Resident Evil Requiem devs have no idea if it’s actually scary or not

Resident Evil Requiem devs aren’t sure if the new game will deliver the same spine-chilling scares that have defined the series for decades.

Returning to a first-person perspective, led by Resident Evil 7 director Koshi Nakanishi, Requiem promises larger environments, expanded survival mechanics, and a heavier focus on psychological dread.

But according to Nakanishi, after spending years immersed in horror design, the team sometimes struggles to know if what they’ve built is genuinely frightening.

Resident Evil Requiem devs can’t tell if it’s scary

“We’ve made so many of these that we can’t tell anymore until someone else plays it,” Nakanishi told IGN. “There was actually a bit of a worry internally before we showed the hands-off at SGF and the first hands-on at Gamescom, was this actually scary? Because we don’t even know anymore. This is our bread and butter, what we make every day.”

That uncertainty shapes ideas that get discussed during development. Nakanishi revealed that while brainstorming set pieces, the team finds itself questioning if concepts are too extreme or not effective enough.

“We didn’t really implement it, so it wasn’t cut, but we don’t know if something’s scary,” he explained. “So we say, ‘we’ll do this, we’ll do that’, we keep adding on stuff, and at one point we were like, ‘what if [Grace] gets a big gash in her leg, or her leg gets cut off, because that thing attacks her, and oh my god it’s so scary,’ but we talked ourselves down a little bit.”

First revealed during Summer Game Fest 2024, Resident Evil Requiem is aiming to merge the claustrophobic tension of Resident Evil 7 with the broader scale of Village.

Hands-on previews from Gamescom have already described it as combining oppressive atmosphere with high-pressure survival encounters, with players caught between tight corridors and expansive, dangerous areas.

Whether Requiem manages to deliver the same shocks and fear that defined earlier entries will only become clear when fans get to play it for themselves in 2025. For now, even its own developers are waiting to find out if they’ve made a game that’s as terrifying as it is ambitious.