Resident Evil Requiem Story Recap and RE2 / Raccoon City Connections

Where Requiem Sits in the Timeline

Resident Evil Requiem is the ninth mainline entry, and it leans hard on the series’ oldest wound: Raccoon City. The game takes place roughly 30 years after the destruction of Raccoon City, which means the events you remember from Resident Evil 2 are now history that the characters are living downstream of. That gap matters. The people who survived the outbreak are middle-aged or dead, the city is a scar, and the story is built around what that scar still does to people.

If you played RE2, you already have the emotional foundation Requiem is standing on. If you didn’t, here’s the short version: Raccoon City was the site of a catastrophic viral outbreak engineered by Umbrella, and the government ultimately destroyed the city to contain it. Requiem picks at the threads left hanging three decades later.

This recap covers the setup, the two protagonists, the mystery that pulls them together, and the specific ways the game reaches back into RE2 and Raccoon City. I’m keeping to what the game establishes rather than guessing at the parts it leaves ambiguous.

The Two Protagonists

Requiem is told through two playable characters with very different relationships to danger.

Grace Ashcroft

Grace is the new face, and she’s not a fighter. Her sections are about stealth, light, and survival rather than gunplay. What gives her a personal stake is her family history. Her mother, Alyssa Ashcroft, was a character from Resident Evil Outbreak — one of the civilians caught in the Raccoon City nightmare. Eight years before Requiem’s present, Alyssa died at the Wrenwood Hotel. That death is the loose thread Grace is pulling on, and it’s no coincidence the game opens around Wrenwood.

Grace’s powerlessness is the point. Playing as someone who can’t shoot her way out forces a different kind of tension, and it keeps the focus on the mystery rather than the firefights.

Leon S. Kennedy

Leon is the veteran, the RE2 survivor, and the combat half of the game. Where Grace runs and hides, Leon fights — hatchet in hand, parry timing sharp. His presence is the most direct line back to Raccoon City, because Leon was there on his first day as a cop when everything fell apart. Decades later he’s still entangled in the fallout, and Requiem puts him back on the trail of Umbrella’s legacy.

The two characters aren’t just alternating perspectives for variety. They’re converging on the same mystery from different angles.

The Mystery That Drives the Plot

At its core, Requiem is an investigation. Both Grace and Leon are independently chasing a series of mysterious deaths, and the common thread linking those deaths is that the victims are survivors of the Raccoon City incident. People who lived through the worst day of their lives are turning up dead decades later, and someone or something is responsible.

That framing does a lot of work. It explains why a 30-year-old catastrophe is suddenly urgent again. It ties Grace’s personal grief over her mother to a larger pattern. And it gives Leon, a Raccoon City survivor himself, an obvious reason to be involved and an obvious reason to be a target.

The investigation moves the game through its chapter structure: the Wrenwood Hotel and its outbreak, the Rhodes Hill Care Center, the streets of Raccoon City, and finally the Umbrella Underground. Each location peels back another layer of why these survivors are dying and what Umbrella’s remnants are still doing beneath the surface.

The RE2 and Raccoon City Connections

This is where longtime fans get rewarded. Requiem doesn’t just name-drop the past — it physically returns to it.

You go back to Raccoon City

Later in the game, the story brings you back to Raccoon City itself. After 30 years, you’re walking streets that were ground zero for the series’ defining disaster. For anyone who played RE2 and RE3, this is the payoff: the city wasn’t just referenced, it was rebuilt as a place you move through again.

The RPD connection

The return ties directly into Resident Evil 2’s setting through the Raccoon City Police Department. The RPD station is the iconic location at the heart of RE2 — the half-museum, half-fortress where Leon and Claire spent much of that game. Requiem reconnects to that landmark, closing a loop that’s been open since 1998 in series time and decades in story time. Leon walking those grounds again, an older man now, is the kind of full-circle moment the whole game is engineered around.

Alyssa Ashcroft and Outbreak

The Grace side of the story reaches into a less obvious corner of the franchise: Resident Evil Outbreak, the cooperative spin-offs that followed a group of ordinary Raccoon City civilians. Grace’s mother Alyssa Ashcroft was one of those Outbreak characters. By making Grace her daughter, Requiem pulls a deep cut from the series’ history into the present and uses it as the emotional engine for a brand-new protagonist. It rewards the fans who remember Outbreak without locking out anyone who doesn’t.

How It All Comes Together

By the back half of the game, the two threads braid. Grace’s hunt for the truth about her mother’s death at Wrenwood and Leon’s investigation into the Raccoon City survivor deaths are facing the same enemy and the same buried Umbrella secret. The chapters march toward the Umbrella Underground, where the story resolves — and where the game’s final choice about Elpis decides how it all ends.

That ending is its own subject. If you want to know how the finale plays out, the two outcomes, and which one is canon, the all endings guide covers the Release Elpis and Destroy Elpis split, including who lives, who dies, and which classic character shows up for the good ending.

The Short Version

Requiem is a story about Raccoon City refusing to stay buried. Thirty years on, its survivors are being hunted, and two people — a powerless daughter chasing her mother’s death at the Wrenwood Hotel, and a hardened survivor who was there on day one — converge on the truth. Along the way the game takes you back to the ruined city and the RPD that made Resident Evil 2 unforgettable. It’s a homecoming dressed up as a horror investigation, and the connections to the past aren’t decoration. They’re the whole point.