VideoGamer gave Resident Evil Requiem a 9/10. The reviewer doesn't have a pulse.

Let's run the forensics on the byline first, because the body is the whole case. 'Brian Merrygold' has no LinkedIn, no Twitter, no prior clips, and no pulse. His headshot's own file name confesses on arrival: ChatGPT-Image-Oct-20-2025-11_57_34-AM. That's not a journalist, that's a receipt left at the crime scene, like a burglar who signs the ransom note with his home address.

Follow the money and the timeline lines up too cleanly to be coincidence. VideoGamer got bought by Clickout Media in August 2025. The human editorial staff got walked out the door earlier this year. Weeks later, a 9/10 chainsaw opera drops under a name nobody's ever met. And here's the detail that makes this a full confession rather than a rumor: the fake bio didn't call Brian a games critic, it called him an 'experienced iGaming and sports betting analyst' — because that's literally Clickout Media's actual business, and whoever ran the prompt forgot to delete the placeholder. That's like hiring a fake plumber and the invoice still says 'Certified Roulette Wheel Technician.'

The prose itself is the tell for anyone who somehow missed the metadata. 'A chainsaw-revving, blood-soaked testament to why we love getting scared stupid' is not a sentence about Resident Evil Requiem, it's a sentence that could be stapled to the front of any horror game since 1996 and nobody would notice the swap. Zero specifics on the parry timing, zero mention of inventory management, zero opinion that couldn't have been generated from the press kit alone. The verdict subtitle was 'A Gilded Grave,' which, credit where due, is the most honest thing this outlet has published all year — just not about the game.

Metacritic did the autopsy for us: review pulled, outlet's future submissions banned, ties severed pending investigation. The score stays frozen at a 9 forever, a monument to the exact moment game journalism outsourced its opinions to the same technology that generates cursed stock photos of hands. Sponsored by the truth. Allegedly.