Our game today is “Slow Down, Nerd”! And it is the Anti-Speedrunner game.
When playing casually, SDN is a platformer game with some melee combat. Three slash combos, some dodge rolls, and all that good stuff. Not an exploration game like your SotN Castlevania-types, just standard levels with linear game progression.
That’s if you’re playing casually. The real gimmick is that the faster you get through the game, the harder it gets and the more it pushes back against you. If you're playing slowly and casually, jumps are easy, everything is timed and synced nicely, and combat is forgiving. If you’re rushing, jumps are longer or lead to damaging traps if you don’t make them spot on. Platforms start moving off cycle. Or to maintain a cycle, platforms speed up quickly and then slow down randomly but always even out to the where they’d be in a cycle. Enemies get more health. Enemies get new moves. Mini-bosses get extra lives. And the faster you rush through the game, the harder and harder all the changes become.
The faster you go, the more safeties and platforms are removed from jumps and the more hazards pop up. As you're jumping, there are suddenly spikes popping up and you have to reposition yourself mid-air to land in specific spots on the ground. Enemies get more and more aggressive. There are fewer items and health refills. Didn’t there used to be a checkpoint on this screen? Not if your timer is too low! It takes more items to open doors or there are more locked gates so you have to find more switches and then those switches have shorter timers and then maybe there are new enemies that will actively work to deactivate switches so you have to fight enemies while racing to the closing gate. Boss stats start super high and then drop over time, so the faster you get to the end of the stage fights, the harder your opponent will be. Heck, maybe if your timer is too low, we’ll even force this chunk of the stage to become an auto-scroller.
On a technical level, it wouldn’t be a huge burden to make the different versions. You just make the hardest version first and then if the stage timer is over X, you deactivate enemy behaviors, lower stats, destroy stage triggers or traps, spawn in safety items, and so on.
Being able to finish the game quickly becomes a major badge of honor because not only did you finish it with your time, you finished a harder game than slower players. And the community couldn’t just route the game once, because every time they shave off a significant chunk of time, the game fights back and makes the next section harder so your routing on the slower version needs to change.