This article includes mild spoilers for the Rhodes Hill Chronic Care Center section of Resident Evil Requiem.
With Resident Evil turning 30 this year, it’s no surprise that Requiem leans into nostalgia. Leon S. Kennedy is back in a starring role, and the game’s trailers feature ominous shots of a crumbling Raccoon City police station – the labyrinthine haunted house that our floppy-haired hero had to fight through back in 1998. But while this latest edition of Resident Evil features its fair share of direct nods to the past, it’s Requiem’s new ideas that actually feel the most nostalgic.
The story’s early sections, in which you play fresh-faced protagonist Grace Ashcroft, are where Requiem most successfully evokes the earliest days of Resident Evil. Despite using the series’ modern first-person perspective by default, it’s classic ‘90s survival horror in the truest sense, right down to the ink ribbons, should you wish. The building that Grace explores, the brand new Rhodes Hill Chronic Care Center, is a next-generation echo of Resident Evil 2’s Raccoon City Police Department, complete with a puzzle-locked exit and deadly stalker prowling the halls. As much as it relies on the triumphs of the past, though, this RPD tribute demonstrates the timeless qualities of Resident Evil, and how the old hits can be made to feel like modern breakthroughs.
Within just a few steps, it’s clear that Rhodes Hill takes all of its foundational cues from the RPD. The first locked door you encounter yields only to an ornate key. Around the corner, a metal shutter prevents access to the wider facility, the nearby empty fusebox signalling that you’ll need to find a replacement component to progress. Beyond awaits a reception desk flanked by sweeping stairs, the very model of Raccoon City’s extravagant main precinct. And, like Resident Evil 2’s classic location, Rhodes Hill is split into two halves, the west and east wings, through which you need to scour eerie chambers – many of which must first be unlocked using a steadily mounting collection of keycards – in search of a means of escape.
Requiem, if it’s not clear by now, is less reverential to Resident Evil 2, more indebted to it. That’s thankfully not too much of a problem when developer Capcom owns the original bank of ideas, but it does walk the knife-edge between remake and reimagining just a little too dangerously at times. For instance, the center’s final exit is unlocked using a trio of quartz cubes, each dispensed by ornate machines upon solving a three-symbol puzzle. Yes, it’s the RPD medallion puzzle in an ill-fitting mask.
And yet this approach never feels like creative bankruptcy, nor does it feel like cynical nostalgia. That’s partly due to Capcom’s original survival horror formula having endured the test of time – Resident Evil 2’s fundamentals felt as fresh in the 2019 remake as they did two decades prior – but mostly because Rhodes Hill is arguably the strongest version of this environment format that the series has offered up since we visited the RPD. More expansive than both the Baker Estate and Castle Dimitrescu, and possessing a myriad of interesting loop routes and shortcuts, navigating its corridors is a fully engaging experience, regardless of whether you recognise the rough outline of Raccoon City’s police station or not.
