Claire and Leon begin Resident Evil 2 Remake in the streets of Raccoon City. Things are not going well. Buildings and cars are burning. Corpses are reanimating and chowing down on anything drawing breath. This part isn’t as tough to navigate as it might look to beginners, and CarcinogenSDA is far from a beginner. Once the game begins, Claire (or Leon) faces a pack of zombies. Holding right pulls your character in that direction and away from the pack.

Carci guides Claire through the streets and into the Raccoon Police Department, which is silent and abandoned when he enters. The path forward is through a shutter door on the east side, where you run through dark, flooded east holiday until you come to a small office where a cop being devoured by zombies on the other side of another shutter door hands you a notebook. That notebook is filled with puzzle solutions, but Carci doesn’t need that. Once he takes the notebook, a zombie cop tries to break into the room. You can shoot it dead (deader), but Carci’s strategy is to let it break in and then lure it forward until it slumps over the desk standing between you and its appetite for brains. Run around it and escape back into the east corridor. "He is going to be stuck in that room forever now," Carci says.

He retraces his steps to the bend that leads to the shutter door he entered through. Two zombies shamble around a corner. Carci opens fire for the first time. "Claire's got a five-shot revolver. Leon's got a magazine-fed pistol. The main utility of both guns is specifically to stun zombies." Stunning zombies is more optimal, since it takes between two and four shots to the legs to stun a zombie and open a window to run past them. You need significantly more bullets to put them down, but these early-game zombies are exceptions. Three shots to the chest puts each of them down. That can pose a problem for Claire. There’s another zombie in pursuit, and she has to reload bullets into her revolver one at a time. Fortunately, he terminates the two in front and avoids the one coming up on him and returns to the main hall, where he meets Marvin, a wounded RPD officer who gives Carci his first knife.

Carci uses the knife to cut a power supply box and open the gate blocking off the west corridor. He’ll traverse the west hallway three times during this phase of the game. The first time through, a female zombie breaks through the window at the end of the hall. He ignores it and moves into a room where he climbs through a window and drops into another part of the west wing. Here, a zombie is taking out his hunger and frustration on a vending machine, making him arguably the most sympathetic character in any video game ever. Carci takes aim at his head, waiting until the cursor narrows before firing. These focus shots increase your odds of critical damage. A few rounds to the head, and the zombie to the floor.

In the original Resident Evil 2, you knew zombies were dead for good when blood pooled beneath them. Resident Evil 2 Remake’s walking dead are trickier. Wait a few seconds after downing one, then "poke" them with a round from your weapon, usually your handgun, since bullets are relatively plentiful compared to other ammo. If they react, they’ll try to stand, and you’ll have to drop them again—and possibly a third time. "I don't know if he's still alive or not," says Carci. "Usually, it takes up to three shots before they wake up, if they wake up." The zombie stays dead, having never gotten his hands on that brain-flavored candy bar.

Following the west hallway brings Carci to a window next to a staircase. A zombie pummels the glass with his fists, but Carci attaches a board found nearby. There’s a finite supply of these boards, but each one is made of material stronger than palladium: One board per window, and no zombies will break through. Up the stairs to the second floor, where the body of a female cop is slumped against the wall. Loot her for bullets, then head for the stairs leading to the third floor. A zombie wearing jeans and a flannel shirt ambles down the stairs. Carci stays back and applies focus shots to the head. To his delight, the zombie’s head pops like a grape. "I don't actually know how the crit rate works in this game, but it is extremely welcome when it happens."

On the third floor, he loots more bullets and picks up the Spade Key. Traversing the third floor takes him through a storage room next to the library—an important room he’ll revisit shortly—and into the library. He has puzzles to solve here, but they have to wait until he’s acquired more items. For now, he needs to deal with Misty, a female zombie lumbering around the room. "She's not in a good spot. I don't want to take a risk of her stumbling over here. What are you gonna do?" he asks her.

Misty grunts and growls a response, but no one speaks undead.

Misty is a female zombie dating back to 1998’s Resident Evil 2. According to lore I read for the first time while writing this chapter, her full name is Samantha "Misty" Chambers, Resident Evil Zero protagonist Rebecca Chambers’ sister. In the original RE2, Misty wore a red tank top, green shorts, and Chuck Taylor-style shoes. You first encountered her at the beginning of the game near a dumpster while making your way through the streets. The name seemed to catch on, because now every Resident Evil 2 speedrunner and challenge runner calls every female zombie Misty. (That particular Misty shows up in Claire’s run in RE2 Remake later.)

In Carci’s game, Misty is moving erratically. This happens because of an internal "director" style AI present in every RE game since 2005’s Resident Evil 4. If you’re playing too well, the director makes changes designed to challenge you. Playing poorly will trigger other changes that benefit you. In RE2 Remake, the director increases pressure by causing zombies to move erratically and abruptly, making them harder to hit, and allows them to lunge at you two times in a row if you or they get too close. "Oh, no, she's not doing this to me right now. Yep, she's doing this. She's doing weird curves."

