Grace Ashcroft wasn’t in Raccoon City when the outbreak happened. She never saw the zombies or the missile strike that erased an entire American city from the map. She wasn’t even born yet but the ghost of Raccoon City has shaped her entire life. It’s the reason her mother was murdered in a condemned Midwest hotel. And now eight years after that murder happened, Grace has been sent back to the same building to investigate a new string of deaths connected to a greater conspiracy.
That’s the premise of Resident Evil Requiem, the ninth game in the franchise. It will be released on February 27, 2026 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC (Steam and Epic Games Store).
It promises to be a blend of past Resident Evil games as players switch between Grace and returning fan-favorite Leon Kennedy. Grace’s sections are the nerve-wracking survival horror of the original games, while Leon’s story has an action-driven bent that later games became famous for. But to feel the weight of any of that, you need to understand what Raccoon City was. And that means starting, as everything in this franchise does, with Umbrella.
The Company That Owned a City
On the surface, Umbrella Corporation was a pharmaceutical giant. Beloved, civic-minded. The kind of company that got its logo on buildings and its executives into the mayor’s office.
Raccoon City, a mid-sized Midwestern American town, was functionally Umbrella’s company town. The mayor and the police chief answered to them. Entire civic institutions were shaped by Umbrella’s money and influence. It was a web of complicity so deep that no one inside it had any reason to pull on the threads.
Which is why nobody stopped them from building bioweapons underneath the city.
The corporate ownership of a place and its people is the fuel that drives everything in the RE franchise. Umbrella wasn’t some external threat that descended on Raccoon City. It was Raccoon City, woven into its foundations.
In September 1998, the T-Virus leaked and spread through the population. Everything fell apart. The goal wasn’t to actually save the city but to contain Umbrella’s secrets. The infection spread until the streets filled with the dead and everyone still alive was trying not to join them.
That’s when Leon Kennedy showed up for his first day of work.
The Rookie
In Resident Evil 2, Leon S. Kennedy was twenty-one years old and a rookie cop arriving at the Raccoon City Police Department for his very first shift. He survived, barely, clawing through the RCPD building, the sewers, and Umbrella’s underground laboratory. Alongside him was Claire Redfield, a civilian searching for her brother Chris, and a young girl named Sherry Birkin. Sherry’s father had injected himself with his own version of the virus transformed into a monster.
In the midst of all the chaos, Leon fell hard for a mysterious spy named Ada Wong. She seemingly died saving him, though Resident Evil 4 confirmed she survived. Ada’s real motives were never made clear and Leon carried the ambiguity of her actions for the rest of the series.
Burn It All Down
By early October 1998, the T-Virus had spread so thoroughly that military intervention was deemed impossible. The infected outnumbered the living and there was fear the virus would spread across the nation or even the entire globe. To prevent a pandemic, the U.S. government ordered a missile strike on the city.
Sounds extreme but the government wanted to destroy any evidence linking Umbrella to the T-Virus. Umbrella’s facilities, the documents inside the RCPD and the underground labs, the witnesses who knew what had happened. Civilians were trapped inside the city instead of evacuated. Military roadblocks turned survivors away at gunpoint. Taking it all down in a missile strike was convenient for a lot of powerful people.
A small number of residents were able to escape Raccoon City, some of them never escaped the nightmare. Leon was practically conscripted into working for the U.S. government. By the time of Resident Evil 4, he’s a hardened DSO (Division of Security Operations) agent working directly for the U.S. President. He’s competent, sardonic with a one-liner for almost every situation. But underneath all of that is a man who doesn’t trust the institutions he serves. And why should he when he knows the people in charge will choose to save themselves over doing the right thing? And he has never gone back to Raccoon City since the night he escaped it.
Until now.
The Reporter Who Wouldn’t Let It Go
While Leon was being molded into the perfect operative, another Raccoon City survivor was doing something far more dangerous: telling the truth.
Alyssa Ashcroft was an investigative journalist at The Raccoon Press. She wasn’t a soldier or a trained agent. She was a civilian who survived the outbreak through desperation. She fought her way out of hotels, hospitals and university buildings as the city died around her.
Unlike many survivors who came out of Raccoon City who tried to move on, Alyssa came out swinging. She kept digging into Umbrella’s history. She used her platform to share what happened to Raccoon City when the government wanted it buried. She was the kind of journalist powerful people hate: the kind who never stops pursuing a story until it’s told.
Alyssa gave birth to Grace sometime after escaping the city. And she kept working right up until 2018. Someone in a hood murdered her in the Wren wood Hotel, while she was there on a lead.
And Grace watched it happen.
Think about what that does to a child. Your mother survives something horrific, spends her whole life trying to drag the truth into the open, and is killed for it in front of you. The logical response is to build your entire life around finding out why. Grace joined the FBI and became an intelligence analyst, someone who traces cause and effect. Her mother spent her life trying to expose a buried truth. Grace built a career out of uncovering buried truths. One generation’s obsession becomes the next generation’s vocation.
A Ghost Town That Never Truly Died
Nearly every game in the RE franchise is about surviving a disaster that should have been prevented. Resident Evil Requiem is about dealing with the aftermath decades later, regardless of whether you experienced it firsthand.
Grace’s grief is inherited. Her enemy is partially abstract. She’s trying to finish her mother’s work and make sense of a tragedy that happened before she was even born. To make matters complicated, former Umbrella scientist Victor Gideon, Leon’s next lead in his investigation, claims that Grace holds the key to unlocking some classified project.
The weight of inheriting unresolved trauma doesn’t stop at one generation. It keeps creating consequences for everyone who comes after. Raccoon City was destroyed but it isn’t truly gone. Leon Kennedy knows this better than anyone alive. He’s been living proof of it for three decades.
Now Grace Ashcroft is walking into the same fire. And whatever she finds at the Wrenwood Hotel is going to be the franchise reckoning with the wound that’s been bleeding out for almost thirty years.
