The city, for anyone who arrived late
🏙️ Raccoon City
A Midwestern American city, and the place the entire series grew out of. In 1998 an engineered virus escaped into it, the outbreak overwhelmed everything, and the response was to erase the city rather than contain it.
☂️ Umbrella
The pharmaceutical corporation whose research caused it. Its name is on almost every catastrophe in this series, and its former scientists keep turning out to have kept working.
🕰️ And then thirty years
Requiem is set in October 2026, twenty-eight years after the destruction. Long enough that the survivors are middle-aged and the city is an abandoned site rather than a fresh wound — which is exactly why it is interesting again.
The two people you play
🔦 Grace Ashcroft
An FBI technical analyst. Introverted, and pointedly not a trained combat specialist — the series' usual protagonist is a soldier or a cop, and she is neither. That vulnerability is the design, and it is why her half defaults to first person.
🗡️ Leon S. Kennedy
A D.S.O. agent, and a Raccoon City survivor himself — he was a rookie policeman on his first day when it happened. Here he is dispatched to the Midwest to track incidents tied to a former Umbrella scientist named Victor Gideon. His half defaults to third person.
The premise, as the trailers give it
A string of deaths that should not be connected
Grace is investigating mysterious deaths across the United States. Four of the victims turn out to be former survivors of the Raccoon City outbreak — people who got out in 1998 and have been dying now.
A fifth body, in a specific place
She is sent to the abandoned Wrenwood Hotel, where the fifth was found.
Which is not a coincidence for her either
Grace's mother, the investigative journalist Alyssa Ashcroft, was murdered in that same hotel eight years earlier. Grace was there. That is the setup the game opens on, and it is as far as the marketing goes.
Past the premise
- Alyssa Ashcroft was herself a Raccoon City survivor before she was a journalist, which is what puts her on the same list as the other four victims.
- The anomalies at the Wrenwood Hotel were arranged by Victor Gideon, and they were arranged specifically to draw Grace there.
- Gideon is after Grace because he believes she is connected to Elpis, a mind-control bioweapon. He has been pursuing her since her teens; the night at the hotel was an attempt that killed her mother and failed to take her.
- Grace was orphaned and adopted before Alyssa raised her, and the man who arranged it was Umbrella's founder, Oswell E. Spencer — who regarded her as atonement for what he did to Raccoon City in 1998.
Why the spoiler marks are there
Resident Evil has always told its story through documents you find at the wrong moment, and Requiem's premise is deliberately front-loaded — the marketing gives you the hotel and the murdered mother on purpose. What is under the marks above is what the game earns over twelve hours, so it stays folded until you ask. The toggle at the corner of the screen controls it site-wide.
Still to verify
Cross-checked on 10 September 2026 against the Resident Evil Wiki's Requiem, Grace Ashcroft and Alyssa Ashcroft entries and Capcom's own material, which agree on the October 2026 setting, on the four Raccoon survivors among the victims, on the Wrenwood Hotel and Alyssa's death eight years earlier, and on Victor Gideon as a former Umbrella scientist. What is still unverified is the only thing reading cannot settle — nobody here has played it.