Resident Evil Requiem and Geek Therapy: What If Horror Games Teach Real Resilience?

Resident Evil Requiem is the kind of survival horror game that doesn’t just scare you, it studies you. We’ve been playing it nonstop, and the more time we spend with Resident Evil 9, the more we’re convinced it’s doing something rare: mixing classic scarcity and tension with modern pacing, smart systems, and a story that hits both nostalgia and raw emotion.

We break down why the dual-protagonist design works so well. Grace’s first-person sections crank up vulnerability through sound, breath, and panic, while Leon Kennedy moves through the world like a seasoned action-horror legend. That contrast is not a gimmick; it’s a lesson in perspective. We also talk about the moments that define survival horror: roaming “hyper-vigilant” enemies that don’t vanish when you leave the room, limited ammo that makes every shot a decision, and save systems that turn safety into a resource you can run out of.

Then we put on the geek therapy lens. The story’s trauma triggers, repeated exposure to fear, and gradual courage map cleanly onto concepts like systematic desensitization, resilience, and growth mindset. We even connect it to how players learn from losses in games like Elden Ring, and why that mental loop can translate to real-world problem solving, anxiety management, and confidence.

If you’re here for Resident Evil lore, we also touch Raccoon City, the meaning of “Requiem,” and why the franchise still feels like it grows up alongside us. Subscribe for more game psychology and survival horror talk, share this with a Resident Evil fan, and leave a five-star review telling us why you listen.

Transcript

Survival Horror Cold Open

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Enter the survival horror Doritos. No.

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Oh wait, no, I guess it's okay.

SPEAKER_01 0:11

I am so excited to do this episode because you know what I've been playing nonstop the entire week since the last time we recorded. Uh Phantasmophobia. Ah no. I have been playing Resident Evil Requiem. Close, but no cigar, sir. Resident Evil is back, and it's so good. And right now, I truly believe Resident Evil Requiem is the 2026 game of the year. And I'm on a roll with predicting things. Yes, I'm on a roll with predicting things. If this was prediction market gambling, I would put money on that game right now because it does things in a way I have never experienced in a video game, not just a horror video game. Like it's such a good gaming experience.

Reviews, Algorithms, And The Grind

SPEAKER_01 1:08

Before we really dive into that, I realized I did this podcaster personality quiz from a company called Pod Match, I think. It was pod something, obviously. It has to be, right? And one of the things that it made me realize is that we really need to ask our listeners to give us a review, five stars or else, and to explain why they love our show because the algorithm looks at that stuff, and that's how we grow. And then I was thinking, I can count on one hand and even a damaged hand, how many episodes we have actually asked our audience to help us grow. So we gotta start doing that. So oh boy, we need to do better then, huh? Add that to the workflow, Doritos. We have to have somebody just like did you know I wrote a book? Just like that. You wrote a book out of wow. Later in the episode, right now we're asking for reviews. Help us grow, all right? Reviews, right, right. We need reviews on the book.

SPEAKER_00 2:16

I mean, no, no, reviews on the episode.

SPEAKER_01 2:18

Well, reviews of the book on Amazon would be amazing, but yeah, no, reviewing our show, giving it five stars and explaining why really can go a long way. And I've never really thought about the show that way. But we're getting into a new era of content. I can feel it happening. Really awesome things are happening with the Dr. Gamology content in the Kindbridge Learning Center because my training's done, and so now the hype is about selling the training to organizations across the country, and then what's the next training I'm gonna build? You know, and and I just want to say Kinebridge has been so awesome to me because they took a person who went on social media and decided to make his game his name Dr. Gamology because have a PhD, that's where the doctor comes from, but the study of gaming is what I'm all about. And they're just like make trainings that use the psychology of games to teach people. It's like that is such a me thing, but to have a company ask me to do it. Anyway, I'm getting so sidetracked. So Resident Evil Requiem, give us a review. I built a training and wrote a book. And Doritos, what have you been up to this week?

What We Played This Week

SPEAKER_00 3:35

This week. Oh man, since last episode, what have I been up to? I keep chipping away at Baldur's Gate 3. Nice. Uh so I'm I'm through through Moonrise Tower. I'm still up in the air if that's the end of Act Two or Act One.

