Today at Summer Game Fest, Capcom brought a surprise gift for everyone: An announcement of a new Resident Evil, featuring a hell of a lot of unsettling hallways and what seems like the aftermath of a nuclear strike (you'll never guess where). You know, normal Resident Evil stuff.
Resident Evil Requiem looks fascinatingly confusing and as upsetting as you'd want it to be, and it's launching in less than a year on February 27, 2026. But the reveal isn't all good news: Breaking the hearts of roughly half the internet, there's no giant vampire lady anywhere in the trailer.
Ah, well. They can't all be Resident Evil Village.
Rumors had been circulating about a possible RE9 appearance at the showcase in the run-up to the event—rumors that Capcom itself even attempted to misdirect right up until the last minute of the show.
Earlier in the program, after an introduction from Lady Dimitrescu actress Maggie Robertson, Resident Evil executive producer Jun Takeuchi briefly appeared in a brief clip to thank the audience for supporting Resident Evil as it approached its 30th anniversary in March 2026. With a very brief statement, he seemed to dash any hopes that RE9 would be in tonight's show.
"Now, about the latest Resident Evil game you've all been waiting for, bear with us a little longer," Takeuchi said. "Just a blink of an eye more, and it'll be ready."
Takeuchi is, evidently, a bit of a stinker.
Capcom's clever ploy when Summer Game Fest founder and host Geoff Keighley introduced the final game reveal of the show, which slowly revealed itself as—surprise—Resident Evil Requiem.
The trailer, embedded above, has an intense energy from the start, as a man marches through an FBI field office to request input from one Grace Ashcroft, a flustered young FBI technical analyst, on a case report about an incident at a "Wremwood Hotel"—evidently the place where Grace's mother was murdered.
"Alyssa died eight years ago," the man, seemingly Ashcroft's director, says. At this point, with the power of frantic Googling, I deduced that Grace is the daughter of Alyssa Ashcroft, one of the player characters from Resident Evil Outbreak and Resident Evil Outbreak: File 2. Things seemingly did not end up well for Alyssa.
Seeing the report triggers what at first seems like flashbacks for Grace, as the trailer starts showing flashes of ruined, rusted hallways, abandoned buildings, hooded figures, and medical procedures. But then those flashbacks become something else, as Grace suddenly awakens, drenched in sweat, hanging upside down in a suspended hospital gurney with a bloody bandage on her chest.
And then things get stranger!
We're shown glimpses of walls coated in wanted posters, cryptic statements from a man sitting in a ruined room about "searching for a special one, a Chosen one," and—to cap everything off—an aerial shot of a cityscape that's been hollowed out by the crater from a massive explosion. If you can't guess which city we're working with here, you get an answer pretty quick.
The camera then drops to the city's streets, working its way between rubble and abandoned vehicles to show us the ruined gates of the Raccoon City Police Department. And then, to cap things off, we get a few shots of people who have been, are currently being, or are about to be brutalized by murderers and mutated creatures. Again, normal Resident Evil stuff.
If, like me, you aren't even sure where to begin with piecing this stuff together, we don't have all that long to wait. Resident Evil Requiem launches on February 27, 2026.
