Summary
It’s been a busy month for gaming news, with the Switch 2 coming out and multiple big-name titles being announced. One of the biggest was Capcom revealingResident Evil Requiemto the world. It’s the long-awaited ninth mainline installment in the series, and it follows a new protagonist. This time, FBI analyst Grace Ashcroft is tasked with investigating a murder at the Wrenwood Hotel.
It just happened to be the same place where her mother, Alyssa, was killed eight years prior. Now she has the chance to find out how her mother died, if her death is linked to the recent murder, and what’s really going on in the hotel. That sounds straightforward enough, but there’s more to Alyssa Ashcroft than that blurb suggests, as she’s been part of theREseries for years.
Alyssa Ashcroft was originally one of the eight playable characters inResident Evil Outbreak, the series’ first foray into co-operative online multiplayer gameplay. Players worked together using classicRE-style gameplay to get through the game’s different scenarios. Then, they could make their own scenarios in Free Mode to test their friends.
It received fairly lukewarm reviews at the time, with Japan and North America giving it a better response. Mainly because they were the only ones who could play the game online. Capcom never set up servers for Europe and other continents, so they had to playOutbreak, a game designed specifically for online play, offline instead. As an extra cherry on top, their loading times were longer than in the NTSC version, too.
Story-wise, Alyssa had beenlooking into Umbrella’s activities since 1993, five years before STARS came across their lab in the Spencer Mansion inRE1. She and a fellow journalist called Kurt even went out to a hospital in the Arklay Mountains to look into rumors that the company was bribing them in order to test their research on their patients. They ended up getting more than they bargained for, as Kurt was killed by Dorothy Lester, a patient infected with the T-Virus.
Alyssa tried to escape, but was caught by Umbrella operatives underthe watch of Dr. Greg Mueller. They couldn’t kill her, so they suppressed her memories instead to keep her from exposing the truth. Even then, it didn’t keep her off their trail, as she kept investigating strange events involving Raccoon City and Umbrella, from dumping bodies by the river to getting animal specimens from the zoo.
Outbreakfollowed Alyssa during the events ofRE2&3, when Umbrella’s viruses reached Raccoon City itself. One of the nastier ones wasthe Epsilon Virus, which gradually mutated its infected into monstrosities like the Crimson Heads and Lickers, among others. It contaminated the city’s water supply, infecting anyone who drank from it, which unfortunately included Alyssa herself.
She spent her debut games trying to both keep herself from mutating and get out of the city, managing to reach a cabin in the mountains. It was there she met Al Lester, a former hospital director, who claimed to know a way out through his old workplace. It just happened to be the same hospital she had visited back in 1993, but she couldn’t recognize it due to her memory suppression. After a series of flashbacks, she managed to recover her memories and learn the truth behind the conspiracy involving Umbrella and Raccoon City.
Al Lester wasn’t helping Alyssa out of the goodness of his heart. He let Umbrella test their pathogens on his wife, Dorothy, in a bid to cure her cancer. But her death and mutation drove him mad with grief. Her body was kept in storage in the hospital’s ICU, where it was fed on bya plant infected with a T-Virus variant. Al thought the planet washis wife reincarnated, and decided to look after it, letting it spread throughout the facility.
He’d spend the next five years luring unfortunate passers-by into his abandoned hospital, where he’d then disguise himself as a masked killer called the Axe Man, then hack his victims to death before feeding them to the plant. He tried to turn Alyssa into one of his new victims, only for her to turn the tables on both of them. Once the plant died, the hospital began to crumble, and Al died in the wreckage next to his late wife’s body.
Alyssa managed to escape Raccoon City and the surrounding area before it was “neutralized” and managed to get vaccinated to stop her mutations. She wrote of her experiences in a lengthy exposé called “What is a B.O.W: Blowing the Lid Off This Horrifying Secret Project.” It led to a series of trials that ultimately led to Umbrella USA’s end, as mentioned in the intro toRE4.
Yet the government was able tosuppress most of the detailsrelating to the Raccoon City Incident. As a result, people believed the city had suffered a viral outbreak because of Umbrella’s negligence, and that it had to be blown up. But they didn’t believe peoplecould mutate into BOWs, treating them like cryptids or urban legends. Alyssa would eventually settle down to raise a family, but she wouldn’t stop trying to expose corruption wherever she found it.
Of all the places Alyssa could end up in after Raccoon City, she found herselfin Dulvey, Louisiana. She wrote an article for the town’s local newspaper, the Dulvey Daily, in 2016. It detailed her investigation into a series of mysterious disappearances that occurred in and around the town over the past two years. This would becomethe prelude to the Baker House IncidentinRE7.
These “disappearances” were committed by the Baker family while infected with a mold that controlled their minds. Each person captured was meant to either become part of the fold via the mold, become monsters called Molded, or be killed and sometimes eaten by the family. Alyssa’s article became one of the few public pieces of coverage left after the incident was covered up and the area around the house was quarantined.
Her last case saw her look into the Wrenwood Hotel and its links to alleged criminal activities. Unlike Dulvey, she decided to head straight to the source to see what she could find out personally, andended up getting killed. No one knew who killed her or why, but when another murder occurred on the property eight years later, Alyssa’s daughter, Grace, an FBI analyst, got her chance to get some answers.
Cynically speaking, Capcom likely killed off Alyssa because they could get away with it. Having mainstays like Leon, Chris, or Claire die would spark a furor, while a character fromOutbreakdying wouldn’t. But it goes to show how intricateRE’s lore is when Alyssa, a character froma spin-off series, still offers plenty of intriguing narrative threads for fans to follow, and withRequiemon the horizon, she still has one last story to tell.
