Category: Video Games

Resident Evil Requiem Final Puzzle Solution Finally Laid Bare, Hours After Pokémon YouTuber Completed It by Accident

The cryptic Final Puzzle challenge in Resident Evil Requiem seems to have been fully solved, with video evidence of the method now circulating online.

Earlier today, Pokémon YouTuber Gengar Collects provided proof they were the first in the world to complete the Final Puzzle — but there was still confusion over how he’d done it, despite his attempts to try and help other fans.

Now, a repeatable method for finishing the puzzle has been published online — albeit only after datamining work was carried out to reveal the necessary requirements. The solution is bizarre, and there’s still discussion among fans now over why exactly it works this way. But first… here’s what you have to do.

Warning! Spoilers for Resident Evil Requiem follow:

In a video published to YouTube, Resident Evil fan Kyro says they and fellow player Rantsycancy “spent two days tirelessly working through” Requiem’s Final Puzzle challenge based on a “datamining background.”

Step one requires you to wait 15 minutes at the game’s meat processing plant, where a conveyor belt of bodies are dumped into… well, a meat processor. In the following meat grinder sequence, you then must ensure all zombies die to the grinder, rather than shooting them yourself. All of this is to ensure that enough zombies have been harvested here, something the game quietly counts in the background.

Next, head to the toilets in the restroom area and flush one eight times. This is all you reportedly need to do to spawn Marie’s Doll during the facility escape sequence — the same doll that Gengar Collects accurately reported finding and using to complete the puzzle himself (though he wasn’t sure what he’d done to make it spawn).

From here, the solution resolves as Gengar Collects previously stated. You’ll need to complete the game, start a new save, then have Marie’s Doll in your inventory when inputting the now infamous code sequence into the DNA sequencer machine that players previously worked out last week. And with all of that done, The Final Puzzle is finally complete.

Fans are still working to deduce why this process is the solution to the puzzle. There’s speculation about a note referencing Marie that mentions extracting “a 2.3 millilitre sample from the 524.3 litres of blood collected from 115 infected,” which may be the count of bodies (or bodies not wrapped up) on the conveyor belt. Why you then need to flush a toilet eight times, though, remains to be seen.

For now, however, Resident Evil Requiem’s biggest mystery does at least have a full working solution. Are you planning to give it a go yourself?

IGN’s Resident Evil: Requiem guide will help you every step of the way through RE9. Take note of these key tips and tricks before you get started, and focus on finding these important items early. Plus, our comprehensive walkthrough will make sure you don’t miss a single Bobblehead or file as you try to survive from the Rhodes Hill Chronic Care Center all the way to Raccoon City.

Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social

Resident Evil Requiem Criticized for ‘Immersion-Breaking’ Gore Censorship in Japan

Resident Evil Requiem released last Friday, and while many players are slicing up zombies as Leon S. Kennedy and creeping around as Grace Ashcroft, players of the Japanese version have noticed something is amiss. Namely, Requiem’s censorship of gore in its home country is being criticized for being immersion breaking and uncreative compared to past games in the series.

Warning! Resident Evil Requiem spoilers follow:

With Resident Evil being one of Japan’s major survival horror series, Capcom has previously come up with creative ways to censor domestic releases to meet the strict requirements of Japan’s CERO game ratings board. As The Gamer pointed out, in Resident Evil 7’s Japanese release, Capcom replaced the decapitated head found in a fridge with a photo of the deceased character. Other times, gory scenes (particularly decapitations) were removed entirely in Japan, including some of Leon’s most brutal death scenes in Resident Evil 4.

In a pre-release interview with Japanese news site Game Watch, Requiem director Koshi Nakanishi commented on the CERO Z (18+)-rated trial version of the game, noting: “While it’s not completely identical to the global version, I think that the content you will experience in (the Japanese release of) Requiem is quite comparable.”

However, many players of the Japanese version have since voiced their dissatisfaction with censorship in the final release.

As one player of the Japanese version pointed out in a (NSFW) Reddit post, Capcom started to show cutting off limbs in Resident Evil 4, implementing a workaround whereby gore and entrails would be blacked-out. With Resident Evil Requiem, Capcom has also opted for blacking out the gore, however, this has extended to covering whole missing areas of bodies in black to the point where it is really noticeable.

For example, in one puzzle in Requiem, you have to find an artificial heart and lungs to place inside a dead body in order to get the Level 2 ID wristband. In the Japanese version, the entire upper body and the heart and lungs themselves are completely black. As the Redditor noted, this “censorship is way more noticeable imo, to the point where it really kills immersion.”

