Metal: Helsinger is torn in half by fast runners.
It looks like Metal: Hellsinger was made for the fast runner. The whole game is pretty short, with an emphasis on bringing the levels back to perfection, and trying different structures and strategies so you can make your way through Hell with ease. And now, players are doing just that, getting through the entire match in less than half an hour.
Any% record for Metal: Hellsinger dropped to 26 minutes, short of the usual playing length of four and a half hours. Even the rounds that involve defeating every optional battle the game throws at you run up to 50 minutes, requiring players to truly master rhythm-based combat as they slaughter their way through the eight stages.
As you can see in running adamcoolcat, the Any% category hardly includes playing the game as most players do. In the first few seconds of the first level, the runner finds a way to launch himself across the map, and immediately makes his way to the first boss.
Even if you follow the intended path, amazing times can still happen. Just eight hours ago at the time of writing, YouTuber The Casual has managed to bring all forced encounters down to 49 minutes and 25 seconds. Even though this gameplay is a lot longer, and one of them focused on speed rather than high scores, The Casual still manages to shoot consistently to the beat, and never seems to lose its rhythm.
While these times are incredible, it’s no surprise to anyone who’s been following a sprint. Increasingly, we’re seeing players rush to beat games faster than anyone else once they’re launched. Even games that clearly weren’t made with sprinting in mind, like Elden Ring, are quickly assembling dedicated communities, looking to launch games with a mix of loopholes, shortcuts, and an incredible amount of skill and persistence.
Speaking of Elden Ring, the register So it now sits at an astounding three minutes and 56 seconds. Even without glitches, players were able to beat the game in less than an hour, with the record currently set at 59 minutes 11 seconds.
Of course, there will always be those who do not “understand” it. If you love a game, why would you want to skip a lot of it? The best way to explain this to the non-converter is that sprinting in no way replaces casual play. By the time contestants attempt to skip and cheat, they have usually completed the “normal” gameplay experience already. Speedrunning is completely detached from this, and it almost comes from a point of curiosity about how our favorite games are grouped together. Can you beat Fallout: New Vegas without interacting with Legion? Do we need to follow the path that we have drawn in the lost? What is the ideal combination of console inputs in Super Mario Bros.? All of these questions and more are answered with sprints, as they lift the hood of our favorite games, and show us what makes them tick.
Metal: Hellsinger may be a far cry from being one of the great speed games, like Super Mario 64 and Metroid, but that hasn’t stopped these players from going extinct regardless. And as more players enter the Gates of Hell, it is possible that we will see these times crumble even more.
