Watch Sekiro beaten in under an hour by an absolute madman
Speedrunners have become too powerful
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.
Sekiro walkthrough | Sekiro tips | Sekiro Dragon rot | Sekiro Prayer Beads | Sekiro Gourd seeds | Sekiro bosses| Sekiro endings| Sekiro Snap Seeds | Sekiro Shinobi Prosthetic tools
Sign up to the GamesRadar+ Newsletter
Weekly digests, tales from the communities you love, and more
Austin freelanced for the likes of PC Gamer, Eurogamer, IGN, Sports Illustrated, and more while finishing his journalism degree, and he's been with GamesRadar+ since 2019. They've yet to realize that his position as a senior writer is just a cover up for his career-spanning Destiny column, and he's kept the ruse going with a focus on news and the occasional feature, all while playing as many roguelikes as possible.
This new indie D&D campaign setting brings Studio Ghibli and Zelda: Breath of the Wild aesthetics and worldbuilding to the tabletop RPG, and I'm already scheming hard as a DM
I've seen enough: Assassin's Creed Shadows will beat Black Flag as my favorite AC game as Ubisoft says it lets you "Naruto run" as the "fastest Assassin" it's ever made