'Elden Ring' First Sub 30 Minute Speedrun Is Absolutely Wild

There are several given rules within the world of gaming. Once you lose control of it, you’ll never get on top of your backlog again, PlayStation Plus subscribers will never be universally happy about any month’s free games, and there will always, always be someone out there who’s better than you at Souls games. 

Right now, it seems like we can actually narrow down exactly who that someone might be, for all of us. Popular speedrunner Distortion2 has been taking the internet by storm over the past week with his runs of Elden Ring. Only five days ago, we covered the fact that he’d managed to complete his very first speedrun of the game in under 50 minutes. Since then, he’s been breaking his own records literally every single day, but this latest run is mind-boggling.

Before we go on, be sure to check out our handy guide below to quickly farming runes in Elden Ring.

Dear reader, we’re already looking at under 30 minutes to beat Elden Ring. To be exact, he’s done it in 28 minutes and 59 seconds - you’d probably be struggling to get a takeaway pizza that fast. Keep in mind that according to HowLongToBeat, it’s meant to take around 45 hours to complete the main story alone. You can check out the full thing below, but obviously, expect to see spoilers if you’ve not finished the game yourself yet.

It’s also important to keep in mind that this is an Any% speedrun, which basically means that anything goes as long as you can reach the end of the game - even glitches and exploits. As reported by Polygon, Distortion2 “wrong-warps”, which essentially makes the game load him in to new locations when he dies instead of respawning from the places he should be, allowing him to skip to late-game areas.

People in the YouTube comments are super impressed, but are also finding it quite funny how quickly the speedrunner has been beating his own records: “I haven’t even [customised] my character and this man already got a speedrun record,” wrote MrIvang1234. “Dist is almost that living meme of the old arcade machines where we'd find all the rankings on the leaderboards filled with a single name. Man beating his own records on a daily basis. Congrats man!” commented Nero_PR. 

It’s hard to imagine how much faster you could possibly beat Elden Ring, but the speedrunning community quite literally don’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon - the fact that I had to double check Distortion2’s YouTube channel to make sure he hadn’t managed to do it any faster in the time I wrote this article really tells you all you need to know. It seems it’s only a matter of time before we’ll be going below 20 minutes.