Resident Evil: Requiem Is the Real Deal

Capcom didn't stumble. Somehow, against all odds and the long, ignoble tradition of beloved franchises slowly eating themselves alive, Resident Evil: Requiem is genuinely good. Great, even. I've seen enough product launches, hype cycles, and day-one disasters to fill a graveyard, and yet here we are — a survival horror game that actually delivers on its promises. Mark it on your calendars.

A Franchise That Finally Remembered What It Was

Requiem — the ninth mainline entry, for those keeping score at home — launched February 27, 2026, on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC. It was directed by Koshi Nakanishi, the same man behind Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, which should tell you something about the tone. The game was originally conceived as an open-world online multiplayer experience — because of course it was, that's what every executive wants these days — but by 2021, cooler heads prevailed and it was retooled into a conventional single-player game. Thank whatever god you pray to.

The dual-protagonist structure pairs FBI analyst Grace Ashcroft — established in the game's narrative as the daughter of Resident Evil: Outbreak (2003) protagonist Alyssa Ashcroft — with the returning Leon S. Kennedy. Leon's last major appearance in the mainline series was Resident Evil 6 (2012), though the franchise's extensive spin-offs and tie-ins mean "major appearance" is doing some work there; he's been redesigned here to look appropriately older and has clearly not been having a great decade. Grace's sections are tense, resource-starved survival horror. Leon's sections are action-oriented and kinetic. Players can toggle between first- and third-person perspectives at any time. It shouldn't work this well. It does. ¹

Critics noticed. Based on 136 critic reviews, the game received widespread acclaim — praise directed specifically at its dark tone, atmosphere, and the balance between horror and action. Resident Evil Requiem Reviews — Metacritic

The Numbers Don't Lie (Even When Marketing Does)

Five million copies in five days. That's the global sell-through figure Capcom reported — covering all platforms, digital and physical combined — making Requiem the fastest-selling entry in the entire Resident Evil franchise at launch. The game subsequently surpassed six million sales within weeks of its February 27 release and topped the US February sales charts. ²

For context: these are figures Capcom reported publicly, and the company has not broken out regional or format splits beyond the global totals. Take that for what it's worth — in an era where "copies sold" can mean almost anything, the headline numbers are still hard to dismiss.

The Standard Edition runs $69.99, the Deluxe Edition $79.99 — the latter tacking on six cosmetic items that I'm sure someone out there cares deeply about. Pre-order customers received Grace's Apocalypse Costume. These are the rituals of modern game commerce, and I've long since made peace with them. Story DLC has already been announced, and Capcom is eyeing the franchise's 30th anniversary with the kind of confidence you only get when your game hasn't imploded on launch day.

The Tech Is Genuinely Impressive (Yes, I Said It)

Here's where things get interesting for the hardware crowd. Requiem is a showcase title in every sense of the word.

On PC, the game supports full path tracing on NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPUs — a lighting technique that simulates how light actually behaves in the physical world, rather than faking it. According to NVIDIA, path tracing "accurately simulates light throughout an entire scene by sampling a wide range of potential light paths a singular ray can follow, improving precision, quality, and realism." Resident Evil™ Requiem Available Now, Featuring Path Tracing

DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation is also supported for RTX 50 Series owners. Per NVIDIA's own documentation, the feature generates three additional frames per traditionally rendered frame. NVIDIA reports — based on their internal testing at 4K with all settings maxed, including path tracing and DLSS Ray Reconstruction enabled — that RTX 5090 owners are hitting over 280 frames per second. A number that means nothing to most people and everything to the ones it matters to.

Independent technical analysis broadly corroborates the performance claims, while adding important nuance. Testing by DSO Gaming found that path tracing at native 4K/max settings on an RTX 5090 dropped to 24–27 FPS without upscaling — enabling DLSS 4.5 Performance Mode brought that to a 47–53 FPS base, and Multi Frame Generation at 4X pushed the result to around 180 FPS in the tested scene. Real-world results will vary depending on hardware configuration and in-game location. ³

Path tracing is locked to NVIDIA GPUs and cannot be combined with AMD FSR 3.1.5, and each rendering mode carries its own visual artifacts — ghosting in path-traced rain effects, noise in ray tracing, SSR shimmer in standard rasterized mode. There is no perfect option, only the least offensive one for your particular tolerance.

On PS5 Pro, Requiem is the first title to implement Sony's updated PSSR (PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution) AI upscaling technology. PS5 and PS5 Pro lead architect Mark Cerny confirmed the update in a PlayStation Blog post on launch day: "We've been hard at work on a new version of PSSR, which takes a very different approach to not only the neural network but also the overall algorithm. We are happy to share that Resident Evil Requiem — shipping today — is the first title to use this more advanced PSSR, which is helping to keep both frame rate and image quality high." Cerny also noted the algorithm stems from Sony's Project Amethyst partnership with AMD. Capcom's own engineers highlighted the tech's ability to handle intricate details — individual strands of hair rendered as polygons, reacting to motion and light. It's the kind of detail that sounds like marketing copy until you actually see it. Resident Evil Requiem is the first game to use Sony's brand new PSSR upscaler

The Puzzle That Broke the Internet (Briefly)

No discussion of Requiem is complete without acknowledging the Final Puzzle — a late-game challenge so obtuse, so aggressively bizarre, that it inspired enough community confusion to spawn a dedicated subreddit. The game had been out for three days and players were still stumped.

Fair warning: puzzle spoilers follow.

The solution, cracked on March 2 by players Kyro and Rantsycancy — who acknowledged relying on data mining to decode the steps — involves waiting at a body bag drop-off pool for fifteen uninterrupted minutes, making your way to the Care Center's West Wing and flushing a toilet exactly eight times, finishing the game with a specific porcelain doll in your inventory, then starting a new save and returning to a braille puzzle box. A separate player, Gengar Collects, had posted a similar guide a day earlier on March 1 but was initially dismissed for not fully explaining his own solution — it later turned out he may have stumbled onto part of the answer while, apparently, leaving his game running during a bathroom break. The internet, predictably, lost its mind.

Worth noting: the solution was ultimately reverse-engineered through data mining rather than organic in-game discovery, which means the community essentially went around the puzzle rather than through it. Whether Capcom intended for players to ever find this legitimately is a question nobody has answered. Probably because nobody at Capcom wants to admit they designed it.

Is it good puzzle design? Absolutely not. Is it the kind of deranged, inexplicable secret that only Resident Evil could produce and that people will be talking about for years? Without question. Resident Evil Requiem's ungodly final puzzle has been solved

The Verdict Nobody Needed Me to Write

Resident Evil: Requiem is the franchise at its best — which is to say it's frightening, action-packed, technically audacious, and contains at least one puzzle that will make you question your life choices. It launched clean, sold fast, looks stunning, and gave the gaming community something to argue about for weeks. In 2026, that's about as good as it gets.

A few reviewers flagged the tonal whiplash between Grace's horror sections and Leon's action sequences as a genuine friction point — a fair criticism, even if the game ultimately earns the contrast. No experience this ambitious comes out perfectly balanced. Capcom got this one right, and the numbers back it up.