Resident Evil Requiem Director Believes in Pacing the Horror Out so Players Don’t Get Exhausted

While Capcom has spoken quite a bit about how scary Resident Evil Requiem will be, the company has also revealed that it wants to make the upcoming horror title into a “complete rollercoaster ride”. In an interview with GamesRadar which you can check out below, game director Koshi Nakanishi spoke about how pacing out the scary parts of a horror game is important, and how games can’t just go 100 percent scary all the time, since that would be exhausting for players.

In this interview, Nakanishi brought up the differences of approach Capcom has with different Resident Evil titles. He brought up how the two most recent releases, Resident Evil Village and Resident Evil 4 remake were both more action-oriented titles while still maintaining some horror elements. Resident Evil Requiem is slated to be quite different from those two games.

“I think the two recent titles, Resident Evil 4 remake and Village, are more on the action side of the series in terms of the mixture of elements that they have,” said Nakanishi. “Resident Evil Requiem is something different. If I had to compare it to past titles, it’s more along the lines of Resident Evil 7 or the Resident Evil 2 remake. You could call it old school Resident Evil, you know, with exploration and backtracking and that kind of thing.”

“It does, of course, feature all the classic core pillars of Resident Evil features that everyone knows and loves, such as combat, exploration, puzzle solving, resource management of limited number of items, and we’ve given it our own spin this time for Resident Evil Requiem‘s game atmosphere.”

As for pacing out the horror sequences for Resident Evil Requiem, Nakanishi brought up how Resident Evil 7 and 2 remake both had a focus on horror without being too overbearing about it. He noted that players will feel too exhausted from playing a horror game where the scariness is being constantly escalated and there are no moments of release or catharsis for the player.

“Speaking then to Resident Evil 7 and 2, I think they reflect a typical game design that we have for this series, where you can’t keep the horror tension to the max through the whole game, because it’s quite exhausting,” he said. “So, you need to have this dynamic pacing curve where you’ll have a a very tense, horrific sequence, and then we give you a bit of a release or a catharsis from that and let you come down from that with more slightly peaceful exploration or some exciting combat, and then we gradually bring you back up the horror part of the curve.”

“Again, that’s the standard practice for Resident Evil. The difference this time is there’s a new system that I can’t quite get into yet, but if you think of the difference between the tension and the release being a certain size of wavelength, as it were, of that curve, I want to make the distance between those aspects bigger than ever before in the series, and it just becomes a complete roller coaster ride between the different aspects of the series. I’m very excited for people to eventually understand what I mean by that.”

Resident Evil Requiem is being developed for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S, and is set for release on February 27, 2026.

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