Misty wanders into a wall and gets stuck, clearing Carci’s path to the locked door that leads to the main hall’s second floor walkway. "I don't think that she has long for this mortal coil by the time I get back into the room," he says.

Carci heads across the walkway to the second floor of the east hall. Through a reception area, he comes upon a board propped against a wall near an art room. He grabs the board, enters the gallery, and nabs a locker card he’ll need to retrieve Claire’s grenade launcher later. Then it’s back downstairs to embark on his second lap through the west hallway. He uses the boards he acquired to barricade two windows along the west wall, a move that will pay off later. A female zombie—another Misty—broke through earlier and is waiting for him. He stuns her and moves on. "She’s going to de-spawn whenever I come back through here with the bolt cutters."

He enters a locker room and uses his card to unlock Claire’s grenade launcher and a case of flame rounds. A zombie has been lying in the hallway outside, waiting for the player to open the weapon locker and break into the room. Carci used to set this zombie aflame, but since this is the only time he’ll visit this room, "I'm going to pull up the revolver here because we have plenty of bullets. I can save a flame round by just poking this guy's leg"—poking it until it falls off, after which Carci leaves the zombie to crawl around the room. Zombies able to walk can break through doors to chase you, but zombies without one or both legs are trapped in the room or corridor where you leave them.

The west office is across from the weapon locker room. Carci enters, picks up a gunpowder he’ll use to craft ammunition, and opens a safe (9-15-7) containing a side pack upgrade that adds two slots to his inventory. "That's the only side pack we're picking up this game, and we absolutely need to pick up Claire's speed-loader for the revolver," he says. That upgrade is on the far side of the room, locked in Leon’s desk. The speed loader enables her to reload all five handgun bullets at once, shoring up her greatest early-game weakness. Carci almost leaves the office before remembering part of his routing. The zombie lying next to the safe he looted wakes up after he takes the weapon upgrade from the desk. Carci will return to this room later with Mr. X following close behind, so he hits the zombie with a flame round to prevent him from becoming a problem.

Back into the main hall and up the stairs to the east side’s second floor, through the waiting room and into the corridor where Carci picked up a board and the weapon locker card earlier. Running down the hall triggers a scripted event where a helicopter crashes into the RPD. Carci steers Claire outside into the rain, where he finds another board and a pair of bolt cutters. That tool lets you open the nearby door leading into the east office off the hallway you escaped earlier. Carci must perform several key actions: Board a window so zombies won’t break through and pester him later, pick up white gunpowder and combine it with the regular powder in his inventory to craft acid grenades, and then pick up a valve (which probably can’t count to three… or at all) and a circuit. The door leading out into the room is barricaded by a chair, and that chair is blocked by a zombie shambling around desks toward Carci.

"I don’t like this. He’s too close," Carci says. He’s forced to back up while putting two slugs in the zombie’s leg. That stuns the zombie, but Carci backed up enough that the zombie could recover by the time Carci can reach the door and move the chair. "Okay, good—go, go, go! Do not recover!"

Carci escapes into the hall, but the zombie he left behind has recovered and will soon bash down the doors to chase him. The shutter door Marvin pulled him through earlier is stuck; Carci installs the circuit into the breaker and the door rises slowly, painfully, until Carci returns to the safety of the main hall. A narrow escape, but an escape.

He jogs across the main hall and runs his third and final lap through the west corridor. The helicopter crash earlier was a scripted event that triggered two changes to this area: Zombies break through two windows on the west wall, and the Misty from earlier is gone. Carci’s routing has ensured that this hallway is safe. "The reason I boarded up these windows earlier is there would be two zombies directly in my way. Sometimes both of the zombies will be here together, and I wouldn’t be able to stun them and run past both of them."

One more chained door, one final use for the bolt cutters. This room connects to the deeper west hallway near the office and weapon locker room and contains a flash grenade and a detonator Carci needs later. With detonator in hand, Carci follows the corridor to the stairs leading up to the second floor, where the female cop zombie he looted earlier is up and moving. Instead of heading upstairs to confront her, he exploits the zombie’s AI by standing at the base of the stairs. The cop will topple over the railing in her motivated but ultimately clumsy effort to reach you. After she lands, his strategy is to toast her with a single flame round, but he forgets the acid rounds loaded in the grenade launcher. "Okay, that was the wrong ammo. God dang. It's okay. It's okay."