SPEAKER_01 3:49

Act one, actually, you just walk across the bridge and you decide whether you're gonna go the path through the forest.

SPEAKER_00 3:57

That's what I felt like. So again, that's why I'm I'm just kind of chipping away at it. I've had some real life things take me away from gaming a little bit. So I mean, I still play Swotor Star Wars online, get still have fun doing that. Actually, I think the the so for that the uh the group of broads from Broadsword just had a live stream two weeks ago, or last week, two weeks ago, yeah. Um, and their update of 7.8.1 comes out March 10th. So it's kind of exciting to get the next little part of this chapter story for the seven series expansion because they have announced that there is going to be an 8.0 coming out in the future, probably within if I was a betting man, they'll try to squeeze it in by holiday season this year, but it may leak in the next year, which wouldn't be a surprise.

SPEAKER_01 4:58

You know, otherwise, you know, you know, I know lots of things. What do you know? I was just gonna make a comment about my work is that the world of gambling impacting mental health has this thing called prediction markets on websites like Cal She right now. And so you saying if you're a betting man about when 8.0 SOTOR is gonna come out, the the reality is you can actually bet on ridiculous stuff like that. Yeah, now yeah, and I think we talked about that two episodes ago. We did, and if you know the history of Star Wars The Old Republic, you need to add about four months to any prediction you have about that game.

SPEAKER_00 5:42

Well, that but that that was when it was still all under Bioware. With Broadsword, content comes out much closer to the anticipated dates. That's really nice. So the the group at Broadsword is doing, I think, a really good job of improving the game, quality of life improvements, and continuing the story. Yes, it's not the you know, it's not like the original class original storyline where everything's voice acted and all that. They've had to scale back based on budgets and and stuff like that, but still they are creating content still, so that's always good to see. You know, it's be yeah, this is the 15-year anniversary for the game. So for those who've been playing since beta, we've been at it for darn near 16 years.

SPEAKER_01 6:34

And for anyone who wants an idea of my career path and how it lines up with SWOTOR, the reason my dissertation research used that game is because that game launched during my first semester of my doc program. And there was so much research about WoW at the time, and I wanted to do something different, and I had loved Star Wars my entire life. It was my number one fictional franchise, and I had never played an MMO, and I fell in love with Swotor because it was such a fun experience for over 10 years of my life. So, and it it was so much fun to play it a couple months ago, too. I just have run out of time in my life where the Daniel that just wants to play games and doesn't care as much about being an academic, he's he's locked in a little padded room inside my brain, wishing he could get out. Wishing he could be a sorcerer that can juggernaut tank.

SPEAKER_00 7:41

Well, you've got that one started, so I did. You you've taken the first steps on the larger world journey.

SPEAKER_01 7:49

Indeed. Oh man, I love Star Wars in that game. That's so cool. Okay, so 8.0 is gonna happen, and that means I have some content that I get to play sometime this year.

SPEAKER_00 8:01

Yes, you have it. Actually, you probably you've missed quite a bit of content since you have taken your leave of the game, and that's okay. Yeah, uh, other than that, I I really haven't played a whole other whole lot of other stuff video game-wise. I do have a couple of DD groups, so I have a Monday night group that we're still trying to you know get together. Real life work schedules sometimes prohibit that, and we're all gamers of various genres and styles, so that's we all kind of were reflexible. It's like, hey, I just got home, you know. The DM gets home 15 minutes before the session is supposed to begin. So it's like, hey, you know, I just got home, walked in the door. I'm gonna just say, call it. I'm not gonna take not gonna do it this time. Okay, it's all good. We have plenty of things to do, and then also running our family's DD night on Tuesdays. So we're we're having fun going through the starter campaign and the the learning the ins and outs of the game, the the and the various other pieces. So it's kind of fun to see the kids, oh, get grumpy trying to use their imagination to do something. And it's like, well, explain to me, what are you trying to do? Talk it out because they're don't they don't have a screen in front of them outside of the map behind me that I have on the I'm using our big TV as our as our map so I can put it on a easily viewable screen. So cool. Having the kids know we have no that's the only screen involved, so they have to use their imagination, use their vocabulary. It's like tell me what you're doing, describe how your character is reacting. You know, what are you looking for? What are you trying to do? And they're like, I I don't know. I I've never thought about that. Oh what this is this is good, this is this is why you want to play this type of game because it allows you to not necessarily and that interact with an avatar with with you know digital mechanics, you're using your imagination to do it now.

