Sons of the Forest devs stunned by ultra-quick Forest speedrun

pcgamesn.com:

I always feel a little bad when I see developers watching speedruns. They spend years on these games, perfecting the environments, the pacing, the balance, and here we are sprinting through, trying to break everything, and beat all their work as quickly as possible. Developers from Endnight, however, creator of the upcoming horror game and Steam wishlist darling Sons of the Forest, are verifiably “stoked” by an ultra-rapid speedrun of the original Forest, which clears the survival sim in just over 20 minutes. As we get closer to the Sons of the Forest release date, Endnight reflects on some of the ideas and tech underlying the breakout Steam hit.

Akaya Kaito, also known as ‘Akaya,’ holds various speedrunning records for The Forest, beating the multiplayer game in 19 minutes and 55 seconds on hard mode, and 19 minutes, 52 seconds in the ‘peaceful’ category, whereby players are not allowed to harm any enemy NPCs. Viewing one of Akaya’s runs, Endnight head tester Evan Haley and Sons of the Forest project director Rod Green observe some extremely shrewd strategies and exploits.

After beginning in the crashed plane, Akaya quickly grabs an assortment of chemicals and alcohol, which will be needed later to craft health and energy packs. As noted by Haley and Green, since the items in the plane randomly spawn, to get the right gear on start up Akaya must have restarted their Forest run numerous times.

Heading out into the eponymous woods, Akaya starts bunny hopping in order to increase their speed. “It definitely takes me back to testing the first game, where you’ve done this so much you just run through it, like instinct,” Haley says. Akaya then heads to the caves to grab the all-important rebreather and the keycard to the