Although many longtime Japanese fans have come to expect domestic releases of Resident Evil games to be censored, many opined that Resident Evil Requiem’s censorship was more excessive or distracting than previous entries. “I get that restrictions are unavoidable but the problem is that it’s gotten worse from RE4 onwards. If the censorship was on the same level as RE4, I wouldn’t have any complaints,” tweeted one user in Japanese. Despite saying the game lived up to their expectations, a Requiem completer noted, “The CERO censorship (blacked-out sections and stuff you couldn’t see) felt so jarring and overemphasized.” Another user added, “It really bothers me that although blood during cutscenes is red, damage dealt to zombies (headshots or severed arms) is black.”

Resident Evil Requiem players on Steam also reported that the Japanese version of the game on PC is censored too, with at least one English-speaking user requesting a refund because of it. Some users on X have recommended that those in Japan who want the full, gory experience should get the uncensored overseas releases on Steam (such as the UK version), noting that they have Japanese language support.

But why is the Japanese version censored in the first place? In order to get a game physically released on consoles in Japan, it has to pass CERO, the country’s ratings board. CERO has five age categories, the highest being CERO Z (18+), which Resident Evil Requiem falls under. However, even CERO’s top age rating has historically cracked down on gore, particularly on depictions of severed body parts, decapitations, and body horror. Previously, The Callisto Protocol’s Japan release was cancelled because developer Striking Distance Studios was unwilling to make the changes demanded by CERO’s rating board, as such censorship would compromise player expectations (according to the studio’s tweet).

For download-only games, publishers can try and get an IARC (International Age Rating Coalition) rating instead, as IARC is supported by many online storefronts in Japan, such as the Nintendo eShop and PlayStation Store. However, for physical console releases, games have to pass the CERO board. It’s worth noting that if a game fails to pass CERO the first time, the developers not only have to make changes to the content, but they also have to factor in the time it takes and the cost of paying a review fee again. In addition to the review fee, publishers have to pay a porting fee for each of the platforms they want to release a physical copy on. This makes gaining a CERO rating costly in terms of both time and money (especially for indie developers).

Although Capcom is far from a cash-strapped indie developer, CERO’s strict censorship of gore, combined with Resident Evil Requiem’s close-up, realistic depictions could have prompted the company to play it safe by shading problematic areas in black.

We’ve got plenty more on Resident Evil Requiem, including the hunt for the solution to its cryptic Final Puzzle solution, which has been confusing fans for the past week. Today, one person does now appear to have solved the Final Puzzle — but the mystery around the challenge remains, as it’s unclear exactly how they did it.

IGN’s Resident Evil: Requiem guide will help you every step of the way through RE9. Take note of these key tips and tricks before you get started, and focus on finding these important items early. Plus, our comprehensive walkthrough will make sure you don’t miss a single Bobblehead or file as you try to survive from the Rhodes Hill Chronic Care Center all the way to Raccoon City.

Verity Townsend is a Japan-based freelance writer who previously served as editor, contributor and translator for the game news site Automaton West. She has also written about Japanese culture and movies for various publications.

The original Cities: Skylines is getting a new Race Day expansion next week, as Paradox parade the fact the series is turning 11

Welp. The Cities: Skylines series turns 11 years old today, so publishers Paradox have announced a bunch of stuff designed to celebrate that occasion. Look, look, they’ve said, here’s a brand new expansion for the original Cities: Skylines and it’ll launch next week. Oh and, they’ve also said, recently under-new-management sequel Cities: Skylines 2 is getting a couple of creator packs.

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Hooded Horse’s terrific 4X strategy game Old World is getting another big DLC expansion set in south Asia

Hooded Horse and Mohawk Games have announced a new expansion for their resolutely pre-modern 4X strategy game Old World. It’s called Empires of the Indus, and as you may guess, it concerns the nations and cultures that once flourished along the banks of the river Indus, running through central and south Asia. Nations and cultures like “the mighty Mauryas, who founded one of the greatest Iron Age empires under the rule of Emperor Ashoka” and “the nomadic horse lords of the Yuezhi who transformed the region as the Kushan Empire”.

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Nintendo Indie World Showcase Announced For Tomorrow, 3rd March 2026

You wanted more?

Clearly not content with its barrage of presentations recently, Nintendo has announced that it will be airing an Indie World showcase tomorrow, 3rd March.

As revealed on Nintendo Today!, the showcase will kick off at 2pm GMT, and promises 15 minutes of info on all the indie goodness coming to Switch systems in the coming months.

Read the full article on nintendolife.com

Starfield PS5 Release Date, Price, and Editions All Leak Online Ahead of Official Announcement

Reliable video game leaker billbil-kun has revealed the release date and price for Starfield on PlayStation 5 ahead of an official announcement from Bethesda and Microsoft.

In a post on Deadlabs, billbil-kun said Starfield will release on PS5 on April 7, and it will indeed have a physical edition.

