Red Barrels’ terrifying first-person horror game Outlast has a new speedrun world record in the extremely difficult 100 percent category, besting the previous record by a razor-thin seven seconds.
A Finnish runner Falex has been grinding Outlast as part of a six-day Twitch marathon. He broke the previous record of 28 minutes, 25 seconds with a time of 27 minutes, 53 seconds. Outlast’s 100 percent category is particularly challenging because it calls for players to locate every in-game file and use the handheld camera to record every noteworthy scary moment that the game’s protagonist Miles Upshur adds to his journal.
There are numerous strategies for speedrunning Outlast. When you reload the game, you will skip an invisible chapter break, advance several meters, and unlock the ability to jump and land without stagger, saving precious seconds, if you save and quit the game soon after Miles crawls through a hole in the Mount Massive Asylum perimeter fence.
Additionally, Miles can turn while in midair, eliminating the need to precisely angle each jump and ledge grab. Instead, you can simply leap, turn, and move into the appropriate position all in one fluid motion, saving a significant amount of time throughout the course of the game.
The ability to glitch outside of a level’s boundaries, however, and completely skip parts of the game, is the most significant. Outlast requires you to hold down left click and then draw the mouse toward you in a manner akin to pulling on the door, much like Frictional’s Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Soma. If you stop Miles from moving, he can escape and teleport to the top of the doorframe. From there, you can use Outlast’s level geometry flaws to fall through the world and land in the subsequent area or chapter.
All of these techniques are demonstrated in Falex’s run, which will probably be difficult to top given how well-optimized Outlast has become since its 2014 release.
Of course, the game can be completed much more quickly. The current any percent record for Outlast, held by Dutch player JayV, stands at an absurd eight minutes, six seconds. If you want to feel like you’ll never be good at games again, it’s definitely worth watching. Any percent runs do not require the gathering of notes or journal entries, and using boundary break bugs allows you to complete the game in less than ten minutes
You can watch runs of Elden Ring, Grand Theft Auto, and Final Fantasy during the upcoming week on Summer Games Done Quick, which has just begun its 2022 marathon.