SPEAKER_01 10:07

Yeah, that's great. I think it's awesome that you're taking the time to do that and you're teaching imagination. That's such a lost skill because all the things people can play now, it gives you everything.

SPEAKER_00 10:21

Yeah, like so. I still get a kick out of you know, because my son, he he has almost well, he says he's almost at 112 or 100%, he's trying to get 115 on Hollow Knight. So he's only a few few few achievements away from getting a hundred the 115%, which is everything, everything. Wow, that's quite an achievement. That's a tough game, too. Alright, dude. I mean, yeah, so he he's had a he's had a blast with it.

Elden Ring Grit And Growth Mindset

SPEAKER_01 10:53

You know, I'm gonna I'm gonna spill the beans and steal somebody's thunder, but a little so someone that you and I both know in our audience decided to start playing Elden Ring again this week after all the huffing, all the huffing and puffing about how terrible it is that he can't find a save point, saying stuff like I'm a save point kind of guy.

SPEAKER_00 11:17

Yeah, he did say that that comment was written down by more than one person, I think, as a as a postable quote that we can use.

SPEAKER_01 11:27

When I was editing the show, I was like, that is such a hilarious way to explain why I'm not playing Elden Ring anymore.

SPEAKER_00 11:38

But he mindsets do change. He's finally kind of adopted the mindset I had when I started Elden Ring, because that was the hardest game I've ever played. But I went in long chalon and went, okay, I know I'm gonna die a lot. Okay, so I die a lot. Big deal.

SPEAKER_01 11:56

You know what they call that, Doritos? What do they call that, Daniel? They call it growth mindset, or they call it grit, or they call it resilience. But every loss, every setback is just information on what strategy doesn't work. Actually, if you need a book that talks about it, I wrote a book, Doritos.

SPEAKER_00 12:21

It is a great book. I well, I I read the first three chapters and then I listened to the rest on audiobook.

SPEAKER_01 12:28

That's so fun. Yeah, the gamers journey talks about this because Elden Ring obviously for me is a big part of my gaming history and my emergence as an academic voice in video games, and it was the coolest game I was playing at the time when I wrote a lot of those chapters, just because of what point in human history people were playing the most Elden Ring. And it's just so important to learn how to lose in a way that builds on things inside your mind, because wins and losses are a big part of how we measure success. But actually, Master Yoda earlier in my life really changed my opinion about what it means to win or to lose, and so as long as you didn't try, you're okay. Exactly, and that's a big part of the stick between me and Jenny during her era of the show is whenever she would say the T-word, I would use my Yoda voice. And the reason the reason trying is a is a lightning rod kind of word for me is because you either keep going until you do eventually succeed, or you make attempts to the point where you haven't succeeded yet and you decide to stop, right? So this is not a get richer die trying kind of thing, it is a I will not give up, or I will give up, or I did give up, and that's when you fail.

Why Requiem Feels Next Level

SPEAKER_01 14:14

And I think that's a perfect segue into the game of the night for us, which is Resident Evil Requiem. So it is the ninth main entry in the Resident Evil franchise. There are more games than nine, but as far as the ones that get numbers on them, it is Resident Evil 9, and it has a difficulty on it that's called insanity difficulty that you can only do after you beat the game one time on casual or standard difficulty. I wonder if that drives Gene nuts. I'm sure well, yeah, because he tote he totally okay. I guarantee prediction market style. I would put money on Gene has beaten insanity difficulty already.

unknown 15:05

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 15:06

Oh, I'm sure he probably has, but the fact he had to do the story mode to even unlock it, well, he was probably all grumbly grumbly.

