Baldur’s Gate 3’s uber-hard honour mode has now been beaten in under 20 minutes, and I feel bad at video games

A Baldur’s Gate 3 speedrunner has beaten the game’s formidably tough Honour mode in under 20 minutes, as part of a valiant crusade against the very idea of video games taking less time than it takes one of your grandparents to persuade their body to leave a comfy armchair.

Whether it’s managing to bed Lae’zel in a fashion that even one of Larian’s romance quest designers thinks is cool or finding a way to rapidly get it on with Halsin in bear form, if you aren’t familiar with BG3’s speedrunning community by now, I’m not quite sure what to say. That is, aside from the phrase ‘what this latest work of art and tell me how you feel about how crap you are at Larian’s RPG in comparison’.

Following on from fellow runner Chronos’s efforts to make everyone who’s tried the mode re-evaluate their talents, Mae’s casually become the first person to coast through it in less than twenty minutes. Their official time was 19 minutes and 32 seconds, a nice little improvement on the 21 minute and 17 second run they notched just a couple of weeks ago.

How’d they do it? Well, using the same flying stealth bear one-shot technique that also recently earned them a sub-20 minute all acts run, in addition to a bunch of other quirky strats that community’s devised as it’s raged against the machine that is having to actually take time to play Baldur’s Gate 3.

They even ran into “a softlock where Jaheira was unable to use any actions” at around the 18 minute mark of the run, which Mae suggests was triggered when they “hit a jump input at the exact same time [they were] mindbroken” and could only be fixed by reloading a save in a fashion that’s allowed as part of the run’s rules. Of course, not even that was enough to throw a wrench in the works.

Since Mae’s seemingly still on a mission to nab the record in five different BG3 speedrun categories, who knows what kind of playthrough they’ll demolish next.

Maybe one that ends with an Astarion forehead kiss if they decide to wait until Patch 6 arrives.