Month: April 2022

It’s been a long wait, but the official full trailer for the fourth season of Stranger Things is finally here. The trailer is set to Journey’s “Separate Ways (Worlds Apart),” and it brings full-blown Lovecraftian horror vibes. We get a spooky house with a mysterious grandfather clock, spontaneous levitation, an eyeless old man, and a brief glimpse of a grotesque humanoid figure sprouting the oozing tentacles that serve as the calling card of the Upside Down. Yep, we’re here for it.

(Spoilers for the first three seasons below.)

Netflix has been releasing various teasers for the last two years, each markedly different in tone—classic Goonies, Scooby-Doo, all those ’80s John Hughes movies—so it has been difficult to get any real sense of what S4 will be like, both tonally and in terms of plot. We’ve previously reported that David Harbour is returning as Hopper, along with the rest of the main cast. Winona Ryder (Joyce Byers), Finn Wolfhard (Mike Wheeler), Natalia Dyer (Nancy Wheeler), Noah Schnapp (Will Byers), Charlie Heaton (Jonathan Byers), Gaten Matarazzo (Dustin Henderson), Joe Keery (Steve Harrington), Caleb McLaughlin (Lucas Sinclair), and Sadie Sink (Max Mayfield) all return.

In the nearly two months since Elden Ring was released, the average player has reportedly needed dozens of hours to finish the “main story” portion of the game. Given that, the fact that the speedrunning community can now demonstrate a complete start-to-finish Elden Ring run in under nine minutes might be a little surprising.

Even for experienced Elden Ring players, watching Distortion2’s takedown of the game in 8 minutes, 56 seconds—a run in which he doesn’t attack a single enemy—can be confusing. So let us help you out with a quick primer on the short history of Elden Ring speedrunning thus far and the glitches and exploits that are driving players through the Lands Between in ever-shorter amounts of time.

Wrong warps and flying horses

Just days after Elden Ring‘s late February release, players marveled at traditional deathless runs that clocked in at just under 2.5 hours. Soon, though, players were dipping into old Dark Souls speedrunning tricks to bypass tough bosses or reach new map sections via careful, barely survivable jumps. That led to the first public, sub-hour Elden Ring speedrun by Twitch streamer LilAggy on March 9, just 12 days after the game’s release.