So, I think Silksong is truly out now. And speedrunners really took it away, leaving no dignity in the realm of what they’d call normal playtime. Under 90 minutes for a game that Team Cherry genuinely put a 5-hour achievement for… That’s wild.
Posts on social media made the dancers stop in awe and start glancing with desire. The game itself is just a few moments old in the world. Some designers have yet to install it on their own computers, while runners flaunt these absurd final gratification times that actually make us question our existence as gamers.
Somebody summed it up quite elegantly on Twitter: “Imagine grinding 6 years waiting for Silksong just to watch some dude finish it faster than my microwave popcorn.” And that’s the vibe. It’s never really been wider or funnier than that divide between casual and speedrunner.
But this isn’t some kind of freak accident or rude gesture, contrary to a few post comments. The developers literally included an achievement for speedruns, under the ridiculous name “Speed Completion,” for finishing so fast as to be under 5 hours. So the developers knew that fast runners would be proving it fast; they just might not have expected “fast” to take less time than finishing a cup of coffee.
In a less formal way, the world record currently stands proudly atop the internet chatter at about 1:17, for the any% category. The run is mainly story, not extra, and just utterly fast for a human-an-inhuman race-Well, less than a day-old, and the runners like fireb0rn are pushing to cut it down. How much will this be by week’s end? 45 minutes? 30 minutes??
Meanwhile, the average guys are worrying about how to not die to the first boss. This one is harder than Hollow Knight, they say, with brutal combat, pixel-perfect platforming, and bosses spitting into the faces of the best players. Early reviews noted a steep difficulty curve, and quite a few players have already chucked in frustrated remarks on Steam. Team Cherry even had to patch the first bosses to make them a little easier.
Speedrunners are indifferent. They see a challenge and break it-glitch, skip, sequence break, whatever. This is what makes speedrunning such a nice part of video game culture: it is not about playing the game the “right” way. It is about the fastest way. And sometimes that involves ways the developer never even imagined.
There’ve been some debates in the reply section about this whole respect issue with the devs. One user claimed it was “disrespecting developers’ life’s work,” while another countered: if the devs put in a speedrun achievement on purpose, it’s not disrespect—it’s engagement. They want players to push the limits. They built the game with that in mind.
Let’s just keep it real; finishing Silksong in 90 minutes doesn’t mean you ever “experienced” the game, as someone said. The usual speedrunners know these games inside and out, better than anyone else. They’ve studied every pixel, every frame, every possible movement. They experience the game on an utterly different level. It’s just… well, very, very fast.
The achievement for beating the game in under 5 hours is still going to be a tough ask for most players. Honestly, hitting that 5-hour mark will be a huge accomplishment for the average gamer. But for the elite runners? That’s just the warm-up. The real competition is how low they can go.
It’s also worth noting that Silksong holds near-perfect critical acclaim, achieving a 93 on Metacritic. So the speedrunners don’t take away points from the game. If anything, they enhance competition among community members who have been waiting for years.
So what now? Records are going to keep falling. Runners keep improving routes, finding more skips, and cutting seconds—sometimes minutes—from their times. Sub-1-hour runs could very well be here before the month is even out. Or even sooner.
For now, the rest of us can enjoy the game at our leisure, all while sneaking a peek at the leaderboards every now and then just to witness just how badly we’re getting humiliated. For the greater good. Mostly.
At the moment of writing this, Silksong has arrived. Whether enjoyment runs 90 minutes or 90 hours, it’s pretty much plain that Team Cherry has made another masterpiece, and the speedrunning community again produced jaw-dropping feats of skills and dedication. Excuse me now while I go practice stomping to the first enemy…again.
