Speedrunner defeats the souls of the PS5 demon in under 20 minutes

It took me 20 hours to beat the Souls of the demon remake on PlayStation 5, but speedrunners have already discovered a massive bug that allows them to beat it in under 20 minutes.

The setup, known as “misrepresentation” or “forced resignation,” needs some explanation. Souls of the demon is made up of checkpoints called archstones, which are functionally similar to bonfires in Dark souls. Unlike bonfires, however, archstones are more sporadic, primarily acting as starting locations for levels in the older game. While players usually start over at the last Archstone they used when starting the game or relaunching, there is a small window between level loading and a new Archstone spawning in progress. backup that can be tapped, as shown in the speedrunner Distortion2 how-to video below.

In short, save your spawn point on an archstone in an area, teleport to a different area, force quit via the PS5’s context menu after the area loads but before your spawn point is saved, return to the game and dying will warp you to the same number arch in the second area. This can be used to perform massive jumps, like jumping straight to boss battles against the Dragon God or the Old King Allant, as long as you have progressed to the required Archstone in a separate area.

Distortion2, which pioneered Souls of the demon discoveries like opening the mysterious hidden door of the remake, recently used this erroneous distortion issue to complete the game in just 19 minutes, according to the in-game timer. It takes a bit of preparation before the race – Distortion2 registers its appearance at Phalanx’s Arch with a separate character before create his speedrun character in order to jump all the opening level – but after that he leaves for the races.

This Souls of the demon bug also has beneficial side effects. The mistaken warp in the Lost Sanctuary boss fight puts you right in front of Maiden Astraea, eliminating the need to defeat his bodyguard Garl Vinland or fight the toxic sludge that surrounds him. And the endgame boss fight against Old King Allant is made trivial since his AI won’t charge if you warp in his arena.

Running Distortion2 also uses the same environmental collision problem as Almost brought him to the area beyond the hidden door to jump a large part of Latria’s Tower and hook up the Ring of the Smart Rat, which increases damage by 50% when your health is below 30%.

Bluepoint Games has worked hard to eliminate the bugs in Souls of the demon since the game was released almost two weeks ago. So far, the developers have eliminated an issue that gave players nearly endless souls to suck the soul of a player who took advantage of huge luck wins from another bug, and also added an invisible wall to prevent players from skip a decent sized piece of Upper Latria en route to the Maneaters boss fight.

It’s unclear when the bugs activating the speedrun will be removed, but by then you can bet Souls of the demon players will continue to use them to reduce their time as much as possible.