Assuming this release date is true (billbil-kun regularly and accurately leaks PlayStation Plus games, so we have no reason to doubt it), Bethesda’s sci-fi game launches on PlayStation two-and-a-half years after it debuted on PC and Xbox Series X and S, back in September 2023.

Billbil-kun also revealed Starfield will launch on PS5 in Standard and Premium editions, as you’d expect, but there’s no early access for the Premium edition.

As for a price, billbil-kun said it will cost €49.99 / £44.99 for the standard edition, and €69.99 / £59.99 for the Premium Edition, with pre-orders expected on March 18. There’s no word yet on when the announcement will be made.

That price is interesting though as it’s cheaper than Starfield’s PC and Xbox Series X and S launch price from 2023. The Standard Edition of Starfield currently costs £59.99 on Steam, and the Premium Edition costs £85.99, so perhaps a price-cut to align all versions is coming soon.

Last month, Bethesda boss Todd Howard confirmed that Starfield is not getting a huge 2.0-type update. “Obviously, we’ve been working on a lot of Starfield content. I can tell everybody we are going to be talking about [the new content] really soon,” Howard told Kinda Funny. “We’re moving into a phase where we’re ready to talk about Starfield. And really show that in the right way, and what’s coming to the game. We’ve been doing a lot of work that we like a lot.”

Howard added: “You know, I’ve seen some of that, so for expectation-setting, I think it’s the kind of thing where if you love Starfield, we think you’re going to love this. It’s updates and things that change the game, not in an isolated way, but sort of meta. Using outer space and things in ways that we haven’t.”

Interestingly, Howard made a point of saying that ​​”if Starfield is something that didn’t connect with you right away, or you bounced off it, or found it boring in places, I don’t think this is going to change that fundamentally.”

Though Howard was coy about timelines, he did say we may find out more “soonish.”

Starfield launched in September 2023 as Bethesda’s first brand new IP in 25 years, but it was not as well received as the studio’s previous games in the Fallout and The Elder Scrolls franchises, and the Shattered Space expansion, released a year later in September 2024, has a ‘mostly negative’ user review rating on Steam.

Starfield went on to reach 15 million players, but the question of whether Bethesda might walk away from the game to focus on its other franchises has been a running theme since release. In June 2024, Bethesda insisted it remained committed to supporting Starfield, and confirmed at least one other story expansion would come out following Shattered Space. And in an interview with YouTube channel MrMattyPlays, Bethesda Game Studios’ Todd Howard said the developer was aiming to release an annual story expansion for “hopefully a very long time.” That, obviously, hasn’t happened. In August last year, it was reported that Starfield’s second expansion and much-anticipated PlayStation 5 port would now arrive in 2026, following the poor reception to Shattered Space.

Bethesda has confirmed plans to improve Starfield space gameplay “to make the travels there more rewarding” after datamined fragments of code suggested the developer had a more streamlined space travel experience in the works. Based on this datamine, while you may be able to travel between planets within the same system, you won’t be able to fly all the way between systems, nor fly directly from a planet’s surface into orbit, like No Man’s Sky.

In a new video discussing his career, veteran Bethesda developer Tim Lamb confirmed that the studio had been working on Starfield’s space gameplay, and that a new DLC story was still coming at some point.

“I think as it comes to Starfield, I’m really excited for players to see what the teams have been working on,” he said. “We have some cool stuff coming, including free updates and features the players have been asking for, as well as a new DLC story.

“I can’t go into all the details just yet, but I will say part of the team has been focused on space gameplay to make the travels there more rewarding. We’re also adding some new game systems, and a few other smaller delights. There’s also some really interesting stuff coming down the pipe from our verified creators. There’s some fun stuff.

“I just want to say thanks. We really appreciate the support and the enthusiasm. We can’t wait to get it into the hands of our players.”

Last month, Bethesda teased new content for Starfield — at least that’s what fans thought after they spotted a hidden message in a social media video released to celebrate the game’s two-year anniversary.

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Resident Evil Requiem Blows Past Disney Cory in the House and Metal Gear Solid to Join Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 as the Highest User Rated Game on Metacritic

Resident Evil Requiem looks like a smash hit for Capcom, with record-breaking Steam concurrent player numbers suggesting big sales. But it’s also a hit on Metacritic, where it has the joint highest user score of all time.

Requiem has a user score of 9.5 on Metacritic, which is the same score last year’s breakout hit, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, has. It surged past Metal Gear Solid, The Witcher 3, and Disney Cory in the House’s 9.3 (if you did a double-take at Disney Cory in the House being up there, well… there’s a whole thing about it being on this list that is well worth checking out). Also on 9.3, perhaps more deservedly, are the original Silent Hill 2 and Metal Gear Solid 3.