His concern is warranted. Claire can craft acid rounds and ammunition for her handgun and SMG, but he’ll need over two dozen against G3, assuming Carci makes it that far. She also can’t make flame rounds. They’re finite on all difficulty levels, but especially scarce on Hardcore, and all of them factor into Carci’s zombie-slaying strats. Firing one grenade type instead of another is a minor mistake, but Carci was worried about minor mistakes adding up to big trouble later on.

Upstairs, he continues along the second floor and enters a locker room. Here, he takes flame rounds from two lockers, one secured with a lock that opens by entering C-A-P, and then installs the valve handle in a pipe leaking steam. A turn of the valve and the steam dissipates, clearing a path through the locker room and into the far corridor. The S.T.A.R.S. office, which Carci must loot, is to the left. A licker, the first he’s encountered, is literally hanging out on the ceiling. That licker needs to die, since "We’ll have to come back here later while we’re running away from Mr. X." Lickers go down in two, sometimes three acid rounds. Carci points and shoots, this time with the correct ammunition. The licker screeches and drops to the floor, where it kicks and claws. Carci doesn’t stick around; he runs into the S.T.A.R.S. office, grabs what he needs (flame rounds, white gunpowder, flash grenade, and a battery for the detonator) and then eases back into the hallway at a walk. Running would alert the licker, which has moved around the corner to cling to the wall near the door Carci needs to pass through. Another acid round knocks him down for good.

The next door takes Carci into a room that adjoins the S.T.A.R.S. office hallway and the library. He solves the puzzle there and collects a medal, then enters the library. "We’re gonna waste all the zombies in this room to make it completely safe for when I come back later." Carci toasts the Misty who wandered into walls earlier with one flame round, burns another slumped by a door, and spends a third flame round on another zombie feasting on a corpse. From here, he takes the stairs up to the library storage room. He places the detonator on a wall behind which is another medallion locked inside a puzzle. As the detonator counts down, he runs back through the door he used to enter, and then re-enters the storage room right away. This is another trick. If you don’t leave the storage room, the explosion topples the bookshelf next to the door, forcing you to heave it aside while a licker bears down on you. But if you leave and then come right back, the bookshelf remains upright. There’s another trick at this spot, too. Look up (or don’t—just trust me) and you’ll spot a zombie hanging from the ceiling above the door and bookshelf. Looking at him causes him to slump forward, and the explosion will knock him loose. Avoid looking at him and he’ll stay put. Between that and keeping the bookcase upright, your path to the exit will be clear.

But first, the detonated wall and the statue holding a medallion behind it. As you run up to the statue, you’ll hear a licker enter. There are two ways to deal with it once you’ve solved the puzzle. "I could shoot the licker with the acid rounds that I have, but there is a possibility that the zombie hanging from the ceiling—which is Devil May Cry 5 producer Matt Walker—he will fall and block my exit," Carci says. "When I have an angry licker trying to slash my face, I can't really afford to stop and shoot Matt Walker."

The other way is to exploit the game’s camera. Use your mouse or analog stick to stare up at the ceiling and then run forward and slightly to your right. The licker will leap and slash at you, but it will always miss. The game requires you and the licker to have each other in sight; if you can’t see the licker, it can’t hit you.

Carci heads out of the library and into the main hall. He’s already solved the lion statue puzzle to collect the third of the three medallions needed to enter the underground. The game’s first boss, and a brief excursion through a parking garage, await.

William Birkin’s first phase, aka G1, is best handled in one of two ways. On consoles, or on PCs where your frame rate can’t reach above 120, you let him chase you around a boiler room while squeezing off handgun shots. If your frame rate is 120 or higher, you can equip defensive knives (you’ll need at least two) and exploit the relationship between hit detection and frame rate.

"The reason I'm running 120 frames per second is because there is a trick with earlier RE Engine games, specifically Resident Evil VII and Resident Evil 2 Remake," Carci says.
"The knife has base damage, but the higher your frame rate, the more hits the knife does."

Many video games tether internal calculations to frame rate. Sometimes that relationship is intentional. Other times it’s a glitch. Dark Souls II, for example, calculates weapon degradation based on frames per second. Your weapons degrade twice as fast at 60 fps than at 30, the game’s default frame rate on Xbox 360 and PS3. In RE2 Remake, higher frame rates cause the knife to "hit" during every frame of its slicing animation. One slash works out to several.

When G1 appears, he’s moaning and writhing in agony as his body transforms. Carci uses that time to hack away, angling Claire so that her upward swing hits the largest part of the boss’s body. "You want that knife to be colliding with the enemy's hitbox as much as possible."

By the time G1 regains his footing, Carci’s still swinging and slashing. G1 will grab him, and Claire or Leon will cry out in pain. This does not count as damage. An on-screen prompt invites you to use your equipped defense item (a knife, a flash grenade, or an explosive grenade) to break free of a monster’s grasp. Carci presses the key and Claire stabs her knife into G1.

