Resident Evil 9 Requiem: The Final Puzzle guide in progress

By far the toughest challenge to complete in Resident Evil: Requiem is The Final Puzzle, and the proof is the fact that nobody seems to have cleared it in its entirety yet.

The Final Puzzle is a complex, obtuse, multi-step challenge that asks you to understand the distances between Earth and celestial bodies, rotate seemingly useless items, and much more. We don’t fully understand it yet – it seems nobody does but the developers – but we’re breaking down everything that the community has managed to uncover so far.

Have a good think about all the steps and information we list in this guide, and maybe you will be the one to help us solve Resident Evil: Requiem’s The Final Puzzle.

The Final Puzzle start, the Severed Hand – RE9 Requiem

We already have a short guide on how to use the Severed Hand, but we’ll give you the abridged version here.

Scanning the Severed Hand with the Blood Analysis Machine in either the Blood Lab or the Office will activate a unique puzzle, along with a message that reads: “Let’s play.” It also gives you an mRNA sequence that reads as follows:

• GGC AAG AUA ACG UGU CAU

If you convert this strand into a Protein, it reads as follows

• GLY LYS ILE THR CYS HIS

Which means nothing, unless we take the first letter of each section, and then we have GLITCH.

Does this mean anything? Actually, it could be a red herring, because there’s another use for the code, but first we have to decrypt it.

The Final Puzzle cypher explained – RE9 Requiem

It’s an mRNA code, sure, but there’s actually another use for it, and the first hint we noticed was on the Hourglass item. When you examine the Hourglass and rotate it, you’ll see that under the sand is the following message:

• U = 380,000

A bit strange, but we’ve seen a similar message before. On the Blood Analysis Machine in the Blood Lab:

• G = 150000000

Finally, if you look at the Grace Ashcroft Blood Analysis Report File in the Courtyard Lab, you’ll see this final message:

• C = 4.2 ly

The “ly” is the hint that ties everything else together. Everything else in this file is a “Match,” the final message stands out as being somehow incorrect or out of place. But if you’re familiar with astronomy, you might know that Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to Earth, is roughly 4.2 light-years away. Thanks to Synth Potato for being the first person we know of to figure this out.

Suddenly, you can translate this message as C = Star. With that information, we go back to the previous messages, and we see that 380,000 is the distance to the Moon in kilometres, so U = Moon. If you’re familiar with the themes of the Care Center, you’ve probably also figured out that G = Sun, as 150000000 is the distance to the Sun in miles.

A is the outlier, but a very strange easter egg tells us to ignore this one — thanks to IGN for finding this. You can kick the head of the Toy Uncle Bobblehead – a shootable mascot from Resident Evil 3 – around the basketball court after Leon’s fight with the Tyrant, and kicking it through the basketball hoop will give you the message “There’s no time for playing around.” Once again, play is mentioned. Check the Toy Bobblehead torso in Gun Shop Kendo after, and you’ll be given the message to “Just ignore A.” And that’s what we’re going to do.

To summarise the cypher:

• U = Moon
• G = Sun
• C = Star
• A = Ignore

Lead Researcher’s Office Puzzle Box code – RE9 Requiem

If we look at the mRNA message from the Blood Analysis Machine again, ignore A, and then replace the letters with the celestial bodies they represent, we end up with this message:

• SUN, SUN, STAR, SUN, MOON, STAR, SUN, MOON, SUN, MOON, STAR, MOON.

Head to the Lead Researcher’s Office in the Care Center, and enter that code on the Quartz Puzzle Box machine in the room. When you’ve done it correctly and backed away from the machine, you’ll hear a laughter audio cue play from several rooms away.

This is where the concrete information on how to solve the puzzle ends, but we do have a few leads.

The Final Puzzle potential solution, mysteries – RE9 Requiem

Once again, Synth Potato has led the charge on getting this mystery solved and is sharing information found by player GengarCollects. GengarCollects claims to have picked up the item Marie’s Doll when escaping from the Courtyard Lab, and dataminers have confirmed that this item does, in fact, spawn in the exact place that GengarCollects claimed, but we still don’t know exactly what makes it spawn there.

What we do know is that GengarCollects claims that entering the code we mentioned above into the Lead Researcher’s puzzle box with Marie’s Doll in his inventory solved the puzzle and completed the challenge.

But that’s not the only mystery at play here. It might seem like the solution is in sight, but there are still questions that need to be answered. One of those involves the Hourglass, and one of the areas from Grace’s intro in Wrenwood’s city streets.

As shown by Milmilk_YouTube, examining the Hourglass in Marie’s cell in the Medication Room while facing the hole in the wall actually uncovers a message which seems to say: “CO’S”

As of right now, Milmilk_YouTube and other users think this relates to Nico’s, a sandwich shop Grace passes near the beginning of the game. Also noted by Milmilk is that some of Grace’s death animations at the hands of The Girl – who is Marie, horrifically mutated – have her staring at Grace’s watch. Is this related? Absolutely anything could be at this point.

A forced The Final Puzzle solution – RE9 Requiem

Even though there are still some strange mysteries in the game that still need to be solved, it seems that a pair of players on YouTube, Kyro and Rantsycancy, have finally solved The Final Puzzle, but they’ve done it with information gleaned from datamining.

This uses a combination of flag manipulation in the Care Center Basement’s Processing Room and some unusual toilet flushing habits. For the full breakdown, make sure to watch the embedded video, but for now, we’re convinced that there’s a more “natural” way to solve The Final Puzzle.