SPEAKER_01 15:13

Yeah. So wow, we're really just we're we're love you, Gene! Yeah, right. Like we are giving love to the entire history of the gaming persona tonight, and that's so fun. But Resident Evil 9 is a horror survival game, but Resident Evil has gone through many stages in its history. It started out very hardcore, very survival-oriented. You're not strong enough to kill all these zombies. You need to be smart and avoid and run successfully. And it was called survival horror. The phrase that we started the show tonight with enter the survival horror was black screen, white letters. The very first thing when you press to start Resident Evil 1. And that phrase has always had sentimental value to me. It is quintessential Resident Evil lore to say that sentence. And this game is really good about what we would call systematic desensitization, which is a process in therapy to help people take something they're afraid of, get exposed to it, and become less afraid of it over time, to the point where you can eradicate the phobia and make it something that people actually can deal with.

SPEAKER_00 16:40

And now, doesn't the game kind of give you a prompt? I remember the first time you attempted this, uh last week, I think. The game gives you a prompt when you're playing as as Leon, you're in third person, and you're playing as I can't remember her name, but yeah, you're in first person.

SPEAKER_01 16:58

Yeah. Grace. It it does tell you at the very beginning of the game that Grace is intended to play first person, and Leon is an action star. Okay, he's he's designed to do karate kicks and swing weapons around, blow things up. He is not afraid of zombies at all. Grace is afraid of her own shadow. And when you play her in first person, you hear her being afraid, you hear the murmurs and and cries and ah and the breathing. Oh no. And and then Leon is just like I'm here to kick ass and chew bubblegum, and I'm out of bubblegum, basically. You know, like he's he's so badass in this game because he's in his 50s now, but he's been killing zombies since what was supposed to be his first day at work at the Raccoon City Police Department in his 20s. So he knows what he's doing in this fictional world. I actually though prefer third person for Grace. I don't I don't like first person horror games, with one exception. I love Bioshock. But there's something about Resident Evil games.

SPEAKER_00 18:26

Do you really consider Bioshock a horror game, though?

SPEAKER_01 18:28

That's exactly it. I do not experience Bioshock as if it's a horror game because you have enough weapons and ammo and plasmids to destroy whatever is running at you, so it's just a scary atmosphere.

unknown 18:53

Really?

SPEAKER_01 18:53

How much house did it take you to kill that thing today? Oh my god. So yeah, one of the f one of the first enemies is this big beefy hulking cook in a kitchen that has a meat cleaver, and he has been turned into a zombie. He's turned, but he's still cooking, and he's still able to murmur words that are the kinds of things that cooks would yell if they're limited to one-word sentences. And if he sees you, he's gonna cleave you, and he will kill you in one or two hits. And so I decided I'm gonna kill him because he has a key to the pantry, and I want to get all of the extra bullets in the pantry. So I fired eight handgun bullets into his head, and then the magnum one bullet, that the last bullet I had, and then he went down. And I went into the pantry and ended up with zero magnum bullets and six handgun bullets. So I lost bullets killing this guy. So I was talking to my chat about this is an important thing about what goals you set in life. You should not set goals that give you less for accomplishing them than what you had in the first place. But that's what horror games are, right? Is the silver lining though is I faced my fear, I walked up to him, got within 10 feet of him, lined him up, shot him down, and moved on with my day. Unfortunately, Twitch decided I'm not supposed to stream past 11 o'clock, and I lost my connection. Noticed. Yeah, I I really tried to come back. I think I figured out what actually happened so I can overcome it on Sunday if it happens again. But at the time, I could not figure it out. So the stream ended, and actually, I will have to redo that enemy because it's gonna take me back to the save room approximately eight minutes before I dealt with him. So then I'll have to face my fear again. But that is repeated exposure, right? That it's helping me to become less and less afraid the more times I deal with this problem. The the perspective thing though, when you're in first person, you hear Grace crying about everything. When you're in third person, you see that she actually can't run without tripping over her own feet. So no matter which way you're experiencing Grace, she is pathetic and terrified of this very horrified world.

SPEAKER_00 21:43

And as the player's living the the living the meme of if somebody stumbles or your dog does something silly or whatever, you call them oh, what a good grace.

