So, apparently the world record Any% speedrun for Salt and Sanctuary, a game I spent over 30 hours on during my first playthrough, is clocked in at... A little under 4 and a half minutes.
I mean, I know it's Any%, but... Fucking hell.
How's that even possible? Just walking to the first boss takes like half of that time.
Long-jumping covers most of your horizontal movement needs. After that we have bell cancelling out of fatal drops, one instance of apparently just phasing through a wall into a different area, using the ferryman WAY ahead of time and then through even more bell-drops getting plopped into the middle of the Pitchwoods a few moments after killing the Queen of Smiles.
Then he ran over, irritated a spindlebeast, kited it a couple screens to the right (apparently you can outrun the fuckers when you're naked?), and then used the bell while getting impaled. Somehow this respawns you directly into the ending cutscene.
A game based entirely around killing things, and he kills a grand total of 1 or 2 things during the whole run.
Sounds like massive glitch exploitation, which those Any% speedruns are anyway.
Least the Salt and Sanctuary run actually involves playing the game, and it's not like Pokemon red/blue/yellow where all you need to do is start the game, open your inventory, fiddle around with it in a very specific way and you wrong warp directly to the end credits.
Or SNES Link to the Past where the player just clips through the wall and dimensionally travels to the last boss and beats him with a bug net.
Or Super Mario World, where you go to the first stage, fuck around with the enemies a little bit, and then re-program the game into a functioning version of Pong.
TAS's are just the best.