After using a defense item, the game looks at your inventory to equip another. If it finds one of the same type, such as the knife, it’ll equip it automatically. By the time G1 staggers back, Carci’s already slashing with his second knife. By this point, he’s done enough damage to put G1 in another moaning-and-lurching animation. "I want to use the knife without actually breaking it, so that it will be used as a defense item. Claire's angle is a little more to the right than Leon's, but I think she might have a wider swing."

A few more slices, and the boss trips and falls over a railing, ending the fight.

G1’s defeat is the last part of the game’s first phase. Claire meets Birkin’s daughter, Sherry—although that connection isn’t clear right away—and they head into a parking garage where they find the gate leading into Raccoon City locked. Brian Irons, RPD’s chief, steps out of the shadows and abducts Sherry. Claire, as selfless as they come, redirects her attention to saving the kiddo. That path leads back to the RPD, but you have to recover the Diamond Key in the parking garage first.

The first step in Carci’s routing for this area takes him down a dark corridor into a shooting range where a couple of zombies lie on the bare floor. All bodies in this game are highly suspect, and sure enough, these two will wake up later, but Carci will be long gone. He takes flame grenades, leaves the shooting range, and heads farther down the darkened corridor. As you approach a bend in the hallway, a licker on the far wall skitters out of sight. That’s just a scripted event meant to spook you, and to signal that there are lickers ahead, in the dog kennel.

Every RE2 Remake runner treats the dog kennel with the utmost respect. Many runs die here, including one of Carci’s practice runs. There are two lickers in the room, and you need to slip by them and out the far door to enter the morgue where the Diamond Key is found. Carci asks the crowd for silence. "If I run, these lickers are permanently put in a position where if I leave the room and try to reset it, I can no longer walk around them. I have to get this right the first time."

He does so by hugging the kennels along the right wall. Out of the kennel and into the morgue, where he pulls out a slab and swipes the Diamond Key from somebody who clearly has no further need of it. Nobody told him that: Taking the key brings him back to life. He lunges from his slab and nearly grabs Carci, who has to harness the game’s weighty movement and steer clear to one side so he can run a U-turn around the room to the door. "Oh, Jesus, this movement. I hate this movement. Did you see that? Did you see that freaking startup time?"

A zombie by the door, easy to miss upon entering, is standing up. Carci keeps moving and bursts out of the room. He slows down before re-entering the kennel, which he almost escapes before remembering a container of white gunpowder he usually picks up on his way to the morgue. Fortunately, neither licker will impede him. Out of the kennel, he walks down the corridor and hugs the right-hand wall. "If you walk in the center," he says, the licker hanging from the ceiling "will Peter-Parker-kiss you and the run is dead."

Eventually, he comes to a Diamond-locked door. Inside, Carci throws a switch that summons Chief Irons’ elevator from his office. A short ride later, he’s back in the RPD for the second of three times. He picks up the Heart Key from the chief’s office and heads out into the hallway and up the stairs, where he picks up another board. Then he turns around, descends the stairs all the way to the basement, and boards a window where a zombie not-so-politely demands admittance. Using the Heart Key to open a locked door, he enters an interrogation room and picks up an ornate box. There’s a two-way mirror he must walk past to leave. As you might expect, the glass shatters as a licker barrels through. Carci doesn’t bother fighting him. "As long as we wait, the licker’s AI will deactivate long enough for us to jump across and escape." Carci hops the divide between rooms to the other side, where the licker came from. Back in the interrogation room, the licker climbs a wall and hangs from the ceiling, a spider waiting for a Claire-shaped fly. Carci hops back into the room and walks through the door.

He climbs the stairs to the third floor and enters another storage room where he must pick up flame rounds, a large gear, and a box holding a circuit he’ll need later. Two zombies amble this way and that, and both are burned to a crisp courtesy of Claire’s flame grenades. "The chief reason I want to get rid of these guys is because I am going to be coming back through here when I'm being chased by Mr. X, so it is 100 percent a good idea to get them out of the way."

Carci makes his way outside and descends a ladder onto a wide expanse of the RPD’s roof. He’ll confront Mr. X here shortly. Before that, he must douse the flames consuming the helicopter that crashed earlier. He follows a set of stairs into an alley where Misty—an actual Misty based on the original model from RE2—gives chase in that shambling, coltish way zombies give chase. He sets her on fire and then turns a handle that redirects water flow on the roof above. Back up top, he twists a handle that causes water to spill from a burst pipe onto the wreckage. All Carci has to do now is re-enter RPD. Before he does that, he gets an idea.

"We're coming up on Mr. X here," says Carci. "I'm going to do a little something-something. I'm just curious if he'll play along with me."

A slight pause. Then:

"I'm pretty sure this will still work."

These, dear readers, are ‌known as famous last words.