Baldur’s Gate 3 speedruns are less than 4 minutes thanks to a corpse and a box

destructoid.com:

Baldur’s Gate 3 is a massive CRPG that can engross you for hundreds of hours. It’s chock full of adventure, romance, and creative shenanigans that take multiple playthroughs to experience fully. But what if you’ve got dinner in the microwave and only have a few minutes?

Well, if you’re like Mae or ImTaiyl , you can beat Baldur’s Gate 3 in less than four minutes (not counting loading time) using a technique known as “Shadowboxing.”

In Baldur’s Gate 3 , you can typically only throw objects a certain distance from you. If you try to throw an object to an invalid location, the game simply won’t let you and the object will stay at its original position. However, the game will store the location you tried to move the object to.

Let’s say the object is a box that has an opening animation. For some reason, this animation breaks all logic. If you open the box, trigger the animation, and move the box to a valid location, the box will instead move to the invalid location you chose earlier .

This is already brimming with possibilities, but how is this relevant to the speedrun? Well, let’s say you want to trigger a cutscene at the end of Act 2 that takes you to one of the game’s endings. You would normally trigger the cutscene yourself by walking into it, but walking is slow and boring. Why do that when you can throw the corpse of one of your companions into the cutscene trigger? It turns out that a dead companion counts as a valid entity that can trigger the ending cutscene.

Unfortunately for Shadowheart, she is the easiest companion to find and kill for speedrunning purposes. The route for the Baldur’s Gate 3 speedrun involves brutally murdering your companion, stuffing her corpse into a box, setting the box on