Super Mario Bros. Wonder speedrunner beats the game in under 2 hours thanks to a glitch that lets you skip an entire castle

It's been less than a month since Super Mario Bros. Wonder was released, and noteworthy speedrunners have already been making waves with their records for clearing the game. However, the Wonder speedrunning community has been even more active lately after discovering a major exploit that changes the speedrunning game entirely.

Just recently, the current world record has been beaten by speedrunner Jhay, with the new top time sitting at one hour and 34 minutes. And it's all due to an exploit that allows players to bypass an entire castle without ever setting foot in the level.

This riveting back and forth within the Reddit community and on social media began in October when speedrunner Burgerandfreys discovered an exploit within the world map. By utilizing the two-player mode, some manipulation of the character select menu, and even more button mashing, one character can skip over a castle by taking advantage of the positioning of the game's camera on the world map. Doing this glitch will trick the game into thinking the castle is cleared due to the rapid jumps between menus and the camera, allowing one of the characters to walk past it without ever entering the level. 

So far, the skip only works for the first three worlds of the game, but the community has been experimenting to see how much further they can take it. Still, that hasn't stopped players from using it to clear the game as quickly as possible. The previous record sat at a little over two hours 20 minutes, but after the exploit was discovered for the previous worlds, the record was overtaken three times. 

Currently, Jhay is working to whittle down his best time further as he sees more improvements in his run. But given that speedrunners are still working to explore Wonder and uncover other exploits, it's very well possible that this record could be bypassed entirely once again following another discovery. Or perhaps Nintendo will see what's happened and decide to patch the game to remove the exploits - only time will tell.

Currently, Super Mario Bros. Wonder is a hit among fans of the series and has been a best-seller since its debut. In the full GamesRadar+ review, global editor-in-chief Sam Loveridge stated: "Super Mario Bros. Wonder is an excellent 2D Mario game with easily the most impressive world-building we've seen in this style. The trilogy of new power-ups are brilliant fun, and regularly humorous, with Nintendo's finishing touches adding extra personality at every turn. The Wonder Flowers are just magical too, rounding off a truly indelible Mario experience." 

For more on Super Mario Bros. Wonder, check out our recent posts focusing on the developer insights that Nintendo shared, which includes details on the 2000+ ideas they had for the game, and the reason why they included a Dark Souls-style co-op feature for the game.