Since the upcoming Resident Evil Requiem is expected to push the boundaries of visual fidelity in the horror genre quite far, the fact that it is coming to the Nintendo Switch 2 can be somewhat surprising. In a new Creator’s Voice video about the title, director Koshi Nakanishi has spoken about the Switch 2 port, its performance, and how even he was initially skeptical about bringing Resident Evil Requiem to the platform.
“The Nintendo Switch 2 system has improved graphical specs, so we wondered if Requiem could run on it – and it did, with ease,” he said. “When we, the development team, first saw it in our hands, we were skeptical too, so we had to do a triple take. We thought to ourselves, ‘Oh, is this really running on Nintendo Switch 2? It all worked so smoothly that we decided to just go ahead with the game as-is and make it for the system. With specs like these in handheld mode, it looks great.”
The skepticism shouldn’t come as a surprise, since the last time a brand-new Resident Evil game was released on a Nintendo console, Capcom had to make use of cloud streaming. Since the original Switch was quite underpowered when compared with PS4 and Xbox One, contemporary franchise entries like Resident Evil 7: Biohazard couldn’t run natively.
Along with the raw horsepower offered by Nintendo’s current-gen console, Nakanishi also praised some of its other aspects, like GameChat, which he called perfect for horror games, since “even players who think they can’t play the game alone can have fun together by just inviting friends to watch, so I feel like GameChat was made just for Resident Evil.”
In another part of the video, Nakanishi also spoke about the horror genre as a whole, and how he feels it is often misunderstood. He also talks about the kinds of emotions that horror games can evoke in a player, rather than it being a genre about relaxing. He noted that Resident Evil, rather than focusing on the fear, instead has an emphasis on “the feeling of relief that comes after the fear.”
“Horror games are often misunderstood, but I think many people assume games are usually played for the excitement, to make you feel good, or to relax, so why should you go out of your way to be scared or threatened by a game? In fact, horror games give you an overwhelming sense of exhilaration,” he said, before noting that “Horror is about extreme situations.”
“Human behaviour in extreme situations. This is where human nature comes out the most. One of the things that attracts players to horror games is the drama that takes place under extreme circumstances. The Resident Evil series is all about the reversal of events: the feeling of relief that comes after the fear.”
Resident Evil Requiem is coming to PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch 2 on February 27th. For more details, check out our review, where we gave it a score of 9 out of 10. PC players that have already pre-ordered it can also start the pre-load.
