A Baldur’s Gate 3 speedrunner has beaten the game in under four minutes, thanks to a grisly trick that lets you bypass large chunks of Larian’s acclaimed RPG. The record breaking speedrunner, ImTaiyl, shot through to what may well be Baldur’s Gate 3’s worst ending in 3:57, playing as the BG3 companion Gale, and murdering Shadowheart twice in the process.
In our previous coverage of a 10 minute speedrun by Mae, we noted that Gale is the character to pick if you want to speedrun Baldur’s Gate. That’s not just because you can use the Baldur’s Gate 3 spell Enhanced Leap to zoom around the map, and for all kinds of shenanigans. It’s also because there’s a really bad early ending for Gale where you blow him up at the closure of Act 2, killing your friends and releasing the mindflayer curse on everyone else who’s infected. You win!
Now a new trick has enabled speedrunners to slash their times in half. It’s nicknamed ‘Shadow boxing’, and it involves murdering your good friend Shadowheart, stuffing her in a trunk, box, or other container, setting it on fire, and waving it around. For some reason, doing this at the start of Act 2 allows you to skip right to the final interaction, which – if you’re playing Gale – allows you to end the game with the aforementioned explosion.
ImTaiyl’s speedrun, however, has a new use for Shadowboxing, using it as soon as you crash the mindflayer ship to skip parts of Act 1, then again in Act 2 to get right to the end. Poor cleric can’t catch a break. According to ImTaiyl’s record breaking stream on August 3, the Shadowheart trick is fiddly, and only saves you a little bit of time in Act 1, so it’s no mean feat to get a sub 4 minute time.
We’re enjoying the saga of Baldur’s Gate 3 speedrunning, as well as tales of the wacky hijinks people are getting up to in the game, like turning the narrator into Matt Berry, or becoming a disturbing serial killer. If you haven’t yet picked your dream team, check out our Baldur’s Gate 3 party composition guide. You might also want to know approximately how long Baldur’s Gate 3 is for regular humans.