SPEAKER_01 21:53

Oh, yeah. I mean it it really is. It's it's a constant frustration of watching what it's like to. Be her. I do think that that's programmed into the beginning of the game, and she becomes more reliable on her feet as the game progresses, which is another sign of what I'm talking about of gaining courage and being more aware of your surroundings and believing in yourself. She actually does end up being a very strong character. I have beaten the game one time through the story off stream, and it is an amazing story. It captures a lot of nostalgia from fans of Resident Evil 2 when Leon made his debut. And you do return to Raccoon City, which is not a spoiler, it was in the trailer, but you do, and all those moments are fantastic. And yeah, so you get Leon, who's that connective tissue, you see his story full circle of what he's become and how he was influenced by some of the other characters from the past games that he's in. And so for me as a gamer that played Resident Evil in the early 2000s for the first time, I feel a lot of that full circle playing the game as Leon. And that's one of the cool things about gamer culture is we've had games that have grown with us through technologies, through different console systems, different play styles, but they've been a part of us, and then to see where Leon is in his 50s, and I'm almost 40, but I've been playing games as Leon since I don't know, late my late teens. So since Resident Evil 2 came out. Yeah, just just a little bit after Resident Evil 2 came out.

Trauma, Fear, And Geek Therapy

SPEAKER_01 23:51

You know, also the game has so many potential geek therapy insights, and this is something that you really you might hear me talk about this if you're a mental health professional, but if you don't play video games yourself, it's lost on you. And so a lot of my mission doing things like this podcast and doing streams and going to conferences is to try to help more people who help people, whether it's help people build confidence, help people believe in themselves, help people see the things you do for fun still as something that helps you grow. Is that when I hear someone tell me I play such and such game, I'm instantly curious. What game? What's it like? What's the playstyle? What's the genre? How do you win? How do you form strategies to overcome the challenges? And can we make metaphors that use that exact same mental process in other areas of your life? And that's what I do being Dr. Gamology is I'm not just playing Resident Evil Requiem, I'm thinking about all the different ways we can learn about humanity. You know, the the game opens with Grace having a flashback that you play where she's younger, her mom is still with her, and her mom gets killed in front of her. That's trauma, right? So now Grace is Grace's fear is not just because the place is scary and they're zombies, it's because the FBI decided to assign her to a case where she has to go investigate a murder that occurred in the exact same hotel that her mom was killed in front of her. Now, in real life, there's no way the FBI is assigning an agent to go to that spot because that's just triggering and unprofessional on so many levels, but it's a video game. So we are learning about intergenerational trauma, right? Like it's it's literally the stuff that we learn about in our counseling classrooms. What were you gonna say, Doritos? Oh, nothing. I was I was making quippets, that's all. Well, I need to learn to pause so that we can get those in the episode too. That's my bad, because I scan on a role. I'm just so feeling so nerdy about this stuff.

SPEAKER_00 26:20

You get passionate and nerdy about stuff like that, and that's perfectly awesome. Just because you get very enthusiastic when the when when you start getting onto those topics, and it's to let you talk, man. That that's that's why you do what you do.

SPEAKER_01 26:35

Yeah, thank you. Another thing, besides the the family story and how trauma is inherited, and how it forms your fears, it forms your self-esteem or lack thereof, there's also something that is very resident evil that not every video game has, and that is hyper-vigilant enemies. And what I mean by that is an enemy that does not disappear from inside the world of the game just because you're not in the same room with it. And as a result, you have to play hide and seek with enemies in Resident Evil Requiem and other Resident Evil games, or at the very least, you'll be going to the place on the map where you know you need to go, but then your path is screwed up because this very powerful enemy is just roaming that hallway and it's completely random. So instead of solving the problem and going A to B, you have to go A to G, H, F, E, M, back to C, and then B. Because you have to lose the enemy in order to get into that room. And there's so many different versions of this in Requiem. In Resident Evil 2, they had a character called Mr. X that would roam the police station. And in this game, there are so many different versions of characters like that, and you can kill some of them if you have a ton of bullets, but if you're playing a difficulty higher than casual, you don't have that many bullets. So you really do have to remember to be scared and have a backup plan in case you can't go where you're supposed to go.

