Skip the Wake-Up Call: Inside the Speedrun Scene Breaking Singularity Open

The first time Marcus 'voidline' Reyes beat Singularity, it took him 42 hours. His current personal best? 58 minutes, 12 seconds. That's not a typo, and no, he didn't skip the game — he just stopped letting it tell him where to go.

Reyes is one of a growing crew of North American runners who've spent the past several months pulling Singularity apart at the seams. What they've found is a game whose systems bend further than most players will ever realize — and a community that treats every glitch like a love letter.

The Run That Started It All

Every speedgame has its 'holy grail' moment, and Singularity's came in March, when a runner going by 'hexbyte' uploaded a clip of herself walking out of the opening facility through a loading-zone collision gap. Instead of the scripted descent into the machine city, players could drop straight into Act Two with almost none of the tutorial completed.

'The game doesn't check your progression flags until the bridge sequence,' hexbyte explained over Discord. 'Everything before that is basically a suggestion.'

That single discovery collapsed what runners call the 'prologue wall' and shaved nearly 20 minutes off any% runs overnight. Within a week, the leaderboard was unrecognizable.

Three Breaks That Define the Meta

If you're new to the scene, here's the shorthand you'll hear thrown around in every run:

• The Cold Boot Skip — Queueing a fast-travel cancel during the power restoration sequence teleports the player past the entire reactor chapter. It's finicky, frame-dependent, and the current gold standard for any%.
• Drone Surfing — Grabbing an enemy recon drone mid-flight and riding its pathing across the map boundary. Mostly used in glitched categories, mostly hilarious in all of them.
• Dialogue Desync — Interrupting a key story conversation with a co-op invite freezes the mission state, letting runners walk past bosses who never trigger their intro cinematic. Yes, the community agrees it feels rude. No, nobody's stopping.

Each of these started as a clip on the game's subreddit, got theory-crafted in the community Discord, and ended up on a leaderboard. That pipeline is faster than most games see, and it says something about how many players are actively poking at Singularity's edges.

Records, Rivalries, and the 58-Minute Club

The current any% world record sits with Reyes, but the margin is thin — the top five runners are within four minutes of each other, which in speedrun terms is basically a photo finish. The real drama lives in the 100% category, where routing the game's side content without triggering the story flags that let you skip it is an entirely different puzzle.

'There's a weird irony to it,' Reyes told us. 'The game is about humanity racing an intelligence that optimizes everything. And we're out here optimizing the game. It's on-brand.'

What the Devs Are Saying

Here's the part that surprises newcomers: the studio isn't in a hurry to patch everything out. In a recent community stream, the design lead acknowledged the skips directly, calling them 'a testament to how much trust players put in our systems,' and confirmed that only the drone surfing — which can softlock the game on console — is slated for a fix.

The rest? Officially, the team is 'monitoring.' Unofficially, several runners told us they've been contacted about a potential speedrun showcase at a future community event, which reads a lot like a blessing with extra steps.

That said, the runners aren't naive. Patches change hitboxes, and hitboxes are the foundation of half these tricks. The scene's collective advice: record your personal bests, back up your clips, and enjoy the wild west while it lasts.

Want to Try It Yourself?

You don't need frame-perfect inputs to get started. The community's beginner route skips just two segments and requires nothing harder than a well-timed sprint cancel. The full route guides live on the community's resources page, and the Discord runs weekly 'new runner' lobbies where veterans coach first-timers through the basics.

Fair warning, though: once you see Singularity's opening facility from the wrong side of a collision wall, the game never quite looks the same again. And honestly? That's the point.