With the wreckage extinguished, Carci heads back inside and moves toward the part of the hallway blocked by the ‘copter. If you’ve played RE2 Remake, you know what happens next: Mr. X, a monster built like a man taller and more powerful than Shaquille O’Neal and wearing a trench coat and fedora more stylishly than Sinatra ever dreamed possible, shrugs the helicopter aside and stalks toward you.

This begins one of the tensest phases of the game, during which Mr. X pursues you through the corridors of the police station while you attempt to solve puzzles and defeat enemies further down the food chain, that being all of them. All the while, you’ll hear Mr. X’s heavy footsteps as he hunts you. Sometimes those footsteps are loud and close, and other times they’re soft and far away. It’s brilliant audio design. Not only do his footsteps help you determine where X might be in relation to your position, they’re also extremely, painfully intimidating. There’s a reason Mr. X became an internet star in 2019, and it wasn’t just because of the brilliant mod that replaces the music that kicks in when he’s got you in his sights with DMX’s "X Gon’ Give It To Ya" (although that didn’t hurt).

Carci doesn’t wait around to take in Mr. X’s awe-inspiring presence. A crucial part of his routing is leading Mr. X precisely where Carci wants him to go. He begins by turning on his heel and racing back outside to the rooftop. As Mr. X’s footsteps begin pounding like war drums, Carci runs over to the bench on the other side of the door, hesitates as if he’s considering picking up the handgun bullets sitting there, and then runs across the roof and behind a wall, where he watches the door. He’s waiting for Mr. X to come outside and turn toward him, at which time Carci will use the rooftop’s wide surface to loop around him and head back through the door and into the hallway, where he’ll continue his routing.

That was the plan.

The door opens. Mr. X stoops his towering frame and steps through the portal. But instead of turning toward Carci, he turns toward the bench. Carci takes advantage. With Mr. X’s back turned, he sprints toward the doorway. The monster hears Claire’s footsteps and turns stiffly, like Michael Keaton in his Batman ’89 suit. Now the door is parallel to Carci, on his left. He should be able to swing Claire toward and through it, but something goes wrong. He collides with the door’s hinge and is stuck there for a moment—just long enough for Mr. X to get close enough to touch. Carci’s fingers dance over the WASD movement keys. Claire wrenches herself free and barrels through the door, leaving Mr. X staring stupidly at where his prey had been waiting for him like a fish on a hook.

"I shouldn't have done that," Carci says, voice slightly tremulous. "Now I'm nervous. That's what I get for showboating."

He shakes off the close call and moves through the east hallways, down to the main hall, and through the west office where he looted a safe and torched a zombie earlier. When he reaches the far side, he takes his finger off the Shift key, slowing Claire to a walk. There’s a licker just outside and to his right. He blasts it with a single acid round and holds Shift again to barrel through an adjacent doorway. He came through here earlier to pick up a detonator. To one side is a door that requires Claire’s Heart-shaped key to open. This is one of two entrances into a records room, the second being a door locked with the Club-shaped key Leon finds in his playthrough. Carci heads toward a long table and picks up a grenade and a jack handle. Now he waits. A heavy thump comes from the hallway where he splashed the licker with acid. That’s Mr. X, who is programmed to teleport just outside the evidence room when players retrieve the jack. A door squeals as it opens. Loud footsteps draw near, and then Mr. X shoves through the Heart door and comes for him.

Escaping him is easy. Metal shelves divide the room in two; all Carci has to do is bait Mr. X down one side of the shelves, then loop around them and head out the Heart door and back into the hallway, where he hits the licker with a second acid round. That’s enough to kill the licker, but Carci steers clear of the body as it goes through its death animation. "When lickers are getting hit and dying, they flail around, and they can still hit you."

