Let me open with this – Resident Evil Requiem will allow you to play in first and third person. For most games, this would be a neat feature; but for a new, mainline Resident Evil entry, it feels closer to a philosophical statement.

The early third-person classics in the series set the standard for survival horror – tense, knotty frighteners that combined action, resource management, and byzantine puzzling. The more recent first-person games have been more visceral affairs, hovering somewhere between a video nasty and gung-ho action cinema. And appropriately, Requiem aims to do both.

Placed in a pitch-black room at the heart of Summer Game Fest, I was shown exactly how in a 30-minute demo that proved one thing above all others – Resident Evil Requiem wants to scare you as much as it possibly can.

At the heart of all this is Requiem’s new main character, Grace Ashcroft. As we saw in the game’s reveal trailer, Grace is a technical analyst for the FBI sent to a ruined Raccoon City to investigate a mysterious disease outbreak – and unlike most other heroes in the series, she’s simply not equipped to deal with what she finds there. Grace has the energy of a classic horror Final Girl – she’s not a fighter, simply someone stuck in the absolute worst place, at the absolute worst time, and that colors everything about the game around her.

My demo begins with Grace strapped, upside-down, to a medical gurney, having her blood drained by someone unknown for reasons unknown. Getting herself unstrapped less than gracefully, she finds herself in an abandoned medical ward – the game offers no objective markers, no stated aim, but the goal is abundantly clear. Find a way out.

What followed was 30 minutes of pure tension I’ve rarely felt from a game demo. Requiem’s hyper-realistic looks – this is a next step for Capcom’s already-beautiful RE Engine – play with light and darkness throughout. I creep around the ward, searching everything I can for clues. A classic Resident Evil puzzle quickly reveals itself – a locked gate, a broken fuse box, an ornate door hiding secrets both mechanical and narrative.

It draws on well-established ideas from across the series, but places them in a new context – I’m absolutely dreading every new hallway, and finding out what’s behind every new door. It’s almost funny quite how far this section of the game pushes that familiar feeling of waiting for a jump scare to happen. Grace herself is a part of this – she reacts with audible fear to each new location, and gasps when she hears something walking around the hallways, unseen. It puts you in a state of near-constant tension. Where previous games broke that tension with ambushes, or small-scale fights, Requiem simply lets you stew in the fear.

Your choice to play in first or third person (and you can switch at any time) might alter how you view all this, but the results are the same. Capcom’s clearly put a huge amount of work into making neither choice feel like the “true” way to play. Animations have been tweaked for both perspectives to help it feel natural, never breaking the fearful spell it casts as you quietly pick your way through this truly ominous place.

And when that tension finally, finally breaks, things only get more unpleasant. After finding a lighter, I use it to creep down an inky black hallway to a nurse’s station, and get my first, full jump-out-your-skin moment – a diseased body tumbles out of the next door I open. Grace screams – and then something else appears to feast. We saw a glimpse of the Requiem demo’s main threat at the end of the reveal trailer, but I got a full look. It’s a monstrous, bug-eyed creature that might have once been one of the nurses working in this ward – so tall that it needs to stoop through doorways to get around.

And from here, the demo switches vibe. The closest analogue in the series is clearly Mr. X – a stalking threat that can’t be killed, only survived. You’ll need to use every location you’ve found to hide and confuse the creature, picking your way carefully around it to reach your next goal. But there are ideas being drawn from further afield, too. The ward’s looping, terrifyingly humdrum presentation calls to mind Hideo Kojima’s traumatizing P.T., and there’s a hint of Alien: Isolation in the way you’re never quite sure how much this creature knows. It sniffs the air while searching for you, smashes cover you might have used to hide before, and can yank itself into holes in the ceiling, leaving you terrified that it might appear somewhere else entirely as you explore.

There’s a sense of malevolent intelligence behind it – at one point, I flee into a side room, closing the door behind me, fully expecting the creature to smash through. Instead, it does something to the lights and disappears, leaving one of the ward’s few safe spaces suddenly as frightening as everywhere else. “Seriously?”, Grace says, summing up my feelings perfectly.

My demo ends as I finally find the fuse I need to get out – I manage to scare the creature by smashing a bottle against a wall (another personality trait the game seemingly lets you find out all on your own), and bolt up the hallway to the gate I need to open. It’s a moment of rare gaming triumph – or at least it would have been if the creature didn’t grab Grace, and drag her back into the darkness. What happens next is anyone’s guess.

Capcom won’t be drawn on how this section ties into the wider game. Is this a one-off segment in the vein of Resident Evil Village’s House Beneviento, or does it represent an overarching gameplay idea; that this is more about powerlessness, and finding ways to avoid danger rather than confront it? That’s a question we’ll have to answer later, but it’s quite the first impression. It might be combining ideas from the past and present of Resident Evil, all wrapped in that choice of perspective, but the outcome is something that feels like a new future for the series.

Resident Evil: Requiem comes to Xbox Series X|S on February 27, 2026.