The long-running Resident Evil series contains multitudes. At times it’s been about quiet menace, carefully weighing when to use each of the handful of bullets in your pocket as you try to explore and solve puzzles while avoiding terrifying and often unkillable monsters. At other times it’s been about kicking ass, tearing through hordes of zombies with grenades and shotguns. Resident Evil Requiem, the ninth mainline entry, dares to ask: why not both?

Requiem pulls off this feat of being two games in one with dual protagonists: series newcomer FBI analyst Grace Ashcroft for the classic survival horror and recurring lead and one-man army Leon Kennedy for the action. I recently played a demo that gave me a taste of both — three hours from the beginning of the game, with a lengthy Grace section bookended by bursts of Leon-fueled frenzy.

By default, you play in a first-person perspective with Grace and third-person with Leon. This nicely reflects the different levels of situational awareness between a timid desk analyst and a battle-hardened field operative, and helps Grace’s sections feel appropriately scarier, but you are free to toggle the perspective for either character at any time from the menu, which is a nice accessibility touch (and, again, a way for Resident Evil’s developers to play with the series’ history of switching between the two).

Both characters show up in Raccoon City’s creepy old hospital on their respective investigations and briefly meet before being separated in different parts of the building to continue alone.

Grace Under Pressure

Suffice it to say: Grace Ashcroft is having a really bad time.

Amid all the horrors on show, the thing that stood out to me the most about my time as Grace was her ragged breathing. More a proxy for the player than a power fantasy, Grace is terrified to be in the hospital, and not qualified for this. Even in her default first-person, Grace’s timid character is present at all times through her panicked breathing and muttering.

In classic Resident Evil fashion, my time with Grace was spent searching through different wings of the hospital to solve puzzles and collect sun, moon, and star keys in order to unlock the main door out. Healing herbs, bullets, and limited-use melee weapons (as well as inventory slots) were all scarce, so I had to be mindful of when I used them, lest I end up in a bind with no options. She eventually unlocked crafting, allowing me to be even more strategic with my finite resources.

The zombies shambling the halls weren’t fully mindless, with their locations and actions showing that they still retained some imprint of their former lives, performing a hollow pantomime of their duties as doctors, nurses, janitors, etc. Some of them seemed sensitive to light, creating an opportunity for me to turn on a nearby light switch to draw one out of a narrow hallway he’d been blocking to turn it off, allowing me to sneak by.

There was also a hulking chef lumbering through the kitchen and surrounding hallways, looking for meat. At worst, bullets seemed to just annoy him, so the only real thing to do was stay out of his way. Unlike previous games with unkillable threats like Mr. X or Nemesis being more omnipresent throughout the game, Requiem seems to have a variety of more localized horrors. I first encountered — and had to sneak past — the chef in his own kitchen, and once I’d advanced further and opened a nearby shortcut, he was roaming a wider radius, but I never found him outside the general vicinity of where he started.

My colleague Joe described a different, nurse-like monster in Summer Game Fest demo of another section that I never saw, and then across the lobby in the medical wing I encountered yet another unkillable threat: a monstrously fat zombie with the proportions of a giant baby that jump-scared me by obliterating a door frame right next to me as I picked up a key item before crawling after me, smashing through the building around it and cussing up a storm about how hungry it is. It fully took up whatever hallway it was in, forcing me to reroute around it as I continued to navigate that wing.

In my time with Grace, the point was made very clear: approach all of this with caution, because brains will trump your limited brawn. The instances when I tried to brute force my way through a problem in this section — just shooting or shoving my way past everyone — were when my efforts were most frustrated. It rewarded observation and punished impatience.

Leon, the Professional

Leon, on the other hand, is here to chew bubble gum and kick ass, etc.

Resident Evil’s resident himbo is back, and where Grace spends her time in frightened lurking, he’s all roundhouse kicks and quips. “I think I want a second opinion,” he says dryly after slaughtering a room full of zombie medical staff that swarm him at the start of my session. As if to emphasize the over-the-top tone, the doctor had a chainsaw for some reason, which I naturally took and turned on them.

Leon’s sections feature way more enemies, because he’s way more capable of handling them. In addition to more plentiful guns, bullets and powerful kicks, Leon has a hatchet that, unlike Grace’s breakable knives, only dulls with use, and he can resharpen it at any time. When exploring areas that I’d already been through as Grace, I could use that hatchet to pry open cabinets, which typically seemed to be stuffed with ammo.

Beyond just reframing previous areas by returning as Leon, what’s unkillable by Grace isn’t necessarily beyond Leon’s capabilities. “Sorry, but I’m not on the menu,” he smugly told one previously impervious hungry monster, after blasting it to death with a shotgun. It’s a common trope to encounter a boss earlier on in a game and be unable to defeat them, but here it’s nicely used to contrast the characters’ capabilities, giving a sense of cathartic revenge to Leon bullying something that had seemed so impossibly dangerous to Grace.

Leon’s sections were charmingly big, loud, and dumb, and a relieving change of pace from my tense exploration as Grace. The balance between two distinct tones and modes of play worked well in the limited context of the demo, each enhancing the other by contrast, and I’m excited to see how it pans out over the whole game. The Resident Evil series has ranged widely over the last 30 years, and Requiem’s developers have managed the impressive feat of a sequel that embraces all of it.

Resident Evil Requiem shambles onto Xbox Series X|S and Xbox on PC on February 27.