Ever since Baldur’s Gate 3 launched last month, players have been scrambling to set increasingly ridiculous speedrunning records to complete the RPG – but speedrunner Mae has set a new record of under five minutes with an extremely cursed tactic that involves killing Shadowheart and putting her in a box.
The very-broken strategy is being dubbed ‘Shadowboxing’ and is fully outlined in Mae’s recent YouTube video that shows just how the speedrunner managed to complete the game in its entirety (rolling end credits and all) in four minutes and 15 seconds.
Mae starts by selecting Gale as her Baldur’s Gate 3 player character and choosing the first-level spells Enhance Leap and Feather Fall to easily bypass combat encounters and make a beeline for the Mountain Pass. Due to her story-essential nature, which we won’t delve into here (for those worried about spoilers), Shadowheart auto-joins Mae’s party before the duo hurtles into Act 2.
So far, so good – it all seems like a pretty standard speedrunning process up until this point. While it’s unclear why this works, it’s at this point that murdering Shadowheart and putting her body in a box seems to break the game ever so slightly.
The whole time this is occurring, Shadowheart disapproves – and just to make it even more cursed, her body is represented with her character portrait when placing her into a container. Mae puts the recently deceased Shadowheart into a crate before attempting to set it on fire, then shakes it around the area for a bit before Baldur’s Gate 3 all but falls apart – bringing her straight to Act 2’s final boss.
At the end of Act 2, Mae sets off Gale’s chest bomb in the Cult of the Absolute’s hideout, killing the entire party and turning everyone still carrying around an Illithid Tadpole into Mind Flayers. And with that, roll the credits at exactly 4:15 since the speedrun began.
This certainly isn’t the first Baldur’s Gate 3 speedrun (and definitely won’t be the last) as players find more inventive ways to bypass the majority of the story – I wasn’t even out of character creation in under five minutes, personally – although some of these more game-breaking speedrun exploits are getting patched out of the title as Larian spots them, so it’s pretty likely ‘Shadowboxing’ won’t be around for long (thank goodness).
Mae is one of the many Baldur’s Gate 3 speedrunners, but she and many others aren’t just gunning for the end credits – there’s also plenty of players going for ‘sex%’ speedruns to try and smash a character as quickly as possible. I think if I decide to get into speedrunning the massive RPG, I’ll stick to trying to romance Shadowheart or Astarion as quickly as possible instead – and maybe never look at a crate in-game the same way ever again.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is out now on PC, with the PlayStation release set to launch 6 September. An Xbox version is incoming soon, as well – although whether console players will be able to speedrun the game in equally as outlandish ways is up for debate for now.
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