Metroid Dread was released less than three weeks ago and already several speedrunners have completed Nintendo‘s critically acclaimed platformer in under an hour and a half.
At time of writing, Australian speedrunner Hardpelicn holds the world record for normal difficulty with a time of 85 minutes and 21 seconds, using the digital version of the game for the fastest possible time. The record for the hard difficulty run is only eight minutes behind this by Spanish runner, Ensalado, who completed Metroid Dread in 93 minutes and 49 seconds.
NME spoke to JRP2234, moderator of the Metroid Dread speedruns board and runner of the Any% category, where players can use any glitches or other unintended methods to complete the game as fast as possible. He claims the current barrier for speedrunners is the limited time since the game has been released.
“Games usually need at least a month before some of the better strategies are found” he said “a time around one hour and 15 minutes seems possible currently.” When asking about what technique speeds the game up the most he named ‘early screw-attack’. Obtaining this late game item earlier than intended through breaking the sequence of play, opens up several other areas in the game.
Jumping off bombs underwater and then using screw attack in combination with the lift from the waves allows runners to gain extra height needed to access late game areas. This means runners can skip playing through entire parts of the game.
The speedrun for Metroid Dread is already very popular with over 300 runners already on the leaderboards.
In other news, players of the new Nintendo 64 online service have been left disappointed as popular games Ocarina Of Time and Mario Kart 64 have launched with major issues on Switch.
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