As far as horror video games go, Capcom’s Resident Evil is by far the most successful. With Resident Evil Requiem on the way to celebrate the series’ 30th anniversary across PC, Xbox, PlayStation and an impressive Nintendo Switch 2 port, the horror franchise could be set to have its scariest entry yet.
While what we’ve seen of the upcoming ninth mainline game in the series looks positively terrifying, the developers behind the upcoming horror game have no idea if their games are actually scary any more as they’ve become too desensitised to their own form of horror.
Speaking to IGN at 2025’s Tokyo Game Show. director Koshi Nakanishi and producer Masato Kumazama explained that they only know if a new Resi game is truly scary once it hits the hands of players.
“We’ve made so many of these that we can’t tell anymore until someone else plays it,” Nakanishi told the outlet. “There was actually a bit of a worry internally before we showed the [Resident Evil: Requiem] 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 better, what we make every day.”
Nakanashi explained that this does lead to some interesting situations when designing parts of new Resident Evil games with the team trying to create scary segments while still not knowing whether they’re actually scary or not.
“We didn’t really implement it, so it wasn’t cut, but- we don’t know if something’s scary. 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,” they explained.
Nakanashi explains that most players can “Resident Evil titles on a scale of how much they’re like Resident Evil 2 or Resident Evil 4” with more action-focused titles leaning on the latter. However, there’s also an “inflation factor” which ended up with the extreme action found in Resident Evil 6.
“If we kept going in that direction there’s almost an inflation effect, where you have to keep adding more and more action to outdo the previous title, and by doing that you ultimately end up where Resident Evil 5 and 6 went, and although they’re still great games, the general consensus is that they pushed Resident Evil so far in the action direction that it was no longer horror,” they explained. “I didn’t want to have to do that with Resident Evil’s ninth title where I just tried to outdo the action in Village and ended up making something I didn’t want to make. Firmly swinging the scale toward the Resident Evil 2 style was our intention, and it’s almost an upgrade of that Resident 2 style.”
Resident Evil Requiem is currently set to be released on February 27, 2026.
