This is a glitchless and deathless any% speedrun of Beyond Shadowgate on Steam PC version 1.0.0.2 with ending A.
IGT: 0:08:39
I wasn't planning on doing another run, what I was going for however was getting all the achievements. During my first runs, I had disabled the Steam Overlay in case I would get a Steam message in the middle of the run. The achievements were still tracked by the game, but not by Steam. So after re-doing a couple of runs to get them on Steam again, I got tempted to have another shot at this because I noticed that I had already become significantly faster at navigation, and I stopped making embarrassing mistakes that would require back-tracking. And I'm glad that I did: Almost saving 10 minutes from my previous run!
This run was done on keyboard and mouse. Aside from reaction faster to things generally, most of the improvements lay in using they keyboard hotkeys for actions such as U for "USE". I was hesitant to do this at first; while using only the mouse would inevitably be a bit slower, mixing in the keyboard keys got me way too confused and I would end up spending a lot of time just to catch up mentally. I found a better mix between the two however, using mostly U and T (USE and TAKE) while letting the mouse do much of the MOVE navigation, because OPEN and MOVE can be done much of the time without even selection any of those two actions. However, whoever ends up mastering the use of hotkeys will master this game.
Here's a few general strategies used when speedrunning this game:
-Whenever there's a dialogue, hold the cursor outside of any interactable screen. This makes it more convenient to click through dialogues because it will be very clear when it has completely ended and you won't have any additional dialogues from invalid actions.
-As previously mentioned, OPEN and MOVE can usually be done on "obvious" paths. Doors will
automatically open and can be walked through without any action selection. Therefor, as soon as a door has been unlocked with a key, use the right-mouse button to deselect the action and then just click the door to both open and enter it.
-The move screen is usually the more consistent method of navigation, however, in some areas it may be preferable to click directly on the event screen. For example, inside of the haunted mansion there's a room with a fire place. You're supposed to enter the fire place but it does not appear as an option on the move screen, so you have to click it directly. Another example is in the main hall of the mansion, the path leading up to the stairs has the square located a bit further on the right, and that can lead to an intuitive click towards the basement instead. An item might appear right in that exact spot too so in such a case you can press T or U right after while having the cursor in the right place.
-A more sophisticated routing error in this run is not properly learning spells or using up items at the right time. Whenever a spell has been learned, the game will shift over to the spell page. For example, in this run, learning the first spell (6:41) brought up the spell page, so I had to navigate back to find the King's wine. An example of where it went well is during the late-game (34:28), using up the red shards emptied the page and automatically scrolled to the page where the rest of the shards were located. This may seem like a non-issue but during the late game there's a late of pages and it will likely add up.
-The game has 4 different endings. Ending A is the fastest ending.
As an ending to this wall of text, I guess I will add that I routed and compared the four different endings. Starting from the last checkpoint where they diverge, I made a play-through to the end using each route for each ending. These timed comparisons included some minor mistakes so they are rough comparisons:
-Ending A (+0)
-Ending B (+152 or +2:34)
-Ending C (+61 or +1:01)
-Ending D (+101 or +1:41)
In addition, Ending B also requires a different route for the mansion, which in my rough comparison to ending A took exactly 1 minute longer. Expect Ending B runs to take around 3 and a half minutes longer.
I plan on doing a run for each of the other endings, but I may upload these as unlisted videos.
4 окт 2024
