Dear Esther speedrun clocks up 23 minutes, point valiantly missed

This is cute, and kind of stupid: someone has done a speedrun of Dear Esther, the atmospheric FPS-without-the-S that, until now, we would have considered unspeedrunable. We can only speculate whether Simon 'default' Albacke Eriksson - discovered via Kotaku on the Speed Demos Archive - set out to subvert the art game by missing the point entirely , or if he simply wanted to see how quickly it could be over with, but he managed to finish the game in a not-too-shabby 23 minutes.

The funny thing is, the speedrun doesn't actually appear to be all that different from playing normally, thanks to the game's forced slow movement. default still gets most of the story doled out to him, it's just that nothing he's told gives him any pause. It's almost as if he's listening to a podcast. If you think you can do any better than 23 minutes, have a look at the following video (which shows part 1 of the speedrun), for art-dodging tips.

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.