretty sure I said an audible “oh hell no”.
Of course I did the only sane thing and opened The Scary Door, and was shocked with a cutscene jump scare straight out of the Resident Evil playbook: a zombie fell down on top of Grace and she screamed. Thankfully, she quickly realized that the zombie is not fully a zombie, it’s just some dead doctor looking guy, but as she is prone on the ground and rolls the guy off her, she examines him with her lighter and comments that the doctor is infected. REQ then proceeded to give me a second heart attack as this massive hand silently reached out from the darkness of my periphery and grabbed the doctor. As Grace followed the hand using the lighter to see, in the dim flickering light I saw this 7 or 8 foot tall Lisa Trevor (shoutout to my Resident Evil hardcore homies) looking monster with dark gray skin and a haunted face pull up the doctor to its mouth, and take a big bite and swallow the doctor’s head (I guess that’s one way to get out of medical school student loans). The monster then turned and leaned down with its teeth dripping blood.
Jared Leto’s Joker perhaps?
Grace, understandably, proceeded to freak out and tried to get away. Now fellow gamers, I am not going to lie to you. I was honestly so in shock at this moment that I didn’t realize that the cutscene had concluded and I had control of Grace again. So my dumb ass just STOOD THERE as this monster lumbered up to Grace and took a big chomp into her shoulder and brought her down to the Danger status. That’s my bad. Thankfully I recovered enough sense to try and run away, and as I mentioned, the third person animation of Grace stumbling and voicing her pain really sold the stress of the situation. Having left the scary room and going down the hallway, I legitimately got turned around only for 2Lisa2Furious (what I am calling this monster) to catch up to Grace, and in a rather gruesome animation that pulls no punches, grab Grace, and bite her head clean off with blood spilling everywhere. GG.
At this point, Marianne who was sitting next to me asked me what happened, and I gave her a quick recap and how to get there to which she, said “haha, nah dawg” and proceeded to instead explore the Resident Evil menus and all the items in the safety of the well lit room while she encouraged me to die again.
Thankfully I still had some time left in the preview area and I decided to try again, the game reloaded to just outside the Scary Door, and this time I tried to throw the glass bottle I had at 2Lisa2Furious which only accomplished making her angry, and me getting somehow trapped in a corner behind a door and getting my head Ejecto Seato-d off my body cuh.
So I tried again, and then I realized “oh what if I run down the Horse Hallway!… Aaaand she’s coming out of the roof to cut me off…and I’m dead again.”
Oh! Let’s try,
running out of the room,
turning off the lighter,
crouching (you know I love crouching) in the dark,
throwing the glass bottle down the hallway,
realize 2Lisa2Furious is not fooled,
run into the original room with the light,
realize 2Lisa2Furious’s skin burns in the overhead pale white light and she retreats!
Slowly sneak back out,
make may way back through the Scary Door,
turn on the lighter,
find myself in a messy disheveled storage room,
find the screwdriver!
Then screen faded to black since I had reached the time limit…and a message appeared with something along the lines of:
“The horror is only beginning…thank you for playing!”
And that’s when I realized the shirt on my back was DAMP with sweat.
I did get this pin though!
Closing Thoughts
While the Resident Evil franchise has been experimenting with different aspects of horror in the last few mainline games, I think that the direction this game is headed has a nice balance of the things that worked originally in the series and combines them with some of the improvements and immersion of the latest games. REQ stays true to the more silly mechanics of the originals with it’s puzzles such as fetch quests for fuses, but combines it with the more suspenseful tone of games like RE7/8 and the RE 2/3 remakes that I will admit were significantly scarier. As long as Grace doesn’t go punch a boulder, this is an entry that will appeal to both old and newer Resident Evil fans.
Resident Evil Requiem Release Date : February 27, 2026
2Lisa/2Trevor
Can’t wait to play it!
Resident Evil Requiem Image Credits: Capcom
