The most exciting one for me is Hades. It’ll be played by “Vorime”, a speedrunner I wrote about before after he beat in the game in under eight minutes. He’s beaten that time since, too, and now sits in the top five on the Hades speedrunning leaderboard. For AGDQ he’s doing an All Weapons run, which means he’ll have to beat the final boss and escape the underworld with each of the game’s six weapons, and he’ll have 2:20:00 to do it. A cool thing about this one is that it’s unseeded, so just like normal play he won’t know in advance what boons and items he’ll be offered. That’s probably why the run has such a long allotted time, come to think of it. RNG can be a cruel mistress.
Runner “Waifu_” will be taking on Left 4 Dead 2’s new The Last Stand mini-campaign solo with just 15 minutes to beat it, and runner “Muty” is going for a 32 minute Half-Life win. Then there’s Celeste. I always have time for Celeste speedruns. Partially because they’re rarely longer than 20 minutes, but mostly because watching them makes me believe I could be better at the game than I am. Honourable mentions include Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice in 25 mins (how?), Diablo 3 co-op in 1:35:00, Warcraft 3 in 1:25:00, as well as Dishonored 2, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 and Dragon Age: Origins - but so many more good’uns are on the cards. Check out the full game list for yourself on the AGDQ website. Similarly to this year’s Summer Games Done Quick, AGDQ 2021 will be a completely digital event to avoid any risks from the ongoing pandemic. It takes place between the 3rd and the 10th of January next year.