Website user review scores can be manipulated, of course (Disney Cory in the House shows that!), and not just with games either (Breaking Bad vs. Game of Thrones is a thing). But clearly fans are loving Resident Evil Requiem, which also has an ‘Overwhelmingly Positive’ user review rating on Steam. IGN’s own Resident Evil Requiem review returned a 9/10. We said: “Like the result of an experiment conducted in an underground Umbrella Corporation lab, Resident Evil Requiem successfully splices two separate strains of survival horror together into the one highly infectious new mutation.”

Resident Evil Requiem’s overall Metascore is 88, which isn’t enough to make Metacritic’s top 250 games of all time. The highest-rated Resident Evil video game is the original Resident Evil 4, which has a 96 Metascore. Still, Resident Evil Requiem is the second highest-rated video game of 2026, behind only Pokemon Pokopia for now.

We’ve got plenty more on Resident Evil Requiem, including the hunt for the solution to its cryptic Final Puzzle solution, which has been confusing fans for the past week. Today, one person does now appear to have solved the Final Puzzle — but the mystery around the challenge remains, as it’s unclear exactly how they did it.

IGN’s Resident Evil: Requiem guide will help you every step of the way through RE9. Take note of these key tips and tricks before you get started, and focus on finding these important items early. Plus, our comprehensive walkthrough will make sure you don’t miss a single Bobblehead or file as you try to survive from the Rhodes Hill Chronic Care Center all the way to Raccoon City.

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Ongoing RAM price crisis cited as one of the reasons “game preservation service” Myrient is shutting down this month

ROM distribution site and self-described “video game preservation service” Myrient is set to close down at the end of March, with its operator citing the current rise in RAM prices amid the tech being hoovered up for AI datacenters as part of the the reason they’re reaching for the shutters.

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Pokémon Fan Claims World First Completion of Resident Evil Requiem Final Puzzle — But Insists They’re Unsure Exactly How They Did It

Resident Evil Requiem players have spent the weekend trying to solve the game’s cryptic Final Puzzle, and now a Pokémon fan has provided video evidence they have completed the challenge — despite being uncertain exactly how they did so.

Pokémon trading card fan Gengar Collects has posted numerous screenshots and video evidence on YouTube suggesting he has indeed finished The Final Puzzle, a labyrinthine quest that thousands of players have been trying to collectively solve since before Requiem officially launched last week.

The only problem? Even with this evidence, which really does suggest Gengar Collects has completed the challenge, fans still aren’t sure exactly how to do it for themselves, as it requires the holding of an item that normally can’t be found.

“I don’t even know if it was how it was supposed to be done,” Gengar Collects says in a video that attempts to walk fans through his solution. Essentially, it boils down to him holding an item, Marie’s Doll, and then inputting the puzzle’s now-infamous code sequence. Doing so then granted him the challenge completion — something he also provided screenshots of.

But how to get Marie’s doll? The past few hours have seen a frantic back and forth between Gengar Collects and other fans via YouTube comments, and to be fair, it looks like he’s trying his best to help. A series of screenshots show the location he claims he found Marie’s Doll in (which is different to the doll you find in the cell). Further screenshots show he is playing on Xbox Series X/S, which limits the suggestion he has somehow used a cheat or hack to get the doll item to spawn, where for others it can’t be found.

Yet more screenshots, requested by other players, show a close-up examination of the doll in his inventory. There are no other clues on the item itself — “no name in ink on the bottom of the shoe,” Gengar Collects says, as the doll in the cell has — only more evidence that he is being honest with his claim.

So, what’s going on? Why can no one else find the doll and complete the puzzle? The best working theory at the moment is that Gengar Collects legitimately completed the Final Puzzle, but only after unconsciously doing something during his playthrough that spawned the doll. And it’s this step, now, that fans are rushing to reproduce. (Alternatively, it’s possible the doll spawned due to some kind of bug or random glitch.)

On the upside, fans say they now know the challenge’s ending — and as soon as the doll is obtained, the puzzle can finally be completed. On the downside, Gengar Collects seems equally stumped on what he did in order to be able to pick the doll up in the first place.

Back over on reddit, the work continues. “Inputting the code is the last step, but you need Marie’s doll,” one fan summed up. “That’s the step we need to focus [on].”

“This is just a guess, but could the doll spawning be tied to how often we spoke to Emily?” questioned one fan. “Has anyone tried flushing the toilets using the numbers 204,” suggested another. “This is the room number that Grace and her mom stayed in the hotel.” For more detailed pointers, be sure to check out IGN’s Resident Evil Requiem Final Puzzle challenge guide — maybe you can help solve it?

IGN’s Resident Evil: Requiem guide will help you every step of the way through RE9. Take note of these key tips and tricks before you get started, and focus on finding these important items early. Plus, our comprehensive walkthrough will make sure you don’t miss a single Bobblehead or file as you try to survive from the Rhodes Hill Chronic Care Center all the way to Raccoon City.

Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social