#Speedrunners game items how to#

On top of all that, you feel like a diabolical speedrunning master while doing it.

Levels are so short and smartly designed that even when you finally master one, you’ll still remember your Bambi-like first steps through it. More importantly, you can feel that progression. In Neon White, you can go from awkwardly fumbling your way through a level the first time to blazing past its trickiest sections with pure muscle memory on the 20th or 30th. Every step in the process is meticulously calibrated to engage the pleasure centers of your brain – and not in the cheap, mindless sense that you might associate with, say, loot-driven shooters or mobile games. This might sound labourious, but it’s not. Also you still have 120 more levels to go, and everybody else in the world somehow has a better time than you. You nail every twist, turn and flourish and hit that sub-17 second sweet spot to unlock an Ace medal. You tweak and optimise – or maybe you realise you’re beating your head against a wall and seek out a new route altogether. So then you run the level again with your new theory in mind. And if you can figure out a perfect point at which to leap up a couple stories and dash forward, maybe you can proceed to bypass half the level.īut of course, that’s all theoretical. And if you can use cards to leap that high at one spot in the level, maybe you can hold on to those cards and climb that high almost anywhere else in the level. If the gift is up there, it must be possible for you, too, to get up there. Where once you might have used cards that propel you forward at blinding speed to ping-pong between enemies en route to a ground-level finish line, you might go on to discover a gift positioned at a level’s highest point, resulting in cascading eureka moments. Gifts are almost always positioned not to reveal a level’s best-shrouded secrets but to get you thinking. Suddenly, it’s no longer about sprinting, shooting and slashing instead, you’re tasked with using each area’s specific array of cards to circumvent the main path, which the gift is never on. This simple change wholly reframes each location. You can then run the level again to try to figure out the gift’s location. At that point, a gift – which you can later offer to another character to deepen your relationship with them – spawns somewhere on the course. It’s only after you first “beat” a level that it evolves into its most sublime form.

#Speedrunners game items how to#

Playing the specific hand you’re dealt in each level – and realising how to creatively exploit it – is key in optimising your run times. One allows you to double jump, another lets you slam down with craterous impact and so on. You can use various items, which take the form of cards that act as either demon-slaying guns or single-use abilities depending on how you deploy them, in service of this. At the outset of each blistering obstacle course – many of which can last fewer than 30 seconds – the goal is simply to kill every demon and reach the finish line. But the real relationship at the heart of the game is that between the player and the individual levels. On its face, Neon White is about a deceased assassin with amnesia, White, competing against other assassins to kill demons. It does a masterful job of making you feel like the genius who figured out the skips that speedrunners rely on in popular games – even if you are actually kind of bad at it. Neon White is a first-person platformer meant to be played this way. By comparison, the run itself is a victory lap. The process of slipping outside a level’s boundaries and into the warped, glitchy worlds between is fascinating – the end result of hundreds of hours of studious play. Rather, it’s listening to runners methodically explain how they’ve managed to skip massive chunks of a game’s intended path. A good speedrunner cuts through a game like a katana through butter, bypassing complex fights and puzzles with delectable smoothness.īut the best part of speedrunning events – like the currently ongoing Summer Games Done Quick or Awesome Games Done Quick – is not strictly the blinding-fast action. The Washington Post – Speedrunning, the art of completing a video game as quickly as humanly possible, is a marvel to watch.