Capcom's Resident Evil Requiem launched on 27 February 2026, and within days of release the survival horror franchise's ninth mainline entry had generated the kind of fervent online debate that only a long-running series with decades of lore can produce. At the centre of it all is a single terminal prompt buried in the final act: destroy or release a substance called Elpis. The choice is binary, the consequences are immediate, and one outcome is clearly better than the other.
The game itself represents a deliberate course correction for Capcom. After years in development, including a scrapped concept as an online open-world multiplayer title, the studio rebooted the project in 2021 and returned to a traditional single-player format. The result is a game that splits its runtime between two playable characters: Grace Ashcroft, an FBI intelligence analyst who is the daughter of Resident Evil Outbreak protagonist Alyssa Ashcroft, and veteran federal agent Leon S. Kennedy, absent from a mainline entry since 2012's Resident Evil 6. Grace's sections lean into first-person survival horror in the vein of Resident Evil 7, while Leon's are third-person and action-oriented, closer to the tone of Resident Evil 4. Players can switch perspectives at any point, a flexibility Capcom says offers both "tense, realistic gameplay" and "ideal" conditions for action enthusiasts depending on preference.
The setting is the ruins of Raccoon City, revisited 28 years after the events of Resident Evil 3: Nemesis. Grace arrives to investigate a missing police officer at an abandoned hotel; Leon is dispatched when the situation escalates. Their paths converge around the ARK facility, a bioweapons laboratory buried beneath the city, and the game's central mystery: what exactly is Elpis, and what did its creator, series villain Oswell Spencer, intend for it?
The answer, revealed in Spencer's archived testimony, reframes everything. Elpis is not a weapon. It is an anti-viral agent capable of curing all known variants of the T-Virus and reversing the mutations it causes. The name itself is the Greek word for hope. Spencer, it seems, left it as a final act of redemption. When Grace reaches the central terminal of the ARK facility and is forced by the antagonist Zeno (a Wesker clone) to input a password, players face the game's only consequential decision.
Choosing to destroy Elpis triggers what multiple gaming outlets, including PC Gamer and GamesRadar+, have called the game's bad ending. The ARK facility begins to self-destruct. Leon sacrifices himself to get Grace clear, and Zeno kills him as the structure collapses. Grace escapes but the victory is hollow: Leon is dead, a secondary character named Sherry Birkin likely succumbs to her own T-Virus infection, and the data on Elpis is lost. The credits roll without fanfare, and the game promptly offers to reload to the moment of the decision.
Releasing Elpis, by contrast, unlocks the canonical conclusion. Grace injects Leon with the cure, restoring him in time for a final boss encounter against a mutated Victor Gideon, who transforms into a variant of the series' iconic Nemesis parasite. After defeating Gideon, Leon and Grace are rescued by BSAA agents from Chris Redfield's unit. The epilogue confirms that Sherry Birkin can be saved, that a young character named Emily survives, and that Grace takes on a guardian role. Players also receive the "Hope and Requiem" trophy or achievement, and unlock Grace's Report, a narrative document that contextualises the campaign's events within the broader series timeline.
Importantly, Capcom has designed the system to reward curiosity without punishing experimentation. After viewing either ending, the game offers to return players to the moment of choice. Those who destroy Elpis first can then experience the full canonical conclusion without replaying the entire game. It is a tidy piece of player-friendly design that acknowledges completionism without making it compulsory.
The game launched simultaneously on PC via Steam, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch 2, the latter marking the first time a mainline Resident Evil title has launched day-and-date on a Nintendo platform. Capcom confirmed the multi-platform release in September 2025 after testing the game on Switch 2 hardware, initially sceptical the handheld could handle it. The franchise has accumulated more than 170 million cumulative unit sales since the original game in 1996, according to Capcom's investor relations figures. Early player sentiment, based on reviews and forum discussion, suggests Requiem is being received as one of the stronger recent entries in the series, with particular praise for the tension of Grace's sections and the nostalgic weight of returning to Raccoon City.
For those still working through the game, the message from the broader community is straightforward. Trust Spencer's late change of heart. Release Elpis. Leon has earned another chapter, and so has the franchise.