Roaming Monsters And Scarce Saves

SPEAKER_01 28:31

And I actually have a terrifying story about this that happened over the weekend. There's a section of the game, yeah, yeah, I do, Doritos. There's a section of the game where you have to carry a girl, a small girl, in your arms, like she's tree hugging you and you're holding her. And you have to take her across the building because there's a puzzle that is in Braille, and this girl is blind and can read Braille. And so your genius solution to solving this puzzle is I will carry this girl in my two arms, meaning I can't hold anything, meaning I can't hold a gun. You have to run the girl as a weapon, got it. No, no, no, bad Doritos. You you have to run her across the entire wing of this hospital care center, and I ran into one of these big, perpetual, hyper-vigilant monsters, and because I was holding the girl, I was a one-hit kill. It knocked me over, the girl goes rolling across the floor, and then the big thing eats my head off of my neck. And so I had to redo so many minutes of the game because it had been a little bit since I had saved, and it was a tragedy. So you need to be kind of a save point kind of guy too, huh, in this game? Well, on respectable difficulties, you can't just save whenever you want to because you have to have an ink ribbon to put into the typewriter, so you have a limited number of saves, Doritos.

SPEAKER_00 30:19

Oh, that's that's always some fun mechanic to manage.

SPEAKER_01 30:23

Yeah, resources are scarce, even the ability to save your game. And that causes you to face your anxiety and be actually you have to psych yourself up and get ready to run certain ways and and dodge and hope you're gonna get lucky and you know shove people off instead of letting them bite you. There's there's just so much going on in this game. And by the way, like it is a incredibly gory game, it's violent. It is the kind of game if it existed when I was 12 and my dad walked into my room to ask me why I went for dinner at just the wrong moment. I'm pretty sure I would not be allowed to finish the game. Lucky for me, I am 39 years old and I can play whatever I want, Dad.

SPEAKER_00 31:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 31:10

Yeah. And and in case you're wondering. No, I would let I would let Desmond play whatever he wants. I have a different approach, is I will just talk with him and process what it is I'm seeing. But the fact that it is in a video game, I'm sure there's some activities where I just would be very concerned. But the types of games that I have in my house, the M for mature rating is because of violence and not necessarily other things that I think would alter the way he thinks about the world. You know, I'm making excuses, but that's just how I see it. Those are parenting choices, they're not necessarily excuses. Thank you. I'm allowed to parent however I want. Yeah, so I just I think that the the entire concept of the game, there is a story, there's two protagonists, there's an entire lore and history of this world that goes longer than 20 years of our time. I believe Resident Evil 1 came out on PlayStation around 1996, and here we are in 2026. So that's 30 years of Resident Evil. And you know, it has connections to characters and settings that have been part of the lore the whole time, but we haven't visited them and seen, you know, seeing the nuclear wreckage of Raccoon City, which the government nuked Raccoon City at the end of Resident Evil 3 and 2 to cover up the zombie outbreak. But they take that whole concept and they sort of like, is that really why they did it? And then you discover, oh, there was a whole lot more going on in the classified knowledge of the what the government was doing there. And that's a really timely perspective, too, for the time we're in. Not that I want to go conspiracy theory on real life events, but it's not really that much of a stretch to take something we thought we knew 30 years and say, like, oh yeah, but there's a whole other layer to it that is not common knowledge under the surface. And it it made for a good fictional story. So good. Like, I can't stop thinking about it. I want to do a spoiler episode of Requiem sometime this year, like it's that good.

SPEAKER_00 33:48

It just came out, so what give it them six weeks? Is that the appropriate amount of time for to avoid uh real bad spoilers?

SPEAKER_01 33:59

I think so, but also some of my favorite content creators on Twitch and YouTube, they've already platinum tropied the game. One person posted their stats, they did three playthroughs 38 hours to get all the all the achievements in the game. And I'm not gonna lie.

SPEAKER_00 34:17

I hear that and go what where you go. You hear that and not gonna lie. No, no, you hear that and go what that was really fast because I know how I play games like that, and I take my own sweet time. My first their 30 hours, 38 hours is probably close to like my 60 to 70 hours in a game.

SPEAKER_01 34:40

That's probably true for context. My first playthrough on casual was eight hours. Our good friend of the show, Medula, his first playthrough where he got a lot more of the collectibles than me, was 11 hours. So that gives you a range of how long the story is. And I'm sure he watched all the cutscenes and I watched all the cutscenes, and the scenes are a part of that time as well. So there's like a four-hour movie in there, and then probably four hours of gameplay, I guess. No, it's it's probably at least the six to two and a half, maybe, you know.

