Gaming: Capcom's Re Engine Is The Gift That Keeps On Giving: Resident Evil...

I didn't expect a big budget 2026 game to be this playable on the Deck.

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I should be on the beach, but instead I'm playing Resident Evil Requiem.

Here I am in Hawaii, sunny skies and steps from the ocean, and as soon as it gets dark, I'm thinking about making my way back to my hotel room so I can sit in the dark and play more of the Resident Evil that our reviewer Elie Gould praised for "wrapping all the best elements of previous Resident Evil games into one."

So far, I agree, but mostly I've been marvelling at just how playable this shiny new 2026 game is on the Steam Deck. Four years on from the gaming handheld's release, it's becoming more and more common for new triple-A games to be a bit too demanding of the Deck's modest hardware—even 30 fps can be out of reach.

When the Deck came out, the 2019 Resident Evil 2 Remake was one of the best games on it. I wrote at the time that "with a mix of low and mid settings I was able to run it at 60 fps, which was a genuine 'wow, this really works?' moment for such a relatively new and gorgeous game."

Capcom's in-house RE Engine developed a reputation for looking really nice while still scaling down impressively well to low-end hardware. Unfortunately, in the last couple of years, the RE Engine has also developed a reputation for not being great at everything Capcom has used it for—specifically Monster Hunter Wilds and Dragon's Dogma 2, open-world games which suffered from major performance issues that took months and months of updates to improve.

But you know what RE Engine is still really good at, it turns out? Resident Evil.

As PC Gamer's Nick Evanson highlighted in his Resident Evil Requiem performance analysis, there are some shiny new tricks in this updated version of the engine, like path-traced lighting, but mostly it's smooth performance that's a welcome sign. "Compared to the disappointment of Dragon's Dogma 2 and Monster Hunter Wilds, in terms of graphics and performance, Resident Evil Requiem is a breath of fresh air. But then again, it should be, as it's not an open world game and the levels are generally quite compact," he wrote.

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Source: PC Gamer