Leon S. Kennedy’s Spanish adventure to save the president’s daughter can be cut off short much earlier than intended, but Capcom is already working on a fix.
Resident Evil 4 is unequivocally an early Game of the Year contender. In our review, we called it “the gold standard” for what we should expect from video game remakes, but it seems that might not be the case for some players who run into a game-breaking bug during Chapter 12. Fortunately, that’s far enough into the game that it won’t drastically ruin the experience, but Capcom is still already hard at work trying to solve the issue.
While formally announcing its recognition of the bug on Twitter, Capcom also confirmed that it is “working on a fix”. It also said that the fix will allow any affected players to keep their progress, continuing the save without the need to restart once the fix has been implemented. Until that time comes, a way to avoid the game-halting technical issue has been provided by Capcom itself.
The temporary guidance is to avoid using the knife during a specific bit at the start of Chapter 12, “after which the player will receive a key item”. The way to avoid hitting the critical progress bug is to simply avoid attacking with Leon’s knife until the game presents you with a notification for obtaining the key item in the upper-right corner of the screen. Essentially, players who refrain from using the knife at the start of this chapter shouldn’t have any issues.
It's a small blemish on an otherwise exceptional remake of an already exceptional game, already acknowledged and acted upon fast by Capcom to ensure it doesn’t become too troublesome. No timeline or date was given as to when this fix will be implemented, but don’t be too surprised to see an update on PS5, Xbox Series X |S and PC roll out fairly soon.
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Everyone deserves to see and play Resident Evil 4 in its best light. The fact that there’s an incredibly specific in-game bug that might prevent people from doing so absolutely sucks, but I’m glad that Capcom has jumped in to find a solution quickly. Luckily, the bug is so specific, meaning that most players on PlayStation and Xbox will never come across it. I guess during my playthrough I’d already run out of knives by the time I hit Chapter 12.
It's yet more evidence that video games are hard to make, with even big-budget AAA titles even letting some critical game-breaking bugs slip through the cracks. Don’t let this put you off picking up Resident Evil 4, though. I found it to be a highly polished action-survival shooter, for the most part, playing and handling smoothly in both performance and resolution mode.
