What strikes you first is how much thought went into the question nobody expected a AAA horror game to answer seriously: does it matter whether you see the monster through your own eyes, or from three steps behind your shoulder? With Resident Evil Requiem, Capcom has done something the series has never managed at launch before, offering players a genuine, fully considered choice between first- and third-person perspectives. The result is a game that rewards paying attention to how you play, not just what you play.
The series has bounced between perspectives for years. Resident Evil 7: Biohazard committed entirely to first-person. Resident Evil Village eventually added a third-person mode via a free post-launch update, but as GameSpot's coverage notes, that option always felt slightly grafted on, a generous addition rather than a designed one. Requiem is different. Both modes have been built from the ground up, with separate animations, altered cutscenes, and distinct mechanical considerations for each. The investment is obvious, and it shows.
By default, the game assigns its two playable characters to different perspectives: Grace plays in first-person, Leon in third. This is not an arbitrary decision. Grace is the more fragile of the pair, built around stealth and slow-paced survival horror. First-person suits her entirely. It grounds you in the space, makes the darkness feel closer, and turns small actions, like cracking a door open just enough to peer into a room, into something genuinely tense. When Grace pulls out a lighter to see what's ahead, you feel the inadequacy of that tiny flame in a way that third-person simply cannot replicate.
Leon, by contrast, is the series' long-established action hero, familiar to anyone who has spent time with Resident Evil 4 or its 2023 remake. His sections are faster, more combat-driven, and third-person fits that rhythm as naturally as it has since 2005. There is nothing broken about this pairing. It works because it was designed to work.
The more interesting conversation, though, is what happens when you flip the defaults. Playing Grace in third-person is perfectly functional. It calls to mind the Resident Evil 2 remake, which is itself widely regarded as one of the best entries in the franchise. The game holds up. Playing Leon in first-person is stranger, and more enjoyable for it. The centred gun scope, reminiscent of classic Doom rather than the over-the-shoulder aiming of RE7 or Village, looks slightly odd at first. But there is a weird charm to it, something that recalls the series' origins while sitting inside its most modern entry.
There is one legitimate frustration with both modes: the game does not always honour your chosen perspective. Melee prompts, finishing moves, and parry sequences frequently cut to third-person regardless of your settings. It is a minor complaint in the broader context of what Requiem achieves, but it is the one area where the ambition slightly outruns the execution. RE7 and Village committed fully to first-person and never broke that illusion. Requiem wants to be both things simultaneously, and occasionally that compromise is visible.
For players approaching Requiem for the first time, the default settings remain the clearest path to the experience Capcom intended. For returning players, swapping perspectives offers a fresh lens on familiar territory, a feature the series has always been adept at providing through difficulty settings and alternate modes. The ACCC might have opinions about value for money in gaming, but few would argue against a title that offers this much mechanical flexibility at no additional cost.
The broader question this game raises for the Australian games industry and its players is a useful one: how often does genuine design investment get substituted with post-launch patches and retrofitted options? Requiem is an example of what it looks like when a studio spends real money solving a problem properly rather than cheaply. Whether that investment becomes a template for future Resident Evil titles, or whether it remains a one-off experiment too expensive to repeat, is a question only Capcom's next sales figures will answer. For now, there is no wrong choice. There is just the one you make, and the one you try next time.