Capcom will have many opportunities to show off Resident Evil Requiem between now and its February 27, 2026 release date, but its first was kind of a bust. Behind the closed doors of Capcom's booth at Summer Game Fest, I watched a theater presentation of a hands-off Requiem demo that featured one puzzle, zero guns, and extremely dark hallways.
In what seemed like the first level of the game, we see Grace strapped to a gurney, suspended upside down while an IV collects her blood. In a cutscene, she escapes by breaking the glass bottle of blood and cutting through her restraints. The player takes control in first-person as she stands up (at the end of the demo, we learned Requiem also supports third-person).
What followed was surprisingly unremarkable: Grace slowly inched down the hallways of the Wrenwood Hotel, trying the lock on every door as the sounds of a monster crawling around the walls built tension. When it finally burst through the wall just like RE7's Jack Baker before it, its sickly pale skin and bulging eyes didn't make a huge impression—it was sloppy and nasty, but it couldn't match the aura of Lady Dimitrescu or Mr. X.
Grace ran, closing doors behind her and hiding in a dark corner until the coast was clear.
It was around the time Grace was finding a screwdriver to open a panel to replace a fuse to restore power to the area that I realized: in a typical RE game, Grace would have picked up a gun or at least a knife by now. Instead, she skulked around with only a lighter (purely for light) and a bottle (throwable to cause a distraction). Strange, but hey, it's an early level.
Grace escapes, but not before the beast takes a bite out of her shoulder. She restores her health with an injector—there better be green herbs in that medicine, or I'm expecting riots come February. And that was it for the demo: short and unrevealing.
All said, it was an uncharacteristically bland chunk of the game to show off, assuming Requiem isn't dropping combat entirely. I got the impression that Capcom was holding back in a big way—could it be that Grace Ashcroft isn't Requiem's sole protagonist and the rumors of Leon Kennedy's return are true? In that reality, it'd make more sense that Grace's sections are stealthy, Amnesia-adjacent chases with monsters she can't fight.
The crowd would certainly go wild if the Leon theory bears out, but I wouldn't get too attached to the idea and risk heartbreak. Maybe Grace Ashcroft is RE's new front of the box hero and Capcom's just saving Requiem's action for a later date.
