These days, most AAA video game companies are struggling to gain and maintain momentum in a fickle marketplace when games are taking longer than ever to make. Capcom, meanwhile, is on a hot streak. Street Fighter 6, Dragon’s Dogma 2, Monster Hunter Wilds, and the continued renaissance of the Resident Evil series are just a few examples of the developer being in a no-skips, all-hits era. I recently got a chance to play three of the company’s upcoming games: Onimusha: Way of the Sword, Pragmata, and Resident Evil Requiem, and my limited time with each spoke both to the variety in the company’s line-up, but also indicated a refreshing “back to basics” mentality that a lot of AAA companies can’t seem to fathom in 2025. These games feel like they’re from a different era, and that’s for the better.
Onimusha: Way of the Sword was the first game I played during my preview session, and after 20 years away, the latest Onimusha feels surprisingly untouched by the RPG trappings that have latched onto many modern action games. The section I played was the same one I saw at Summer Game Fest, which showed samurai warrior Musashi Miyamoto slicing his way through a mostly derelict village overrun by underworldly monsters. At first blush, Way of the Sword might feel a bit simple to the modern action game fan who has become so used to skill trees and Soulslike difficulty. But there was a time in the PlayStation 2 era when a good parry and dodge mechanic was enough to satisfy you for about 10 to 15 hours.
When I played Way of the Sword, I was caught off guard by how “of its time” it felt. It’s as if it picks up where the series left off 20 years ago, but with a bit of modern flair and finesse. The boss fight at the end of the demo against Ganryu Sasaki, a fellow Oni Gauntlet-wearing swordsman, was challenging enough to prove that skillful swordplay is enough to carry an action game in 2025, even as the genre more frequently de-emphasizes those core fundamentals.
That same streamlined focus was evident when I played Pragmata. I already wrote up impressions of the demo I played at Summer Game Fest, and this appointment was mostly focused on the same early section of the game, just with a boss fight at the end. Like Way of the Sword, the sci-fi puzzle shooter feels like something plucked out of a previous generation. Its over-the-shoulder shooting, brutalist sci-fi aesthetic, and dad game setup make it feel exactly like something you would’ve seen on a GameStop shelf during the PS360 generation. As I said back in June, it keeps from feeling like a rote retread of old tropes by combining its shooting with a real-time puzzle-solving element that has you breaking down enemy defenses and opens a window for your bullets to actually do real damage. Separately, these mechanics are simple and perhaps unremarkable; together, they create a big-budget shooter that would have been the kind of fun, one-off experiment a company like Capcom would have released between big sequels. Even as Capcom has put out hit after hit, the company has become pretty reliant on sequels in the same way pretty much every other AAA developer has. It’s refreshing to see that it still has the chops to put out something like Pragmata, a non-sequel which may pull from old motifs, but also feels novel as games like it have gone out of style in recent years.
That brings us to Resident Evil Requiem, the latest entry in a series that has spent the better part of a decade reinventing itself. What I played of the ninth mainline game in the long-running survival horror series felt more evocative of Haunting Ground, a cult classic hide-and-seek horror game Capcom put out in 2005, than the misadventures of Chris Redfield and Leon Kennedy. As we see more of it, Requiem may eventually adopt the more action-oriented flow of 2021’s Resident Evil Village or stay in the escape room-esque hide-and-seek loop of the segment I played, but in the demo section, at least, it felt like the game had been stripped down to its core elements to leave you with a terrifying helplessness. All I had to defend myself from a horrifying monstrosity that followed me back and forth through a dimly lit hallway was my wits, glass bottles, and whatever light sources I could find to scare it away. Resident Evil has been experimenting with what it means to carry that name for a while, and so perhaps it’s fitting that what I played of Requiem didn’t make me think of Resident Evil much at all, but rather of a long-lost gem that Capcom has mostly forgotten.
All three of these games are coming out in 2026, and by then, we’ll be another trip around the sun removed from the games that seemingly inspired each of them, and they could feel even more out of time. Even so, Capcom’s dedication to the old ways of doing things, when it feels like every other month we’re hearing about a beloved franchise or company being handcuffed to modern practices solely meant to make every game a time suck, is a big part of the reason it’s put out mostly bangers for the past few years. I’m not usually one to say “things were better back in my day,” but it is nice to have reminders that not every developer has learned the wrong lessons. At least one major player is willing to go back to the well, find what worked before, and meaningfully iterate on it instead of breaking it apart to turn it into something we no longer recognize.