At this juncture, Carci’s old routing took him back through the west office, into the main hall, and up to the library on the second floor. Instead, he pushes deeper into the west hallway, past the dark room and up to the second-floor locker room. This is one of the most exciting changes to his routing, and one reason he hoped AGDQ viewers would choose Claire. He moves through the locker room and down the corridor toward the S.T.A.R.S. office. "The licker from earlier is dead, meaning we can just charge right through here." Inside the office, he uses the S.T.A.R.S. badge to unlock the cage at the back of the room and pick up Claire’s SMG, a weapon he used to pick up when he returned to RPD for the third time. Now he needs to exit the office and head to the left, a route that will take him into the library from a different point of ingress.

He goes to the door and asks the live audience for quiet—he’s listening for Mr. X. The monster’s footsteps indicate he’s passing through the locker room and heading for the S.T.A.R.S. corridor. What Carci wants is for the hunter to turn around and go back through the locker room and down to the second floor, far from the library where Carci needs to do some work. Mr. X isn’t known for cooperating. His footsteps move past the office and further down the corridor, closer to the library.

"Are you kidding me?" Carci says. He holds his anxiety in check. The last thing he wants to do is repeat a mistake he made during a practice run, where he barged into the hallway just as Mr. X stomped in his direction.

The footsteps stop. To the confusion of Carci and his couch of pro RE2 players, they don’t resume. Carci slips out of the office and moves toward the library. He’s braced to react: Since Mr. X was heading this way, he could be anywhere in the library. Carci brought a flash grenade for just such an occasion. He can use it to stun the monster for nearly 30 seconds, during which Carci can use the jack to move a shelf into place—he repositioned the other shelves earlier so he wouldn’t have to bother with them now—and climb up to the third floor, where the tops of the shelves form a makeshift platform leading to the third floor.

Except Mr. X isn’t in the library. In fact, he doesn’t seem to be anywhere. "He didn't climb the ladder, or I didn't hear him climb the ladder… so he's just gone."

The worst thing Carci could do here is wait for Mr. X to find him. He uses the jack to shove the last shelf into place, climbs the ladder and walks across them, and heads out into the third floor of the main hall. It’s tenebrous up here, where the light doesn’t reach. It also affords Carci a view of the main hall far below. Still no sign of Mr. X. He can’t be on the third floor, because he couldn’t cross the gap between shelves until Carci moved them. Carci’s path into the clock tower at the end of the hall is clear—of Mr. X, anyway. Two zombies linger outside the room he needs to enter. They need to go, or they could ambush Carci later. He bar-be-cues them with flame rounds and enters the tower.

What follows is a puzzle straight out of a point-and-click adventure game. A box holding a circuit Carci needs to progress is wedged in the clock’s cogs and gears. He places and removes gears in such a way that the machinery fires up, the machinery clangs and bangs harder than Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson in his home gym, and the box slips loose and falls to the floor. (I’ve long held the opinion that Resident Evil games pre-RE4 are more point-and-click adventures with horror motifs—minus the pointing and clicking—than survival horror, but that’s a subject for another time.)

All the commotion usually calls Mr. X to dinner. Box in hand, Carci peeks into the corridor. No sign of his pursuer. "You can hear his footsteps, but as long as his music isn't playing, he's not anchored on to you." He moves across the third floor to a door that can only be opened this side. The door lets him cut through the storage room where he picked up the large gear earlier and down the staircase across from the chief’s office. "All right. No more Mr. X," he says.

A quick trip to the item box where Carci keeps his newly acquired SMG and ammunition. "Just so that I don't forget," he says. He’s about to take a short break from playing as Claire. Filling his inventory with the items he needs is a smart way to make sure he’s ready for the next steps when he regains control of her. "If I forget, then I'm going to get hit by dogs, and that wouldn’t make us happy."

Carci unboxes his second circuit, inserts both into a circuit board, and solves another puzzle. This opens the door to where the key card he needs to exit the parking garage waits for him. Entering the room triggers a cinematic and sends Carci to the next phase of the game: Playing as Claire’s secondary character, Sherry Birkin.

