Mario Kart World hasn't even been out for a full week yet, but players have already found multiple ways to take advantage of its new mechanics for some wild shortcuts, including the new Rewind feature.
Rewind – an option that lets you quickly travel back in time to retrace your steps in the Switch 2 game – was quickly adopted by those racing against CPU racers to avoid things like blue shells and generally clown on their opponents. I'll be honest, I thought that's where the Rewind antics would end – after all, the feature can only be used in single-player, so you can't take the strategy online. However, it turns out it can also be used in the Time Trials mode, and one player has discovered that it can be used to complete laps incredibly quickly.
Highlighted by YouTube creator Jopes, it turns out that if you take to a course with a small enough track, like the bite-sized Koopa Troopa Beach, and then reverse backwards from the finish line, using the Rewind feature will take you all the way around the course and complete a lap for you, all while looking like you sped your game up.
After some testing and optimizations, Jopes found that when reversing around a route for two laps, Rewind won't just complete a full lap for you when used, but also give you a significant head-start on the next one. After driving as close to the inner edge of the track as possible (off-road and cutting corners over grassy patches) Jopes was able to use this to then finish off a lap with a total time just short of 13 seconds – 12.856 seconds, to be exact – achieving what was a world record lap time for the track.
At the moment, it seems unlikely that you'd be able to do this to set a world record for the whole track – after all, driving backwards is slower, so the benefit can only really be applied to a single lap, like we see above. Still, who knows what speedrunners might be able to use it for going forward – we're already seeing some wild shortcuts as players bounce off palm trees and use the wall-riding tech to skip over corners, so we can definitely expect more strategies like this to come.
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