Jarlyk | [TAS] Sundered Any% in 33:01 @jarlyk | Uploaded July 2023 | Updated October 2024, 1 hour ago.
This is a Tool-Assisted Speedrun of the game Sundered in the Any% category, which beats the game in 33:01 RTA (32:46 IGT). After all the Hollow Knight lately, it was refreshing to work on something a bit different and I hope you all enjoy watching it as much as I enjoyed making it. This game isn't super well known, but the speedrun is actually quite interesting, with a lot of technical nuance and with a high skill ceiling for the movement.

If you'd prefer to watch an unedited version of the run without commentary, that's available here: youtu.be/a9tPAfag6iY

Thanks to all the folks on the Sundered Speedruns Discord who helped me learn the tech for the run and gave suggestions for routing and improvements.

Technical notes:

This TAS was developed using libTAS, which unfortunately is not fully stable for this game. Due to issues with desyncs, it had to be developed in 26 segments, which then were spliced together for the final video. The actual gameplay state is fully contiguous, but it's not strictly reproducible, since I could never get the game to sync longer than about 20 minutes at best and thus the endgame segments were all created by just never closing libTAS.

Also, while it's always true that TAS really can't be compared with human runs, I'd highlight that it's especially true for this game, simply because TAS is able to know so much about the rng in advance. There was also some rng manip used for crits in the end game fights, though not extensively (on the order of getting two rolls to get a crit instead of one by slightly tweaking input timing.) A highly optimized TAS could do much more extensive rng manip and I think the route could be cut down quite a bit further too, such as removing the entire Negociator split and maybe just keeping moonjump for the entire latter half of the game.