Sherry was abducted by the diabolical Chief Irons and is being held in the playroom of an orphanage. To escape, you must unzip the creepiest doll ever made and pull out a block covered in shapes. Inserting the block into a set of other blocks, and then arranging them in a specific pattern of shapes, is required to continue. "The only piece that you need to actually move is the first piece into the third slot. After that, you just rotate everything the correct way. It’s quick, which is how you get the achievement for getting out of that room in less than a minute." Solving the puzzle opens a drawer containing a pair of scissors, which Sherry uses to cut through duct tape that holds a slab of cardboard over a hole in the wall.

From here, Sherry’s section is both easier and riskier than that of Ada Wong, Leon’s secondary character. You head downstairs and into a room where the corpse of a young woman is laid on a table. Further exploration triggers a cutscene in which the chief appears, and Sherry hurls a bottle of chemicals at his face, disfiguring him. The cutscene ends with him preparing to chase you out of the room. Your instinct is to run for the front door of the orphanage, but it’s locked; to get the key, you must let Chief Irons chase you back upstairs and hide from him as he hunts you through a maze of toys and shelves. It’s easy if you know where to hide while Irons turns the room upside down looking for you. Sherry’s just a kid and has no means of fighting back. If he spots you once, the game ends. Technically, it’s not damage, but a game over is a game over. "I need to make absolutely sure that not one pixel of Sherry can be seen by Irons," says Carci. "It’s easy, yes, but I have slipped up before."

His caution pays off. Once the chief staggers into a bathroom to splash water on his face, still sizzling from Sherry’s attack (couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy), Carci grabs the keys from where they hang in the bathroom door and unlocks doors in her path back downstairs with Irons on his tail. You can’t escape through the front door, so you have to return to the hallway that led you to Birkin. Another cutscene plays showing the mutated William Birkin, Sherry’s papa, roughing up Chief Irons. Sherry goes into hiding, and the game shoots back over to Claire.

With the parking garage card in hand, Carci takes the elevator from the chief’s office down to the parking garage and uses the card. As the gate leading into the streets rattles upward, Mr. X warps to his position. He’s easily handled. Carci circles a parked cruiser, leading the big bad X and buying time as the gate rises. Once the path is open, he heads up a ramp and into the streets toward a fence. A zombie batters at a closed gate. When Carci draws near, the zombie will knock the door out of place and collapse on the ground. Carci runs through and straight into the arms of a second zombie.

All part of the plan. He’s got a flash grenade equipped as his defense item. Pressing the defense button shoves the grenade into the zombie’s mouth and pushes him back. "Reason being, it allows us to push forward a little bit as we use the defense item against the zombie, and it's actually the quickest escape we can get out of a defense item."

While this drama unfolds, the first zombie regains his feet and Mr. X approaches the open path. By this time, Carci is running up a set of stairs leading to a fire escape. The flash grenade triggers behind him, stunning the zombies and Mr. X, who can’t follow him onto the fire escape. Carci reaches an alleyway, shoots a Misty shambling near a dumpster, and then climbs over the dumpster into another narrow corridor with a building on one side and a fence on the other. "For the previous route I was running, I would use the nine-millimeter from the trunk of the police cruiser" in the parking garage we’ve just left behind. It’s a much better gun for Claire than her starting handgun, with a larger magazine and a laser sight that dramatically increases her odds of critical hits, but he’s got a better strategy. "I've started using the submachine gun because it's quicker and more fun," he says.

A dog barks on the other side of the fence. It’s not a threat: Once Carci goes through the gate at the far end, the dog de-spawns. Another dog takes its place, hopping onto a car and preparing to lunge at Carci. He sprays it with his SMG, then moves around the car. There’s another dog in his path, but it’s feasting on a corpse and doesn’t notice him. The SMG puts it out of its misery. Carci enters a basketball court where he picks up more SMG rounds, then peppers dogs on the far side of the chain link fence before they can climb over. Entering another street, he shoots dogs on his way to boarding a bus. A zombie stands in the row between seats. Carci shoots his way through, blasts another dog, and enters the orphanage.

