Sitting down at the NVIDIA event just before the start of Gamescom, I didn’t quite know what to expect from Resident Evil Requiem. Capcom’s legacy with this franchise is intimidating enough, but the moment the demo booted up, it was obvious this wasn’t just another slice of survival horror. It was something leaner, sharper, and more unsettling than I had braced for.
The demo began with my character, FBI agent Grace Ashcroft, waking up in a pristine white hospital room. It should have felt safe, but the second I opened my eyes I realized something was deeply wrong. The room was too quiet, too sterile, with a clinical brightness that flickered in and out as if the building itself was on life support. There’s a strange kind of terror in waking up disoriented, stripped of control, and that’s exactly where Requiem wanted me, it also didn’t help that I was hanging upside down. Talking about a cold open!
From there, the corridors stretched out like endless arteries, glowing in pale light one second and drowning in shadow the next. The atmosphere was immaculate. Every corner carried dread, every door felt like it was hiding a corpse. And sometimes it was. At one point, opening a door led to a body collapsing onto the floor right at my feet. I actually flinched, because in first person, it was almost too much. The demo allows you to switch seamlessly between first and third person, and while the third-person camera gives you that classic Resident Evil overview, first person dials everything up to eleven. Suddenly you’re not controlling a character, you are her. And when the scares come, they’re aimed directly at you.
That was the moment I realized how different the experience could be depending on your perspective. Third person let me navigate with a degree of caution, but in first person every flicker of light, every shadow, every distant noise pulled me deeper into the horror. A rattling vent wasn’t just background detail, it was a whisper in my ear.
And then came the monster. Not just a lumbering zombie or some grotesque experiment, this was a hulking nightmare that filled the space with raw, predatory menace. The demo didn’t give me much time to admire it; it immediately started hunting me down, forcing me to sneak through dark passages and hide in half-lit corners while I frantically searched for fuses and keys. That sense of being stalked, of knowing something is always just one step behind you, defined the experience. Even in this short vertical slice, it felt relentless.
And the visuals? Honestly breathtaking. Running on cutting-edge NVIDIA hardware with ray tracing and DLSS 4 enabled, Resident Evil Requiem looked almost uncomfortably real. Reflections rippled across sterile tiles, fluorescent lights buzzed overhead with eerie precision, and shadows stretched like they were alive. It wasn’t just a showcase of technical brilliance, it was a showcase of how visual fidelity can amplify fear. When a game looks this convincing, you don’t just play it, you believe it.
What surprised me most was how much Requiem managed to terrify me in such a short demo. There weren’t grand set-pieces, no boss fights, no explosive crescendos. Just me, a disoriented agent in a broken hospital, sneaking through half-lit corridors while something monstrous hunted me. It was pure survival horror, distilled down to atmosphere, tension, and dread. The restraint made it even scarier, because if this was just the opening, what’s still waiting deeper in the game?
