Resident Evil Requiem delivered on the multiple-protagonist promise I've always wanted from Silent Hill

It always seemed odd that Harry Mason was such a badass. The protagonist of the original Silent Hill was a novelist searching for his missing daughter, and yet over the course of the game he managed to accrue a handgun, a shotgun, a rifle, and multiple melee weapons, which he confidently used to defeat a giant caterpillar, a split-headed lizard, Mothra, and also God.

Meanwhile, badass cop Cybil Bennett was just kind of there. Silent Hill implies that she's off having her own awful adventure at the same time, but we only see glimpses of it. Apparently the original plan was to have two playable characters. When you played Harry you'd get a version of Silent Hill that was puzzle-focused, and when you played Cybil you'd see a more action-oriented version of the game.

That explains why there are some objects you can interact with only to have Harry say he can't use them right now, and why this untrained author became such a proficient boss-killer. Cuts during development meant the two protagonists were folded into one.

Later Silent Hill games toyed with similar ideas. Multiple protagonists were considered for Silent Hill 2, though in the end all we got was the chance to briefly play Maria in the Born from a Wish scenario. It's a lot more work to animate and voice playable characters than non-playable ones, and the Silent Hill series has often been forced to do its best with shoestring budgets.

It took a Capcom survival horror budget to give me what I've always wanted. Resident Evil Requiem encourages stealth and problem-solving when you're playing as Grace, then becomes an over-the-top action movie the moment you start playing as Leon. The contrast benefits both. As Grace, I'm manipulating zombies using light switches and broken bottles to bypass them, fleeing from oversized monstrosities, constantly in a state of near-panic. That tension releases the moment I switch to Leon, a man who sees zombies as targets for a roundhouse-kick workout and big beasts as natural targets for big guns and corny one-liners.

Every time the screen fades out and goes back to Grace, I can feel the tension start building again in my shoulders. It's like I'm watching a marathon of the Evil Dead movies but someone periodically flips to another channel where they're showing The Shining, Ringu, and The Descent back to back.

Silent Hill F tried something similar with its two realities. In the foggy Ebisugaoka you played a version of Hinako who had to contend with fragile weapons and could sometimes sneak past monsters, while in the dark shrine world she was a katana-toting badass. I didn't think the contrast worked as well there, though—one of Silent Hill F's most effective body-horror sequences happened in the dark world, but was followed by tooltips explaining how your new power-up worked in a way that undercut the effect.

Requiem makes the smart decision not to try for real horror when you're Leon. Though he faces grotesque enemies and is in real peril, there's a slapstick quality to the way dropped chainsaws spin dangerously and can be picked up by zombie after zombie to create the perfect "here we go again" sequence of pratfalls and near-disasters. Leon is rarely afraid and is mostly just done with this shit, while Grace sounds like she's permanently on the edge of hyperventilating and would very much like to be home and safe and logged into her Reddit account.

The Resident Evil games have often had multiple protagonists, going all the way back to the Jill and Chris in the original. Sometimes it's been a choice, with the second player-character saved for a second playthrough, and sometimes we get to play two at once, like Rebecca and Billy in Resident Evil 0 and the two sets of paired protagonists in Revelations 2. The way Requiem divides its playtime between the two, pairing each with a different flavor of horror, has given me exactly what I wanted from Silent Hill all this time. Even though Resident Evil has always been my second-favorite of the two series I can't be mad at it for getting there first, given how effective the result is.