Resident Evil 9: Requiem – Is the retro town too out of place or just right?

“Resident Evil 9: Requiem” has recently been brought up by players again, this time not for its controls or its story direction, but for the “weird outfits” worn by the townsfolk in that small Midwestern American town. A bunch of men in wool overcoats, wide-leg trousers, hats pulled low, and women’s dresses and coats that reek of old movies—put into a setting that’s clearly on a modern timeline, it looks like a chunk of 1940s–50s black-and-white film forcibly wedged into a contemporary horror-movie scene.

Starting with the controversy: a lot of players’ first reaction was, is this yet another case of a Japanese team dragging out their outdated stereotypes of a “small American town” and shoving them into a game? The hats, trench coats, and rubber shoes look like they were copied straight out of a classic gangster film. They resemble unemployed bar band members and underground fighters far more than small-town residents of the 2020s. Some players joked that Capcom isn’t making a modern horror game at all, but a “historical spiritual simulator,” planting one foot right in the crack of temporal dislocation, leaving you completely unsure what era this place is actually stuck in.

But if you pull the camera back a bit, you’ll see that this retro vibe isn’t just slapped onto NPC skins; it’s a unified visual strategy for the entire town. The care center’s interior looks like it froze in the 1950s: wood-paneled walls, old-fashioned lighting, buttoned uniforms—all piling on that “they’re treating you well but something feels off” medical-institution atmosphere. Typewriters and old coins scattered around the environment simultaneously tell you that the logic of life here is trapped in the past, while clashing sharply with Leon driving a modern Porsche and other characters’ contemporary clothing. This temporal dislocation is almost like using visual art as a form of level design.

What’s more interesting is that this way of dressing has also been “tinkered with” on the gameplay level. Because the townsfolk tighten their coats and pull their hats low, many first-time players mistake them, seen through the rain at a distance, for Mr. X–type pursuer enemies, and their heart rate spikes on the spot. The dev team clearly knew this silhouette misdirection would happen—it even feels deliberately designed—so that every extra glance you cast at a passerby quietly ratchets up your mental pressure. It’s effectively using the city’s everyday life itself to simulate the feeling of “being watched, being tailed.”

If you look at this town from the perspective of a “sandbox simulation,” it’s more like a test chamber intentionally locked to a specific era. Retro clothing, old-style medical facilities, outdated objects form a sealed temporal ecosystem, while the modern characters you control are like external variables intruding into the box. This intense clash of eras keeps prompting you, as you play, to ask: why hasn’t time moved forward here, and who hit the pause button? In a horror game, the actual answer doesn’t really matter; what matters is that the sense of wrongness follows you all the way through the main story.

As for whether this counts as a stereotype, I’d rather see it as an artistic “biased simulation”: Capcom did choose a small-town America template that leans heavily toward classic film aesthetics, but then pushed it to an extreme and brought it right to the forefront of gameplay and atmosphere. You can call it unrealistic, but it’s hard to say it doesn’t serve the experience. You can complain that “no one dresses like this anymore in real life,” but if everyone were just in hoodies and jeans, the town’s distinctiveness and oppressive mood would probably get diluted right along with it.

If you’re the kind of player who cares a lot about “internally consistent worldbuilding” and has high demands for realism, this retro little town may occasionally break your immersion. It might help to adjust your expectations first to “watching an American horror movie with a touch of grotesque filter,” and accept it as a stylized simulation—it’ll go down easier. If you already like old films, noir detectives, and vintage street scenes, then this wave of design might actually be a bonus that draws you into “Resident Evil 9: Requiem.”

To wrap up, I’d like to hear your thoughts: placing a town with a 1940s–50s vibe into the modern timeline of “Resident Evil”—is that, in your view, a demerit-earning stereotype, or a decent, even standout piece of artistic stylization? If there really were a vote, I’d probably choose “it’s fine, acceptable, doesn’t affect my play,” but I’m more interested in whether people are willing to keep seeing this kind of “era-dislocated” sandbox experiment in future horror games.