Right at the end of Resident Evil Requiem, you’re presented with a choice to seal the fates of Grace and Leon. There are two options, and we trust that you chose wisely, because the outcome of one is certainly much less desirable than the other.
If you’d like to know about the ending you didn’t choose, you’re in the right place. In the video above, you can see both endings play out, and in the text below you can read how it all goes down. So let’s dive in and explain both of Requiem’s conclusions.
The Good Ending
Grace and Leon’s adventure brings them to Raccoon City, the place where all this Resident Evil mess began. While we all know that the NEST secret facility was hiding under the city, Requiem reveals that another lab lies beneath the infamous orphanage: the ARK. There, in the system’s computer files, Grace discovers an unpublished interview with Ozwell E. Spencer – Umbrella’s mastermind – conducted by her mom, journalist Alyssa Ashcroft.
The video reveals that Spencer was eventually remorseful for all the disasters he caused with Umbrella’s viral and bioweapon projects. His push to be a more decent human is shown by his adoption of a baby girl, Grace. Yes, Grace is just a regular girl, and not some genetic key to a virus as villains Zeno and Victor Gideon have suggested throughout the game. And if you pay close attention to Spencer’s wise words, you can read between the lines to work out that Elpis – the mysterious macguffin at the heart of Requiem – is not in fact a weapon, but the vaccine for bioweapons. And so when Grace is given the opportunity to release or destroy Elpis, it’s clear which is the right way to go.
When Grace releases the antiviral, it initially seems like a great result for Zeno – a lightning-fast, sunglasses-wearing, slick haired villain who isn’t actually Wesker, despite all appearances. He believes Elpis is the key to ultimate control, and so swiftly injects it. Unlucky for him, the fast-acting serum quickly cures his existing infections, erasing his Wesker mojo and robbing him of the ability to dodge bullets.
To make things worse for Zeno, an armless Victor Gideon – Requiem’s lead villain and a former member of Umbrella – arrives on the scene and claims that Spencer’s plan for Elpis was genius, as a world without virus-based weapons would surely descend into anarchy. Unsurprisingly, he’s very onboard with the idea of uncontained chaos. Zeno, who reveals his true masters to be The Connections (the secret evil corporation from Resident Evil 7 and Village), is angered by all this, but his rage is temporary: he’s quickly decapitated by a rapidly mutating Gideon.
With a boss fight clearly on the way, Grace gets to work on healing Leon – who throughout the game has been suffering from stage three T-Virus infection – with the Elpis antiviral so our hero can take on Victor. Leon makes swift work of Gideon, despite him now having the ability to wield electricity and tear apart flesh with his newly-mutated arm, although in predictable Resident Evil fashion, killing a final boss once just isn’t enough. Gideon mutates into a hulking monstrosity, finally pulling back the curtain on what exactly our not-quite-human villain is: a Nemesis.
