When I brought home the original Resident Evil as a middle-schooler in 1996, my friends and I could barely find the courage to hold the controller as a zombie, freshly fed off a bleeding corpse, stood up and backed our character into a heavily wallpapered hallway corner.

Nothing is more terrifying than being between a zombie and a wall, clutching a shaking pistol with a vanishing, small supply of bullets.

Resident Evil Requiem, more so than the past few entries in the long-running series, seems at first to fall in line with this approach. After a few scene changes through an FBI office, an impressive if uncanny rendering of a Brooklyn, New York, city street (complete with bodegas advertising “Food Stamp”) and a mouldering hotel, Requiem settles on the stately and crenelated Rhodes Hill Chronic Care Center, an old sanitarium turned into a mad scientist’s testing ground. That scientist, Victor Gideon, played with mealy, gold-toothed verve, has drawn the game’s two playable characters — Grace Ashcroft and Leon S. Kennedy — here to complete the final stages of his dastardly plan, which involves using Grace’s special provenance to unlock more aggressive forms of bioengineering.

This storyline is largely unimportant and detached from the immediate pressures of surviving Rhodes Hill. These early hours of the game, spent with Grace tiptoeing down dark and creepy corridors to avoid the centre’s zombified residents, evokes a by-the-books haunted house with all the expected trappings. It’s a building full of puzzles and blocked doors to be unlocked while dashing away from gnashing teeth and grasping arms.

Many of the zombies here retain aspects of their former selves, an idea introduced with the chore-obsessed villagers of Resident Evil 4. Maids continue to scrub at the floors and walls, smearing blood instead of soap and varnish. Divas croak out discordant arias in the centre’s stately lounge and chefs stab endlessly at ambiguous slabs of meat. The whole setting is stuck in horrifying suspended animation, lousy with trapped souls who will snap out of their reverie and chase down Grace, should she be so unlucky as to interrupt them.

Although mansions and mansion-like structures are the series’s bread and butter, Rhodes Hill feels anything but stale. The default first-person perspective of Grace creates a frightening immediacy and a sense of vulnerability to the horrors on display, which don’t always react in predictable ways. Certain zombies will get back up long after they have been dispatched and transform into much more powerful and aggressive incarnations, adding friction to the task of sussing out the cleverly hidden solutions to puzzles and keys to doors.

Things come apart, however, once the player is forced to spend a significant amount of time as Leon, which unfortunately means most of the game’s back half. Leon spends Requiem on a greatest hits tour, reliving the glory years of Resident Evils 2, 4 and 6 by blasting his way through crowds of zombies, punctuating that action with roundhouse kicks and cheesy one-liners. There are no puzzles for Leon, just a charnel house of disinterred bodies.

While dotted with occasionally interesting interactions, like a glass-walled building on its side that must be traversed carefully, this is a setting players will have seen many times before in more impressively executed projects, like The Last of Us and its sequel.

Resident Evil games have always see-sawed between survival horror and action bombast. Jill Valentine from the first Resident Evil was, after all, both the “master of unlocking” and a woman who could take down the muscled Tyrant with a bazooka.

But the game’s final boss fight was a singular, outsize moment that only worked because it served as an accent for the rest of the game’s plodding tension. Requiem serves up this tension well, until it abruptly doesn’t, once it’s time for Leon to tromp through a bland, abandoned city while popping zombie heads and watching his kill count rise. Next to the quiet deliberateness of Grace’s approach, Leon’s hypermasculine action hero gameplay feels clumsy and brutish.