Resident Evil 9's prequels reveal Alyssa Ashcroft's intriguing backstory

A desiccated blast from the past

I'm a card-carrying Resident Evil lore sicko. Or so I thought. When Capcom revealed Resident Evil Requiem, the chorus of "it's Alyssa Ashcroft from Resident Evil Outbreak" posts that broke out on social media made me realize there was a whole chunk of Resi lore I had no idea about. A janky multiplayer game that people love now, despite hating it at the time? Starring an ace reporter whose murder is the premise of Requiem? This, I thought, was a knowledge gap I absolutely had to address — and not just with fan wikis.

The games are, in a word, awful. Time has not dulled the sharp edges of their bland levels and boring enemies. But I got what I wanted and came away with a better understanding of Alyssa's background, as well as some potentially timely themes underneath all the psychological horror and Leon Kennedy-ness of Resident Evil Requiem.

Outbreak starts with an impressively disturbing cutscene that gives you a rat's-eye view of the crisis unfolding in Raccoon City. Mobs of infected are battling Umbrella agents underground, and a Super Tyrant — presumably the same one Leon fights later that night — is making quick work of most corporation soldiers. Why that matters to you becomes quickly apparent. The scene cuts to a mountain of rats devouring an infected Umbrella soldier, and one of the furry fellas ends up in Jack's Bar, where Alyssa Ashcroft and all the other playable survivors are spending a normal night. One bizarre mashup of in-game cinematics and FMV-style zombie shots later, the bar is overrun, and the fight to escape begins.

The fight is mostly classic Resident Evil stuff — shooting zombies, finding keys, solving puzzles — but since Outbreak was a multiplayer game, you're cooperating with two other characters (AI-controlled, in my case) and moving across smaller maps with simpler puzzles. With three people and a massive amount of health restoratives at hand, Outbreak offers little in the way of tension, and that small amount evaporates instantly once you realize how appallingly dense every enemy in the game is.

My allies for the evening were Cindy, a waitress running around sobbing "Why now" at intervals, as if a zombie apocalypse might be more convenient next week; and Mark, a Black police officer with whose utterances Capcom tried to out-stereotype Barrett from Final Fantasy 7. Communication between us — and humans who would've been playing together at the time — was limited to what Capcom called an "ad lib system," where you press a button and see a random line of dialogue appear. Most of them were gibberish. I caught one line about "scoops" and "asses" without much in between to connect the nouns, along with more than a few sentences that just didn't finish. Not that communication would've helped much. Cindy, understandably, had little combat prowess. Mark had a gun and the benefit of a rather concerning amount of ammunition stashed around the bar, but rarely shot anything.

Off we trotted upstairs to the bar's staff room, which is actually several rooms and a locker room. (Roughly a dozen people evidently work at this tiny bar on a basis regular enough to justify the lockers.) The action button lets you investigate, but also hide when applicable. The game has a different idea of what's applicable than you do, however. Collectibles blend into the background, so if you approach a cabinet or a bed (yes, there's a bedroom in the staff quarters and it isn't even the owner's; Jack's bar is easily the weirdest workplace in gaming) in the hopes of collecting what looks like ammo sitting on the sheets, you might end up locked into a 10-second long animation of Alyssa hiding instead.

We somehow made it out in the end, and despite my misgivings about the whole thing, I pushed ahead, determined to see Alyssa's story. There wasn't one. And not just for her, either. The survivors are just avatars with no stakes in proceedings beyond not dying, and everyone's relationship to the few nuggets of information about Umbrella's activities in the city was largely the same. The level design is atmospheric, I'll give it that. But an essential piece of Resident Evil lore this was not.

A year later, Capcom trotted out Resident Evil Outbreak: File #2, a redo of the first Outbreak that looked and functioned mostly the same, with a handful of different levels (including one where you fight zombie animals at the city zoo). But it also made an attempt at storylines. Alyssa gets the most developed one, though the disparity between hers and everyone else's is so blatant that it makes me wonder why Capcom didn't just make an Alyssa Ashcroft game. Her story is why I played, however, so I didn't think about it too much.

And it turns out Capcom didn't either. For most of Outbreak: File 2, Alyssa is still just another playable character in a game where personality and background have little significance. You can pick up a few tidbits here and there that suggest she makes a habit of digging into stories no one else will. Some are throwaways, like a report about a robbery. But there's another one more relevant to her story— a newspaper cutting about Big Pharma dumping chemicals in the river where a weirdly mutated dead body washed up. Then you hit the fourth mission, Flashback, and that's where Alyssa's story unfolds. A friend of hers was murdered by a zombified experiment subject in the hospital the mission takes place in, and an Umbrella researcher named Greg Mueller suppressed Alyssa's memories of the incident. Now, Alyssa vows to find justice for her dead friend and bring Umbrella down however she can.

That's about it for her role in Outbreak 2. The game putters along to its end in much the same way as its predecessor: annoying as hell to play and with a broad story that's more concerned with the downfall of Umbrella and the city than the people trying to survive. That little bit of her story and the promise of her future was enough for me, though.

There's a single newspaper clipping in Resident Evil 7 where Alyssa writes about the disappearances in Dulvey, LA. That's the only direct mention of her in the series after Outbreak, but now it made more sense beyond just being an Easter egg for dedicated fans. This was Capcom telling us that Alyssa wasn't like Leon or Jill or any of the rest, who (justifiably) tried to put the Raccoon incident behind them. This is a reporter who relentlessly pursued every lead about anything that might be connected to Umbrella and its experiments, chasing shadows and rumors across the country, never wavering in her quest for justice — despite, as the Baker Report suggests, being dismissed as a crank.

Reporters like that are dangerous. Just look at all the real-life efforts of the last few years to rein journalists in and force them to follow accepted narratives that let corruption run amok, rampant and unchecked. Whether Requiem's antagonist is the obscure criminal organization that created Eveline in Resident Evil 7, an undead Greg Mueller back for vengeance, or something else entirely, it's no wonder they want Alyssa Ashcroft out of the way.