Game News While this Dark Souls speedrun record was considered unbeatable, a Silent Hill fan pulled out a secret weapon

Game news While this Dark Souls speedrun record was considered unbeatable, one Silent Hill fan pulled out a secret weapon

Dark Souls are one of speedrunners’ favorite playgrounds. There are many routes to reach the end of the adventure in record time and, here, it is the first in the series that will interest us. Having remained at the top for four years, a player was dethroned by another speedrunner – from Silent Hill to the base – who set up an unprecedented path to achieve this result.

A little revolution

There are several categories per game in the world of speedrunning, here it is the “Any% Force Quit” which will interest us. The goal is simply to reach the end credits as quickly as possible with permission to use the “Wrong Wrap”, a bug allowing the player to teleport to a location normally unreachable. The best in this exercise is Captain Toinon, or at least that’s what we thought until a Silent Hill speedrunner, named OpaqueGlassJar, suggested the idea of ​​using a different weapon , the sword of the black knight.

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The goal is to buy a bow from the merchant in the undead village and then bet on the appearance of a black knight. Then, with a little luck, continue towards the Taurus demon, which can be passed easily thanks to a “glitch”. Once the sword is recovered, another of these glitches increases the player’s damage, then confronts the Gargoyles of the Bell, returns to the Firelink sanctuary, passes Twilight Hamlet in the direction of Quelaag to return to the traditional route. After being optimized by the community, this new path allowed CapitaineToinon to reduce his time by 40 seconds, going from 19:49 to 19:09 for the complete run, before being beaten by QueueKyoo, with a time of 18:51. A new example that shows how speedrunning strategies are multiple and constantly evolving.

Speedrunning, a constantly evolving world

We saw this with Dark Souls, released in 2011, even 12 years later, techniques were discovered to improve speedrunning. The most convincing example is the most “speedrunner” game in history, Mario 64. During the year 2023, a new technique makes it possible to save no less than 45 seconds in the 120 star category, which is colossal. In the level “Rainbow Ride”, to collect the star “The Big House in The Sky”, you have to wait for a flying carpet to reach the holy grail, but players have discovered ways to pass it and reach the end of the level with the tools available in game, 20 years after the last big discovery.