Resident Evil 4 remake has a funny Easter egg that lets you skip the first major fight

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Un clever bastardo!

Resident Evil 4 Remake secret weapons - Leon protecting Ashley
(Image credit: Capcom)

Resident Evil 4 remake is pretty great and, while it didn't quite stick the landing for me, the core of the game is a combat system that can only be described as exquisite. The remake somehow keeps the same fundamental elements but, through judicious addition and re-working the ganados around Leon's newfound ability to move while aiming, updates the brutality and intensity of the crowd-management while feeling like Resident Evil 4 every instant. The best sequences in this game are the massive fights against crowds of enemies.

R4 remake isn't shy about showing them off either: You'll have dozens, but the very first is a total blowout designed to give players a serious workout. It comes when Leon, having ventured from the outskirts, enters the village square for the first time. You can kill one or two enemies with stealth but, as soon as they spot you, it's on, and soon enough there's a chainsaw involved. This fight is both hard as hell and glorious, with the game throwing wave after relentless wave until the player has survived long enough. Then the church bell rings, the ganados suddenly turn passive, and they all shamble off as Leon wonders WTF just happened.

It turns out that in R4 remake Capcom has added an easter egg allowing players to skip this encounter. That church bell, it turns out, is visible from various vantage points in the village and, if you hit it successfully with a bullet, it will ring. So you can start the fight, run straight into the house that triggers the appearance of the chainsaw, then immediately clamber out to the roof, dink the bell, and end matters after a few seconds. This chap shows how though, as that's not embeddable, you can see the same clip in the below tweet.

I mean, this is neat as hell, obviously has big implications for speedrunners, and it speaks to the attention-to-detail in this remake that the development team found it funny enough to include. I'm not going to give you any boring lectures about not skipping the fight because it's so good either, because this mob killed me like six times so fuck those guys and gals.

Resident Evil 4 remake has been received largely positively and, with the Mercenaries mode on due on April 4, will probably find itself in contention on many folks' best of the year lists. I'm taking a break before starting my Professional runthrough for one very good reason.

I'm going to sit back, relax, and wait for the mod that lets me play through this as Joe Biden: Though, of course, the first thing modders actually did was put Leon in a thong.

Rich Stanton
Rich Stanton
Senior Editor

Rich is a games journalist with 15 years' experience, beginning his career on Edge magazine before working for a wide range of outlets, including Ars Technica, Eurogamer, GamesRadar+, Gamespot, the Guardian, IGN, the New Statesman, Polygon, and Vice. He was the editor of Kotaku UK, the UK arm of Kotaku, for three years before joining PC Gamer. He is the author of a Brief History of Video Games, a full history of the medium, which the Midwest Book Review described as "[a] must-read for serious minded game historians and curious video game connoisseurs alike."