"Insanely hard" Silksong true ending speedrun world record is somehow already under 4 hours: "We have to do the entire game with 5 masks and 2 needle upgrades"

Hollow Knight: Silksong speedrunners are tearing through Pharloom like termites through wood, already pushing the world record for one of the game's toughest speedrun categories below the four-hour mark.

Longtime Hollow Knight speedrunner BlueSR notched a 3:56:12 clear of Silksong's true ending on September 28, just days after setting the previous record at 4:35:56.

Nearly 40 minutes were shaved off in a week, and BlueSR reckons the time can go significantly lower from here with comparable routing and better execution. "I think, realistically, a 3:50:00 is pretty possible," he says in the video, later proposing 3:40:00 in a separate tweet.

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Achieving Silksong's true ending is separate to, and easier than, getting 100% completion, but it does still require clearing a lot of content. You have to finish 17 side quests to unlock the quest which in turn unlocks Act 3 of the game, and you need to find enough lost fleas to unlock the final location for the flea circus.

This "takes up most of the mid game of this run, so that's why it's such a long one," BlueSR explains in the freshly recorded run. The majority of the run is the lead-up to Act 3, with the final act lasting just under an hour.

The kicker is that the current optimal route does not give you time to get some essential upgrades which make Silksong much more bearable. "This run is insanely hard, since we have to do the entire game (including late game) with 5 masks and 2 needle upgrades," BlueSR said on Twitter after their previous clear.

True to his word, BlueSR finishes the new record run with just the base five masks of health. And with a weaker needle, silk attacks augmented by tools become even more important, leaving even fewer resources available for healing.

For comparison, days before Silksong was released, a Hollow Knight speedrunner clutched a 112% (100% + DLCs) APB (All Pantheon Boss) run of the original game in just 2:49:59. Silksong is a much newer game which speedrunners know far less about, but this feels like a pretty good point of comparison for how much bigger Silksong really is. The current record for a bare minimum true ending run of Silksong is more than an hour longer than the most comprehensive Hollow Knight speedrun.

For a more direct comparison, the true ending speedrun record for Hollow Knight is just 1:00:59 with load times removed. This is a little unfair because Silksong's core structure puts far more side content between you and the true ending, whereas Hollow Knight can be pared down to a pretty mad dash. But again, it goes to show just how much stuff developer Team Cherry packed into this thing. An Any% run of Silksong only just went below an hour.

Speedrun.com is beginning to fill up with Silksong records, and at the time of writing, BlueSR is both the only and leading contestant for the true ending category. There are currently no 100% completion records (or a category for them, for that matter), but I'm sure we'll see that change in the months ahead.

Hollow Knight: Silksong sicko laughs in the face of the difficulty discourse, completes the metroidvania without taking a single hit because "it did not seem that bad."