Watch Sekiro beaten in under an hour by an absolute madman

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, you may have heard, is a very hard game. We said as much in our Sekiro review, and anyone who's played it will tell you it can be teeth-grindingly, toe-curlingly, eye-twitchingly brutal. But just as surely as the sun rises in the east, where there's a game kicking everyone's ass, there's a speedrunner who can make it look easy. Today that speedrunner is danflesh111, who recently beat Sekiro in just 50 minutes and 52 seconds.

Dan was gunning for any Any% record, so he only had to clear the minimum requisite bosses and the final boss, but it's still a staggeringly impressive run. Hell, if you take Dan's completion time of 50:52 and stick a comma in there, you get 5,052, also known as the average number of times most players will die while playing Sekiro. Death animations take a couple of seconds apiece, so with some quick napkin math, we can deduce that most players will spend more time dying than Dan spent beating the game. Speedrunners, man.

The really scary thing is that speedrunners will undoubtedly shave minutes off Dan's already impressive time in the near future. The great Sekiro speedrunning race has only just begun, after all. According to Speedrun.com, Dan holds the current Any% record, with German player OddBod roughly 30 minutes behind at 1:19:38. And that's just Any% - who knows what glitches and tools speedrunners will come up with to create wild new brackets.

I can't guarantee that our Sekiro tips will lead you to a one-hour run, but I can guarantee they'll help you stay alive and get the most out of this immaculate action RPG.