SPEAKER_00 35:22

Yeah, but again, the first time you play through a game, you have to watch the cutscenes because that is that is part of the story, that is part of the immersion that you're going through and and setting everything up. Now, the second, third, fourth times, that's what the space bar is for.

SPEAKER_01 35:38

Yeah.

Requiem Meaning, Lore, And Loss

SPEAKER_01 35:40

I want to also talk about the title is Resident Evil Requiem. They have had some pretty interesting titles. Resident Evil 7 technically did not have a seven in the title because they just made the the V and the I and the upward stroke of the L into a seven. Resident Evil Village, same thing, but they used a different color on the V, the I, and the upward stroke on the two L's to make an eight in Village. And this one is Requiem. There's not really a nine, except sometimes the Q shifts into a nine and then shifts back to a Q. But also Requiem has an RE in it, and so there's a lot of cleverness to the use of the word, but this game also returns to having zombies as the main enemies. In Resident Evil Village, the main enemies were werewolves, lichens, I should say. And in in Resident Evil 7, it was black mold, honestly, that looked kind of like Venom in Marvel, you know, like it would it would turn a sentient black moldy thing, yeah, and it would cover you and like take over your body and stuff, but it wasn't really zombies, and this one they are straight up zombies, and a requiem is a mass that you would hold in certain faith systems for your dead, and so it's also the name of Leon's gun, the magnum gun that I mentioned earlier is called Requiem in your inventory, which is so fitting for a gun that's gonna kill zombies that brutally, right?

SPEAKER_00 37:39

Yeah, I I I I just happened to look up the you know, what does Requiem mean? Because I did I've also played Plague's Tale Requiem. That's the second installment in a Plague's Tale as well. Yeah, interesting that uh you know if you look at the the uh non-religious definition, it it says any musical service, hymn or dirge for the repose of the dead.

SPEAKER_01 38:05

Yeah, and also it's about the acceptance of death as a part of life, which there's a big part of what Leon's going through in this game where he actually is infected by repeated exposure to fighting these T virus zombies. And so a lot of the game you're wondering how bad of an infection this is because it's like a dormant infection, it's in him, but it's not turning him, it's just completely integrated into his DNA somehow. So there's this mortality to your favorite character, and you revisit the settings where these traumatic things in the story happened, you're making peace with the finality of life, and you're finding this synthesis or this integration of all the things from the past installments of the game with the current point in the game that you're playing, and so you're seeing this complete fulfillment of the story in the in the character of Leon. And sometimes in therapy, we talk about the stages of grief and loss, and how you're on this path from denial, which is like the zombie outbreak. Oh no, what even is going on? What do we do? Through anger and resentment to bargaining and depression, realizing nothing's gonna be the same ever again and the world you loved is gone. And then there's acceptance that this is where we're at. We're gonna move on whether we like it or not. And I think that all those stages make appearances in this game and in just the thought process of what is happening in this alternate history of our country, a version of the United States that has Raccoon City in it and the umbrella corporation, and has had Leon and Chris and Jill and Claire and Albert Wesker and Nemesis and Mr. X and Ada Wong and of course Ada. We gotta Doritos, you want to know the worst part of Resident Evil Requiem? What's that? There's no Ada. There's a tombstone for Ada. No! Oh my god, we would not be recording tonight if that was true, because I'd be so messed up. No, she just didn't appear in the main game. But in one of the character models where Leon does not have a glove on his left hand, he has a ring on his ring finger. So a lot of people, including me, are like, Ada, Ada? Come on. But maybe that's a podcast for a different episode. But if you need to know about Ada Wong, you can always go to drgamology.com, find my blog post, watch the YouTube video. A lot of people actually have been watching this YouTube video since the game came out because they're just looking for anything Resident Evil. So that's a fun spike in my little content ecosystem. But that video is about the mercenary archetype, which is actually one of the 12 Youngin archetypes that we use to break down people's personality. And and I assigned that to Ada Wong from Resident Evil. So maybe I should do a Leon video.

SPEAKER_00 41:50

Maybe you should.

