Out-of-bounds glitches are a common tool for speedrunners to make their runs faster by leaving where the game wants them to be in order to bypass obstacles and sections of the world. A recent Summer Games Done Quick (SGDQ) run of Cyanide Studio's Styx: Shards of Darkness has a speedrunner not only exploit an out-of-bounds glitch, but play around with developer tools to skip sections of the game.
Early Monday morning, speedrunner Tohelot played through Styx: Shards of Darkness, the 2017 action-stealth game featuring the second appearance of the titular goblin thief. Near the fifteen minute mark, the run took an interesting turn when Tohelot manuvered Styx out-of-bounds and landed him on a stone platform with a flowchart. This flowchart, as he and host Char_bunny explain, is a data table built into the levels that holds all the information about level objectives. By walking over the shapes and interacting with them, he can mark objectives and parts of the level as complete and quickly clear stages, although Char_bunny notes that sometimes classic speedrunning is quicker.
Other notable SGDQ runs:
- BlueMetal's run of Metal Wolf Chaos XD fittingly took place on the 4th of July. This Cutscene% run allowed everyone to see the awesomely over-the-top battles between the President's mech suit and a treasonous coup by the Vice President, along with all the amazing cutscenes.
- The first of SGDQ's bonus games, JCog's run of Paper Mario was made more interesting with a Stop 'n' Swop gimmick, which has them begin in Ocarina of Time, complete ACE (Arbitrary Code Execution) to load the data of the save file name into the N64's expansion pack, and then hotswap to Paper Mario to beat the game in only 50 minutes.
What streams to look out for:
- ClaireLynnD will be playing a 100% No Source run of Majora's Mask on Wednesday night around 10 PM Eastern. This means they'll be getting everything in the game except for items that need other items to collect. Expect plenty of strange pathing and for Claire to escape Clock Town before they even get the ocarina.
- Astro's Playroom at 9:30 Eastern Friday morning and the Demon's Souls remake at 7:15 Eastern on Saturday night are both notable as being the first PS5 exclusive runs to be at SGDQ.
- Friday afternoon around 3:30 Eastern, frozenflygone will be playing a selection of custom maps for Celeste. If you though the original game was hard, these stages require pinpoint precision for platforming straight out of a Kaizo Mario romhack.
- Saturday features a whole bunch of big runs in a row. Starting just before 8 AM Eastern, there's a random seed run of Super Meat Boy Forever, a glitchless playthrough of Pokemon Emerald, a glitchless playthrough of Bowser's Fury, all the 150cc cups in Mario Kart 64, a blindfolded 70 stars playthrough of Super Mario 64, the big 100% speedrun race for Super Metroid, and Dark Souls 3.
What is SGDQ?
SGDQ is a video game speedrunning charity marathon held biyearly (with Awesome Games Done Quick.) For over ten years, these events feature runners playing games from every generation of gaming history and explain the tricks and glitches they exploit in order to get the fastest times. Various donation incentives included during the marathons give players the opportunity to see more streams and have some agency in what the runners do, such as naming characters. This year, they're raising money for Docters Without Borders.
You can watch the SGDQ stream on Twitch here, and the full schedule can be found here. If you want to see Tohelot's run from the beginning, you can see it here.
