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You can beat Resident Evil 4 Remake without shooting anyone

Resident Evil 4 Remake is a high body count horror shooter, but actually you can beat the new version of Capcom’s classic without Leon Kennedy landing a bullet.

Resident Evil 4 Remake no shooting: A secret agent with long hair, Leon Kennedy from Capcom survival horror game Resident Evil 4 Remake

Resident Evil 4 Remake is a constant battle for survival, as wave after wave of the iconic Ganados swarm Leon Kennedy over 16 high-body-count chapters. But remember, this is still at heart a survival horror game. Like the original Resident Evil, and the other RE games before it, carefully managing and deploying your ammunition remains an essential mechanic. Now, one Resident Evil 4 Remake player takes this strategy to the next level, somehow finishing the entire game without landing a single shot on anyone.

So, to be clear, this doesn’t mean completing Resident Evil 4 without killing anyone. There are boss fights, scripted sequences, and areas that you cannot pass through until certain enemies are dead, so doing a complete no-kill run would be impossible without some significant glitching. No. YouTuber ‘Xenoxygene’ has created something much more elaborate and painful than just skipping huge chunks of the game. They actually complete Resident Evil 4 Remake, start to finish, without landing one single bullet on anyone.

You might remember that after the end of each RE4 Remake chapter, you get a results screen which lists enemies killed, game time, and accuracy. Xenoxygene’s mission is to make sure that every single results screen lists 0% accuracy, as in, not a single round that they fire hits even one enemy.

But there’s a loophole. Frag grenades and flash grenades don’t count as bullets, so you can defeat necessary enemies like Salazar using those, while running past most of the general Ganados. Almost sounds simple, right? Well, think back to chapter 11, during the minecart chase. If you don’t shoot the enemies in the minecarts chasing you, you can’t progress. At the same time, you’re bound to Red 9 and can’t use any other weapons. This is where Xenoxygene gets seriously impressive.

Resident Evil 4 Remake no shooting: A secret agent with dark hair and a red dress, Ada Wong from Capcom survival horror game Resident Evil 4 Remake

The YouTuber works out that you can ‘kill’ the enemies by shooting the minecarts themselves, not the Ganados riding them. Nevertheless, this does count towards accuracy, meaning the game registers a certain amount of shots landed. For Xenoxygene, this isn’t good enough, so they devise a supremely intelligent – but absolutely absurd – solution.

To finish chapter 11, it’s necessary to land a minimum of 25 bullets. The objective therefore is to drive accuracy down as much as possible. If, for example, Xenoxygene fires 50 bullets during the chapter, and lands the essential 25, their accuracy will be listed as 50%. 100 bullets would drive it down to 25%. 250 bullets would put it at 10%. You see where this is going.

Xenoxygene calculates that in order to push their accuracy down to a fractional 0.048%, they need to fire a total of 52,000 shots in chapter 11, before landing the essential 25 in the minecart section. There probably aren’t 52,000 bullets in the whole of Resident Evil 4 Remake. But there are darts from the dart gun…

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Xenoxygene starts firing darts into the ceiling, picking them back up, and repeating the process. To fire 52,000 however would take hours, so the YouTuber writes a little in-game script and leaves it running. 52,000 fired-and-retrieved bolts later, they return. We won’t spoil what happens after that.

We’ve seen Amnesia The Bunker finished in 90 seconds, and Resident Evil 2 completed without even moving. But this is really something special. Congratulations to Xenoxygene on one of the most masochistic Resident Evil challenge runs of all time.

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