SPEAKER_01 41:51

Yeah, I just need to be interesting. I need to create so much Resident Evil content now. I'm motivated. Okay, so like I said, I think that just the fact that both halves of the game, the first person, the third person, the scared little girl overcoming horror, and the seasoned badass karate kicking, chainsaw swinging action hero in Leon, both sides were executed so well. I cannot imagine this game not being nominated for Game of the Year at the Game Awards in December. I just can't. It's everything they intended to do was programmed in a solid way. So, you know, like sometimes you play a game where you see what they were trying to do and they kind of got it, but this gameplay is solid. So I hope it wins. Like that would just be so cool to me. But it might not. Yeah. I mean, there's always a chance that some game we've never heard of, like Claire Obscure Expedition 33, comes out and is just the best thing ever. But as far as things I know that are on the horizon for 2026, this has gotta be in the top five game experiences. Sounds awesome. Yeah, I just gotta I hope I figured out all the the stream technical difficulties because I really do want to get the content and more conversation like this for the Twitch audience. Because I know there's people that listen to everything we do, Doritos, and there's people that will show up for Twitch, podcasts aren't their thing. There's people that do podcasts, Twitch is not their thing. I just I wanna like I wanna make this so big that Kindbridge wants me to do a training about Resident Evil and mental health. Like that would be so fun. That would be kind of fun.

Remakes, Co-Op Memories, Final Lessons

SPEAKER_01 44:10

Have you ever played a Resident Evil before? Haven't. Oh wow. Well, you did really following me through this.

SPEAKER_00 44:22

I was able to watch majority of your stream today. I had some real life meetings to attend to, so I had the phone kind of upside down, so I couldn't see it, but I was lurking all the same. But again, I I've seen enough of the of other games and in the franchise, so I I understand the the genre the the a lot of the lore and again it's got some awesome lore when you go back to the beginning of the series and how it all plays together.

SPEAKER_01 44:55

You know, they've done remakes of two, three, and four, right? And those are some big moments. But what they really need, and it would shake the foundation of gaming if they did this, is to remake the first one. It's called Resident Evil because the first game took place in a mansion, one residence, and it had zombies in a way we all would recognize that these are zombies, and the two characters you could play as were so memorable. The villains and the plot twists were their tropes in video game history now. You know, the master of unlocking that phrase makes people giggle, but so many people that have never played Resident Evil will feel like they've heard that somewhere. Is one of the worst lines in delivery and video game history because the first game was so cheesy. It's it's just so good. If they ever redid the first game, it would be on the level of remaking Final Fantasy VII. I really feel like there would be a huge appetite for that. But the way it stands, they've remade other really big moments. Resident Evil 2 is a lot of people's favorite in a sentimental way. Also, if you ever wanted to play one, five and six are co-op. People don't usually like those, but I loved those because my love of Resident Evil actually originates with my friendship with Gene and how we would just endlessly play every difficulty of Resident Evil 5 together to where we could finish each other's combos without any verbal communication. It was like I don't know, like a basketball team or something, like an alley oop kind of at one point in the no look, all the good stuff. No look, alley oops, everything. Yeah, like we were on the leaderboard of co-op mercenary mode. We were number 21 in the world at one point before we started sliding. It took a long time before anyone even beat us at one point. So that's what Resident Evil was for me is it was just a big part of friendships, it was a big part of seeing that video games could tell bigger stories than just one game at a time and create worlds where you imagine kind of when you follow a series of books, you know, you just experience the characters and the history of what they've been fighting that way. And to be at the ninth one when four is the one that was newest when I started playing, and that one starred Leon. So maybe that's why this has been an episode where I just keep gushing over Resident Evil. That's good though. Yeah, but also for anyone who is looking for the geek therapy content and mental health content in here, Doritos, you and I actually drop nine very specific mental health connections, an entire checklist of things you can use the worlds and environments of Resident Evil to teach people things that are useful in their battles over anxiety, fear, grief, problem solving. We even talk about the puzzle aspects and the deep cognitive problem solving that Resident Evil forces you to have to get through the story. But there's number 10. If you want to look more into that one yourself, you know, just you want to clear the hall of dangerous, scary monsters if you're holding your children in your arms and don't have a weapon. I think that's the most important thing from our talk today. Yeah, I think it is. Is there anything the child as the weapon? Got it. Don't use the child as the weapon. Is there anything else we forgot to tell people today, Doritos?

SPEAKER_00 49:26

I think we probably called forgot to tell them to continue the journey.