Hideki Kamiya wants a cozy Resident Evil: retired Leon fishing, baking, and fixing ovens

Hideki Kamiya just drew a line in the sand for Resident Evil. Not “more horror,” not “bigger monsters,” but a cozy alternative where retired Leon goes fishing in the countryside, forages wild veggies, bakes bread, walks the dog, tends a home garden, and even drives 50 km to buy supplies. He then adds the domestic finishing touches: inviting old buddies over for a barbecue, fixing a grandma’s oven at her request, and selling homemade lemonade at the local festival.

That pitch matters because Kamiya is not some random fan. He cut his teeth on Resident Evil, working as a designer on the original and later serving as director of Resident Evil 2, before moving on to other major Capcom-adjacent hits including Devil May Cry, Viewtiful Joe, Okami, and Bayonetta. Even more telling, he has said he is not a big horror guy. He recently expressed a desire for a “non-scary mode” in Resident Evil games, and now he is spelling out what “not scary” would look like in gameplay and structure. If you are investing time, headcount, or budget into franchise continuity, that is a real data point about design appetite, not just internet noise.

To be clear, Kamiya is not signaling that he wants to helm a new Resident Evil project himself. He said it would be “cool if someone else makes it, as long as he gets to play it,” and his tone reads more like a designer’s thought experiment than a resignation from horror entirely. The reason this is still strategically loud is incentive alignment. Big publishers like Capcom have to decide whether “scary” is the brand’s immutable core or an optional setting that can expand the audience. Kamiya is essentially arguing for the latter. He even frames it as a way to introduce the series to newcomers who might not be into the usual zombie survival horror.

There is also a product lesson embedded in his suggestion: expanding an IP usually means finding a new promise that still feels like the same franchise DNA. For Resident Evil, that could be as simple as turning tension down and centering routine, craft, community, and exploration. Kamiya’s specific vision is almost the opposite of survival horror pressure. Instead of resource scarcity and dread, you get errands to the general store, backyard gardening, and neighborhood favors. Instead of “run from what you cannot fight,” you have a day planned. That contrast is precisely why this idea gets attention. It challenges the assumption that action heroes only have one mode: the adrenaline one.

Kamiya also appears to be responding to an existing chorus. According to the source, in a follow-up tweet he wrote: “Capcom, there are a lot of voices out there saying they want something like a [Resident Evil] that's not scary.” His ask is not subtle, and the logic is straightforward: if the audience is already requesting non-scary experiences, Capcom either ignores that demand and risks alienating potential entrants, or it experiments and possibly grows the funnel. He ends that follow-up with a personal stake: “So if you have some free time, please consider making it... I want to play it.”

From a boardroom perspective, this is the kind of comment that tends to land in the “market signals” bucket, not the “game dev wish list” bucket. Even though X posts are not a survey, they are a pulse check that can show what factions of a fanbase are vocal about. And because Resident Evil is a franchise with multiple eras and audience segments, even small shifts in the perceived accessibility of the brand can influence platform strategies, marketing positioning, and how executives think about risk.

Second-order implication: once a publisher publicly hears “non-scary mode” and “cozy” show up as credible design territory, teams can start building accessibility and audience expansion into pre-production rather than retrofitting later. That is important because the cost of changing core gameplay pillars late is usually high. Meanwhile, if the company does not move, it leaves the opportunity to third parties and adjacent creators, who can pitch “cozy horror” or “cozy action adventure” variants that still ride the same cultural wave. Kamiya’s own career underscores how fluid genre expectations can be. He helped define action intensity in one lane and emotional, exploratory design in another lane with Okami, which is why his Resident Evil day-off concept sounds plausible as a systems design exercise, even if it will not literally ship as written.

Finally, the timing and what Kamiya is doing right now matters for how seriously you interpret the suggestion. The source notes that at The Game Awards 2024, it was announced Kamiya is currently working on a sequel to the 2006 Capcom classic Okami at his new Clovers studio. In other words, he may not be the person to build cozy Resident Evil next. But the message is still aimed squarely at the people who can. For peers in similar executive roles, the stake is simple: when a franchise’s core gameplay identity starts getting optionality pressure, the strategic choice is whether to treat that as noise or as a signal to widen the product surface area before competitors or indie experiments define the narrative for you.