He could finish this leg of the story by going down the hallway where Sherry got away from Irons earlier. First, he makes a pit stop upstairs in the toy maze, grabbing more SMG bullets from the bathroom. Then it’s downstairs and into the hallway, where Chief Irons dies a most gruesome and fitting death. Claire passes through the room where Sherry hid earlier and descends into an underground tunnel. Before she can reconnoiter with Sherry, who’s just ahead, Mr. X makes his next and final appearance in Claire’s campaign. Escaping him is as simple as running down a couple of corridors and entering an elevator. This triggers a cutscene where Mr. X pries open the doors and is a heartbeat away from squishing Claire and Sherry, but they’re saved by William Birkin, who loses his last vestige of humanity to tear Mr. X in half and save his daughter. Mr. X is officially off the board, but the elevator plunges underground.

(This has always been one of the more confusing parts of RE2 Remake’s story. Getting torn in half seems like a difficult setback to overcome, even for the seemingly indomitable Mr. X. But even though he doesn’t show up in Claire’s story again, he plays a part in Leon’s. Either he found a seamstress to sew him back together in Leon’s scenario, or Birkin never got his hands on him. The likeliest explanation is that Claire and Leon’s campaigns are more what-if scenarios detailing what each character would face if they were in the starring role, rather than parallel stories with continuity shared between them. It’s not as clean a telling as the original RE2 from 1998, which had some messy continuity errors, too, and not a big deal overall, but it’s a fun discussion point for RE fans.)

After another cutscene, Claire regains consciousness in a maintenance room to find Sherry missing. Again. Ms. Redfield is my favorite character in the RE canon, but she’s not the best babysitter. But let’s not be too hard on her. A zombie apocalypse facilitated by a corrupt pharmaceutical company and a greedy police chief qualifies as extenuating circumstances.

We’ve entered the sewers, the second of Resident Evil 2 Remake’s three main areas. Carci descends into the sewers and wades through a tunnel filled to the waist… with waste. Now, I’m gonna smell like shit, literally, Claire quips. He picks up gunpowder he’ll use later to mix SMG ammo and heads through a doorway and up a set of stairs. Below, in an adjacent room, Claire points out a cable car. That’s your ticket out of the sewers, but accessing it isn’t so simple.

At the top of the stairs, Carci enters another maintenance room where three zombies wait for dinner to be served. "There are a couple of packs of ammunition that I want to pick up, very important packs of ammunition, I might add," says Carci. Navigating the zombies makes that difficult. Two become active the moment you enter the room, while the third, a portly fellow who was napping and is understandably piqued at having his beauty sleep disturbed, hauls himself to his feet. One of the two ammo packs Carci needs, a set of flame rounds, sits near this zombie. "One thing about flame grenades is they cannot be crafted. You can only get them when you find them on the map."

Instead of risking a close encounter, Carci waits for the third zombie to regain his feet and, as the other two close in, tosses a flash grenade to blind all of them. "If I did that any earlier, this portly zombie over here would not have been standing all the way, and he would not have been affected by the flash grenade. I would have had to run them around a little more in order to get them away."

Carci picks up the flame rounds and then opens a nearby locker with the code S-Z-F, a scrambled acronym that works out to Street Fighter Zero, known as Street Fighter Alpha in the U.S. Just before the zombies regain their vision, Carci drops through a hole near the lockers and enters the sewer hub, where a locked door stands between him and the area’s boss.

A few minutes earlier, his girlfriend, whom he calls Lemon, sent a donation with a message the AGDQ host read aloud. You are so hardworking, diligent, funny, generous, and my geek. I'm counting on you. I love you. Good luck. Some of the message was in Japanese; Carci translated it for the benefit of his audience. "What she said was something that Ada says in the Japanese version of the game, which translates to, I'm counting on you."

Between the touching message that made him break into a grin and his progress so far, Carci is poised for success.

"I've already made it halfway through. This is going really well."