Resident Evil has always asked me to accept some pretty silly things. You spend hours looking for keys and strange objects to open doors that could probably be kicked in. In Requiem, there’s a door in the hospital with a thin pane of glass, and I found myself thinking that a gun would probably solve this problem a lot faster than hunting for three cubes.
But I can live with that. Resident Evil’s puzzles are part of the game. The characters don’t stop to explain why they can’t smash the glass, and the story doesn’t ask me to believe that searching for cubes is the only sensible option. I understand why the puzzle is there. Without it, there might not be much of a game.
That’s why the moment in Raccoon City bothered me more. When Leon and Sherry come across zombies, they seem surprised that any are still alive. I can understand expecting the old outbreak to be over. Raccoon City was destroyed to contain it. But these aren’t zombies hidden deep underground. They’re moving around in buildings, on the upper levels, where somebody could presumably see them.
Surely, at some point in the years since the city was destroyed, someone would have looked. Satellite footage, drones, military observation, whatever. Maybe the government kept the public away and covered up what was happening. That’s believable enough. But Leon and Sherry aren’t just random people wandering into the ruins. They’re experienced professionals, and Sherry is helping Leon investigate a government secret. How are they going in without knowing what’s still there?
The difference is that the game acknowledges this bit of nonsense. Resident Evil doesn’t usually have Leon try to punch a window, fail, and then announce that he’ll have to spend the next ten hours looking for a key. If it did, the story would be asking me to believe the glass was unbreakable. Here, Leon and Sherry react as though the zombies’ survival is a surprise. That makes me wonder why nobody knew.
I’m not saying this ruins Requiem. It’s a small thing, and the game has plenty going for it. But it does make Leon and Sherry seem strangely unprepared. These are people who know what happened in Raccoon City. They should have had some idea what they were walking into.
Resident Evil gets away with ridiculous puzzles because it doesn’t pretend they’re sensible. Requiem’s zombies are fine. It’s the surprise that makes them hard to explain.
