Warning: This article contains extensive spoilers for Resident Evil Requiem, including boss encounters and ending sequences. It also describes scenes of graphic video game violence.
Capcom has never been shy about punishing careless players, but Resident Evil Requiem takes that tradition to a new extreme. The game, which follows veteran operative Leon Kennedy alongside FBI agent Grace Ashcroft, is stuffed with kill animations that range from the grimly inevitable to the genuinely ridiculous. According to a guide published by GameSpot, the breadth of ways the game can end your run is remarkable, and players who have not yet experienced them for themselves may want to brace for impact.
Most deaths follow a simple rule: if your character's health is critically low and an enemy lands a grab attack, you will see something far more elaborate than a standard collapse. Standard deaths, caused by ranged damage or ordinary hits, simply drop Leon or Grace to the floor. It is the grab-triggered animations that the game's designers have clearly invested their creative energy in.
Among regular enemies, the chainsaw-wielding infected, dubbed Chainsaw Charlies, offer some of the most visceral finishes available. Depending on the angle of the attack, Leon can be sliced from shoulder to torso or cut clean in half, with his upper body flung aside. One particularly creative variation involves a chainsaw becoming lodged in a zombie's stomach, prompting a lunge that ends predictably badly for Leon. The Singer zombies in the Care Center take a different approach entirely: they press their faces close to Grace's and scream until her eardrums rupture, with blood pouring from her nose and eyes.
The game's environmental deaths deserve their own category. In the Care Center Garage, a bulldozer driven by an infected can skewer Grace against a wall if the player is too slow to shoot the driver. Worse still is a section in the Care Center Basement where Grace must ride a conveyor belt while fending off the undead: one misstep sends her into an industrial meat grinder. Inside the collapsed Willis Tower, Leon faces both a falling elevator and a room where the floor consists entirely of fragile window panes. Shooting the wrong pane ends his run as surely as any boss.
Boss encounters account for the most elaborate deaths in the game. A creature known only as Chunk, which can squeeze through narrow corridors despite its bulk, will eat either character's head during a grab or flatten them before doing so during a lunge. The Girl, a darkness-dwelling pursuer who stalks Grace, also bites off her target's head when the light fails. The Blister Borne, another boss, adds its own decapitation to the list. By the time players reach Mr. X, the game introduces a ripping-in-half animation as the standard kill, with a secondary option involving a helicopter rotor in the Raccoon City Police Department.
Plant 43, an upgraded variant of a creature from the series' earliest entries, offers a more botanical demise: it swallows Leon whole, with the camera panning to show blood trickling from the plant's maw. The Commander, a close-quarters combat specialist, will snap Leon's neck during a failed quick-time event sequence. Each of these moments is designed to sting: the animations are long enough to feel like a rebuke.
The game's two endings each carry their own final death for Leon. In the so-called Destruction ending, an antagonist named Zeno, already empowered by the virus while Leon is weakened by it, overpowers him and delivers a headshot. In the Hope ending, the final boss Victor Gideon transforms into a massive creature during the second phase and, if the player fails the concluding quick-time sequence, crushes Leon in his hand before smashing the body into the steel floor.
There is, of course, a certain craft to designing deaths this varied and specific. Capcom's team has clearly thought carefully about which enemies warrant spectacle and which do not. The giant spider boss, the Titan Spinner, notably lacks a unique kill animation, a deliberate choice that makes it feel like a relative disappointment compared to the carnage surrounding it. Whether that is a creative decision or simply an unfinished detail is a question the game does not answer.
For players who want to avoid all of the above, Resident Evil Requiem does offer the option to keep health high and stay alert. For everyone else, the game is clearly prepared to make failure memorable. The full guides hub at GameSpot covers boss strategies and endings in further detail for those who want to minimise their encounters with the more creative end screens.