Resident Evil Requiem’s blood buckets are making me hungry

Throughout the game, and especially in the Rhodes Hill Care Center that you explore as Grace, you’ll encounter numerous pails of vibrant red viscera, spangled with disconcerting mystery lumps. As you make your way through the East Wing of the Care Center, you’ll eventually find yourself in the Blood Lab, where our snakeskin-clad villain Victor Gideon has been up to all sorts of disturbing hijinks. There, you’ll find the Blood Collector, which Grace can use to craft all sorts of handy items, like handgun ammo and injectors that prevent corpses from mutating. To do so, you’ll need to use all that fresh-squeezed infected juice you’ll find lying about the facility.

So yes, there’s a clear gameplay purpose for all these haphazard chum pails, but they make me laugh every time I come across them for a couple of reasons. First, this is a hospital. Granted, it’s a hospital with a fully-stocked bar and a roulette table, but it’s a medical facility all the same. Though things went pear-shaped at Rhodes Hill after Leon showed up, with the staff and patients becoming infected, that happens a very short time before you step into Grace’s shaky boots. Was leaving wastebasket-sized, open containers of human blood and organs all over the place part of the standard daily procedure around here? Shouldn’t these things have a lid of some kind? I would assume all of that infected blood lying around could present a contagion risk, or just generally be bad for staff morale and the overall vibe. But hey, I’m not a doctor. Maybe it’s fine.

Second, while I realize Resident Evil Requiem is not a game with culinary aspirations, these buckets look kinda-sorta yummy from certain angles. If you’ve ever stared down a steel pot full of a bubbling tomato-based seafood stew, like Italian cioppino, Vietnamese bun rieu, or French boulliabaise, you know what I’m talking about. For the shellfish-adverse, it’s probably revolting. There are all sorts of colors, shells, and angles you might not want anywhere near your mouth. But once you take the plunge, there are all sorts of goodies in there: mussels, crab, squid, garlic, herbs, wine — what’s not to like? You can craft all sorts of useful items on the fly in Resident Evil Requiem — shivs, molotov cocktails, and ammo. But why not a crusty baguette to enjoy alongside one of those hearty buckets of infected goodness? Don’t threaten me with a good time.