Imagine spending years crafting the perfect nightmare. You design monsters, build tension, and fine-tune jump scares. Eventually, you might hit a strange wall: you become immune to your own creations. That’s the unique challenge facing the developers behind the latest horror title, Resident Evil Requiem.
Koshi Nakanishi, the game’s director, shared this odd predicament in a recent IGN interview. “We don’t know anymore,” he admitted. “We’ve made so many of these games that we can’t tell if it’s scary until someone plays it.” This kind of professional desensitization can make designing fresh scares a tricky business.
Nakanishi is no stranger to fear-inducing game design. He previously directed Resident Evil 7 in 2017. That game plunged players into a horrifying encounter with the relentless Baker family. It was so intense that some players couldn’t even finish it. Others simply refused to play. The team knows how to scare people, but they sometimes have to remind themselves.
“We don’t know if something is scary,” Nakanishi repeated, describing their creative process. “So we’d say, ‘Let’s add this, let’s add that.’ At one point we thought, ‘What if [Grace] has a severe wound on her leg, or her leg is severed because that thing attacked her?’ Oh my god, that’s really, really scary! But we had to calm ourselves down a bit after that.” It seems even the creators need a break from their own gruesome ideas.
Resident Evil 2
Nakanishi feels very confident that Resident Evil Requiem brings a major upgrade in horror. He sees it as a true survival horror experience, building on the tension of Resident Evil 2, rather than following the more action-oriented style of Resident Evil 5. He made his design philosophy clear for future games, too. “I don’t want to do that with Resident Evil 9, where I just make the action better than Village and end up going back to doing what I don’t want to do.”
Gamers eager for a fresh dose of terror can mark their calendars. Resident Evil Requiem is set to launch on February 27, 2026. It will be available for PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC.