We’ve had the absolute pleasure of playing Resident Evil Requiem on the PS5 Pro, and from a visual standpoint, it’s a stunner.
You see it in the very first moment you have Grace walk along a busy street on the way to her objective. You see it in the first shot of Raccoon City, a gaping crater that was once a place full of activity and life. You see it in the close-ups of Leon and Grace, their expressions coming across so clearly thanks to excellent character models and facial animations.
Every frame of the game looks like it was pre-rendered in motion, lending the entire experience a level of photorealistic quality that goes beyond just looking good in an experience that comes together quite well to make your skin crawl and hair stand on end.
But before that, a quick disclaimer about the footage you’re currently seeing might be in order. There could be a bit of sharpening, some crushed blacks, and a slightly lower level of detail thanks to captured footage being compressed. But rest assured, that isn’t the case with the actual game on the PS5 Pro. Requiem scores well on several parameters like lighting, material realism, natural depth, and image stability, even in its most demanding moments.
A Sublime Lighting System
The game’s promotional materials all pointed to the excellent use of light and its crucial role in stealth sections involving Grace. But it’s more than just that. Every scenario in the game, from a busy street to a desolate corner of the Rhodes Hill Care Center are all brought to life in a way that catches the eye from the minute you load in.
There’s a frankly astounding level of detail on display, and the lighting does well to highlight it in dark spaces where your flashlight or lighter is your only source of illumination. Their beams move tangibly differently, lighting up your surroundings based on how those beams would reflect off surfaces in the real world.
A conversation between two characters with a flaming building as its backdrop has you seeing shadows that flicker with the flames, their warm glow contrasting with the harrowed expressions on the faces they light up. In darker spaces, the inky blacks that come at you almost feel suffocating, a facet of the experience that’s underlined whenever the Stalker is in play.
The light becomes all the more important when it’s in short supply, making a well-lit room feel so very safe thanks to the stark contrast it presents to the darkness you were navigating just moments ago. Light and shadows interact so well, with a believable spill of rays around corners, lamps, and candles casting dynamic shadows that move with their subjects, while your characters are reflected back at you on glass surfaces that you look at.
Raccoon City looks ridiculously detailed in its ruined state, and the lighting does so much of the mood work. With the advanced AO in play, the destruction reads as dense and tangible, but there’s also this intentionally dulled, lifeless tone over everything. Even the RPD feels sad now, like a place that’s already lost. It honestly makes me wonder what the game would feel like if the developer ever went full open-world with it.
The first-person camera is definitely our choice when it comes to admiring the game’s lighting, and it’s of such a cinematic quality that it’s genuinely hard to tell the difference between in-game moments and cutscenes. But lighting alone doesn’t make for great visuals.
Graphical Parameters That Stand Out
All the light in the world would not have helped sell the experience that Requiem is trying to present if the environments, people, and objects being lit up were not up to scratch. That’s clearly not the case in Requiem, and when you’re treated to a close-up on any character, you’re going to see why.
Individual hairs on Grace and Leon’s heads swing gently in the breeze, while beads of sweat glisten on Grace’s face and arms when she’s in a particularly bothersome situation, even as Leon’s temples remain blissfully dry, his calm demeanour being reflected in his appearance. At some point, a short swim in a vat of what suspiciously looks like blood continues to leave the character involved with a red hue on their hands as they navigate the rest of that level.
The facial animations could have you believing that there are real actors on your screen, and not animated models that have been prepared to make things look as real as they can get. Grace’s abject terror at the ordeal she’s being forced to endure shines through in almost every frame that focuses on her face, her fear being reflected in her eyes. Her concern for a new character is also quite evident, as is her anger at another point in the story. Every close-up shot or camera stare showcases emotion as well as expression, helping sell the game’s CG-like realism quite well.
Leon and Gideon are also highlights, each character’s personality being conveyed through their frowns, smirks, and a generally high quality of lip syncing that helps the voice acting match the gravitas of a grim situation. And there are a lot of those in the game thanks to a bevy of enemy designs that are absolutely horrific, as they should be.
You can see the pained expressions on the faces of zombies, a somber reminder of the people they used to be before their transformation. The Stalkers and other bigger threats are just grotesque, and the manner in which their bodies respond to your bullets or other weapons is incredibly detailed and well implemented. Chunks of flesh are ripped off their bodies in real-time, the trajectory of your bullets being reflected so well with each new shot.
Their faces contort in pain, every hit they take being conveyed back to you in excruciating detail, just as it is when you take some damage of your own. It all takes place so seamlessly that bringing up a pause menu can feel quite disconcerting in the heat of the moment, jerking you out of moments that are so engaging you forget the borders of your screen even exist.
Blood behaves so realistically, you might even find yourself diving out of the way of it in the event your character meets their death at the hands of an enemy. The death animations for both your characters and enemies are absolutely brutal, made all the more satisfying by the game’s incredible approach to its material realism.
A Tailored Approach to Visual Fidelity
It could have been easy to oversell the photorealism of it all, but Requiem cleverly avoids that trap, using its volumetrics and elements very well to present environments that feel as they should. Faraway shots of Rhodes Hill showcase a creeping fog that interacts so well with the objects around it that it looks very natural.
In another shot, Leon’s Porsche speeds down a busy street, its sleek paint reflecting the lights around it while the road looks ever so well-detailed, glistening with a slight sheen of rain on its surface. None of these details looks too overdone, but work so well to present an immersive experience that they stand out nonetheless.
It helps that the PS5 Pro is able to sustain a clear, sharp image with very few instances of jagged edges or shimmer that we could see during our time with the game. That’s as true for intense moments in the gameplay as it is for cutscenes, the console’s image upscaling capabilities doing a good job of making sure things stay as smooth as they can be.
It’s also probably good that there’s more headroom for ray tracing, and for streaming textures and sustaining a level of detail that lends Requiem its filmy quality. That’s especially true in the game’s second half, when all of its systems come together to present moments where the story fires on all cylinders.
There are views from familiar buildings, sweeping shots of locations that can have you smiling to yourself, a chase sequence that we’re still not fully recovered from, and level designs that are just outstanding with the way verticality is used to present specific moments.
You get reminded that you’re in a video game when you see an NPC walk slightly more stiffly than they would in real life, or when the occasional shimmer around a character’s hair or some volumetric noise pops up. A few texture streaming hiccups around elevators or during fast turns were also a way to remind ourselves that this was still a video game. But in one that’s as terrifying as Requiem, we’re going to say we were grateful for those reminders.
Cinematic Cohesion
Requiem’s near-cinematic level of quality comes not just from the effective use of several pillars of good CG design, but in the way they’ve all been lovingly made to work in tandem with each other, which lends the experience a layer of immersion that’s going to be the RE Engine’s best one yet.
That it’s able to blend its lighting, detail, and animations so well while also sustaining a stable image is a benchmark of what it’s capable of, made even better by the PS5 Pro’s ability to bring games such as this one to life so well.
We can’t wait for you to join us on what is a Resident Evil game that both looks and performs so well, it’s sure to bring a smile to both franchise veterans and newcomers alike.