Between hulking bioweapon super-soldiers and mutated wildlife, your run-of-the-mill zombie in Resident Evil games is mostly regarded as cannon fodder. But in Resident Evil Requiem, Capcom is aiming to put a fresh twist on its rank-and-file zombies, transforming them into an unpredictable menace that you'll have to approach with caution. Speaking to GameSpot, Resident Evil Requiem director Koshi Nakanishi said that this new breed of infected--who recently succumbed to their viral infection--retain some of their lingering personalities.

"When making a Resident Evil title, the question of how to present zombies is always something that comes up in discussions," Nakanishi said (via a translator). You want to have some variety, but at the same time, if you make too many changes, it doesn't feel like a zombie anymore, so there's always that element or that challenge of designing enemies for a Resident Evil title. In this setting, you're dealing with a lot of zombies who literally just became zombies momentarily or a while ago. It's pretty fresh."

Capcom expanded on that idea, creating zombies with behavior patterns players could exploit, especially when playing as Grace Ashcroft, whose segments are more focused on the classic Resident Evil survival-horror experience. "Part of that fear experience is not knowing what the enemy is going to do when they approach you or when you see them, and so if you just had a standard zombie, you probably by now have an idea of what a zombie's going to do," Nakanishi explained. "But if you had these zombies here that retained some of their memories or behavior from their previous life, then there's more of a mystery element. You're not exactly sure what they're going to do."

With Resident Evil's ninth mainline entry, Capcom finds itself at something of a crossroads. In recent years, Resident Evil games have flitted between nail-biting horror and enjoyably explosive thrills, leaving fans split between wanting the all-out action of Resident Evil 4 and VII's more unsettling brand of survival horror.

When I played Requiem last year, it seemed pretty clear to me which spooky path players were being led down. As junior FBI agent Grace Ashcroft was relentlessly pursued, scrambling to survive while defenseless and alone in a dark asylum, I assumed that Requiem would merely be re-treading the same PT-esque ground it did with Resident Evil VII. After spending another three engrossing hours with Requiem more recently, however, it turns out that I couldn't have been more wrong. Capcom's long-awaited sequel manages to channel both the action-packed thrills of Resident Evil 4 and the raw, disquieting tension that made Resident Evil VII so captivating. Where Resident Evil Village felt like an uneven compromise between action and horror, Capcom does not seem worried about Resident Evil Requiem being either too scary or too trigger-happy--it's just giving players the best of both.

Requiem's final preview kicks off by putting me in the dust-coated boots of the internet's favourite Unc', Leon Kennedy. After pulling into Rhodes Hill hospital in the dead of night, he's met by a nurse who wearily answers the door before showing Leon around the dimly lit facility. As we roam the deathly quiet corridors, she explains that Rhodes Hill is a chronic pain treatment center under the control of one Dr. Gideon, a renowned surgeon who administers "experimental therapies" to patients. We can all guess where this is going. Sure enough, as I'm led up the eerily silent and half-illuminated halls moments later, I come face-to-face with a staff doctor--but he's wielding a blood-soaked chainsaw.

The Head of Xbox Game Studios said the long-in-development State of Decay 3 is "coming on really well," in a recent interview, affirming Xbox's continued backing of the zombie game first announced in 2020.

Craig Duncan, who was previously the Studio Head at Rare and now runs Xbox Game Studios, had a lengthy interview with GamesRadar+ after last week's Developer Direct showcase. To close out the interview, Duncan was asked if we'll see more of State of Decay 3 this year, and said the following in response:

"I think the [PR] in this room will murder me if I give you the answer to that. So here's what I'll say: I have done a number of visits to that studio in the last six to eight months. I have sat and played the game with the team a bunch of times. It's coming on really well. We're very excited about the franchises and its potential. So I will certainly see a lot more of it in the coming year."

A teenage boy has been missing for two weeks after allegedly rushing from his Long Island, New York prep school into Manhattan to meet someone he met on Roblox, according to a statement from the boy's family.

Thomas Medlin left the Stony Brook School on Friday, January 9, at around 3:30 PM ET to reportedly catch a train from the Long Island Rail Road station to Grand Central, where surveillance footage spotted him at about 5:30 PM ET. In an interview with Long Island news outlet News 12, his mother, Eva Yan, said this is uncharacteristic of her son, who excels in school.

"He has never left us," Yan said. "Everyone loves him. With the weather coming [in] cold, you know, we have checked the homeless shelter, looking for the locations."

Ashly Burch, the actor who voiced Chloe Price in the original Life Is Strange, has confirmed that she wasn't approached to reprise her role for Life Is Strange: Reunion.

Last week, developer Deck Nine and Square Enix announced the next game in its long-running Life Is Strange series: Life Is Strange: Reunion. Like with the most recent title, Life Is Strange: Double Exposure, Reunion will once again star Max Caulfield, and this time, she'll be joined by Chloe Price.

Reunion is expected to be the finale in the pair's decade-plus story, and Chloe, who hasn't been featured in the series since Life is Strange's 2017 prequel, Before the Storm, will be a playable character alongside Max.

While Xbox games landing on competing platforms is becoming a regular and unsurprising phenomenon, the actual release dates for these other versions aren't so consistent. Speaking in an interview, Xbox Game Studios head Craig Duncan chalked these variabilities up to development resources.

Speaking to GamesRadar, Duncan addressed the difference between Forza Horizon 6 and the upcoming Fable reboot; both titles are from Playground Games, though Forza is releasing on PS5 after the Xbox launch, while Fable will be on both platforms day-and-date.

"There's always development realities about when these projects start--how big a team is, and what plans we have at the start of development," Duncan said; he also admitted that the Xbox team is somewhat "inconsistent" with its release strategy. "You see some games in one place, some games in multiple places. Just know that we're going to work on that, and we're going to try and be more consistent with what we do."