Resident Evil Requiem raises a lot of questions about the existence of its protagonist, Grace Ashcroft. Is she a clone created to store the memories of a dangerous eugenicist? Or is she just a regular person? The game never fully commits to an answer and the more you dig for answers, the messier it gets.
Who Is Grace Ashcroft?
Grace is the adoptive daughter of Alyssa Ashcroft, a journalist and survivor of the Resident Evil Outbreak. By the time Requiem begins, Alyssa was killed at the Wrenwood Hotel eight years before the game’s events. Grace is now an FBI analyst, and she gets pulled into an investigation into the mysterious deaths of the survivors of the 1998 outbreak in Raccoon City, including one body located at the same hotel where Grace’s mother died.
Her connection to Oswell E. Spencer is what makes things complicated. The Umbrella founder acted as Grace’s adoptive father when she was a baby and kept records of her genetic profile. Spencer is a man who always has a reason for everything he does. So it’s strange for him to be so invested in an ordinary child.
Years before the events of Requiem, Alyssa interviewed Spencer, which offers an explanation. At some point, Spencer started to regret how the devastation his experiments into bioweapons brought to Raccoon City. He then had his butler bring Grace into the room. He believed that she was his blind hope and key to atoning for everything he did.
It’s why he accepted Alyssa’s request for an interview so he could ensure Grace would be raised by someone who would keep her safe. Initially, Alyssa was alarmed when she saw Spencer hold baby Grace and assumed she was yet another one of his test subjects in his quest to create an advanced race of humans. But Spencer reassured Alyssa that Grace was “perfectly normal”. When Spencer died in 2006, his will officially declared Alyssa to be Grace’s legal guardian.
It’s a sweet story until you remember that Spencer was a manipulative, psychopathic chessmaster who craved godhood and being in control. How can we be sure he was telling Alyssa the truth about Grace being a normal girl?
The Clones: Emily, Chloe, and The Girl
There are two different cloning projects featured in Requiem. The first project is the Series 70 of genetically-engineered clones. They were a part of Spencer’s research project to achieve immortality through experimental techniques including mind transfer and a new virus. They also look very similar to Grace as the clones are all female with wavy platinum blonde hair and blue eyes.
An earlier batch of these clones called Series 60 were born and raised in the Raccoon City Orphanage during the 1980s. Because of the experiments they were subjected to, nearly all of the clones turned into homicidal mutants except for a girl named Chloe. Unfortunately, Chloe was captured by ARK research staff and euthanized after tests deemed she was showing the same symptoms as the other clones.
The second round of cloning experiments was done by crime syndicate The Connections. Former Umbrella researcher Victor Gideon and his employer Zeno got their hands on Spencer’s incomplete notes on his experiments and jumped to several wrong conclusions.
Victor and Zeno assumed that Spencer succeeded in transferring his memories before he died and created a new virus called Elpis. After they learned about the clones, they both thought that Grace was the successful one with Spencer’s memories but they couldn’t find her after she was adopted by Alyssa. So they resumed Spencer’s experiment and created two new clones Emily (who Grace adopts at the end of the game) and Marie (later known as The Girl after she became a mutant) in an attempt to recreate Grace.
They were proven wrong when Elpis turned out to be an anti-viral drug that neutralizes the mutations caused by virus-based weapons. According to Victor, Grace wasn’t a clone or the key to unlocking Elpis. He was also a blind fanboy of Spencer who was trying to rationalize why his master would create a cure that would destroy his life’s work.
You can see how convoluted the plot regarding Grace’s origins is.
Why is Grace so Special to Spencer?
The problem with taking Spencer at his word is that he’s never been trustworthy. Throughout the Resident Evil series, he betrayed his researchers, exploited children, and treated human lives as disposable in his pursuit of godhood.
When Spencer insisted to Alyssa that Grace was “normal,” the game never explains why a man like Spencer would devote so much care and attention to an ordinary orphan.
All we know about Grace is that she doesn’t seem to be one of Spencer’s clones, she doesn’t have his memories, and she didn’t know the password for Elpis. Yet Spencer arranged for her to be adopted by a survivor of the Raccoon City Outbreak. Not just any survivor, but the one who was key in exposing the role his company Umbrella played in the outbreak. He also made sure that anyone looking for Elpis would eventually link Grace to the project while trusting that she’d figure out the password and insist his intentions are benevolent.
It’s possible that Spencer really did see Grace as a chance to make amends for the damage he caused. But at the same time, Requiem has dropped hints suggesting Spencer’s motives were fueled by the need to get revenge against his adversaries. Either way, the game leaves one question unanswered: why did Oswell E. Spencer care so much about Grace in the first place?
