The good people of IGN have recently teamed up with Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky, the co-designers of The Outer Worlds, to pursue a fast-paced run of their new RPG. They called the 12-minute jaunt “unbelievable”, and you can follow the above embedded video.
[Warning: This video corrupts one of the possible endings in The Outer Worlds, while the audio itself spoils much of the rest of the game.]
The speedrunning community has hit The Outer Worlds pretty hard since it came out a month ago. The first run that made headlines came just four days after launch, when YouTuber Jabo finished the game in just over 30 minutes. Now CreeperHntr has reduced it to about 12 minutes, with the fastest time being about 11:13 seconds when it was written.
The secret to their success is an extremely low level of intelligence that gives a character the advantage of being “stupid”. In this way, you can skip some sections of the game and foolishly throw the colony ship into the sun. Cain and Boyarsky have their own secrets as they run. They are also clearly interested in what the speed running community can achieve without the benefit of low intelligence that leaves many of their meticulous storytelling behind.