Could have big potential if figured out fully. Seems recreateable. hopefully someone will find it useful

Cool!

I remember seeing a clip of this glitch back when the game first came out (by BnH247 I think?) but had trouble reproducing it and assumed it was just a one-off thing. Inspired by your clip I went back and tried again, and actually managed to reproduce it this time!

What I think is happening: When a blackout ends while you're being assassinated (has to be that specific animation), your character gets tethered (linked? synced? there's probably a better word) to the enemy that was assassinating you. Because the blackout ends, you get separated and can move again, but the movements of the enemy also affect you. Most prominently, whenever they turn, you rotate in a circlular motion around them (the sliding).

Here's skip concepts for 2 missions:

Other related glitchiness: If you assassinate an enemy you're tethered to, both you and the dead enemy teleport somewhere far out of bounds. This seems to be a set location for each chapter. If you shoot an enemy you're tethered to, this happens: I don't have a better video for it, but the tilting glitch seems to make enemies unable to attack/see you properly. Could be very useful.

Some other remarks: To get the assassination animation, you must perform it at least once, wait for a blackout cycle to happen, then have the enemy aggro to you while you're "unaware"/looking the other way. Just turning around while in combat is not enough. One good way to trigger it is to keep pushing the enemy until the timing is right, then looking away when they get back up. Thankfully the timing window for getting the glitch to work is fairly large. I managed to clip inside the final elevators in Babel and Ascendency, but you can't activate them without collecting enough orbs, so that's not useful. The glitch ends if you proceed far enough, or if you reload the game. The game seems to only load the current mission/section, so it seems unlikely that you could skip more than 1 section at a time. For example all the parts where you're walking outside are separate zones, and you can't bring an enemy outside with you, so skipping those doesn't seem possible so far.

Fully routing the game with this glitch seems like a lot of work. To make it fast, you would have to pay a lot of attention to the blackout cycles, and route big sections instead of reloading the game between each mission (as this makes the enemies forget the assassination move). It's also very difficult to control the sliding, and very time consuming to set up the glitch, so testing and messing around to find skips would be hard. With enough effort though, I think it's possible to figure out consistent ways to slide a certain way. For some missions, such as the ones where you have to collect a bunch of orbs, it may be worth it to do the tilting glitch for faster paths while ignoring enemies.

Maybe someday I'll try to route this into the run. If anyone else feels up to the task, I wish you good luck!

In response to Savusukka, I'm certainly going to be playing around some with these glitches and trying to see what else I can do in the future. At the moment I'm still playing through the game as normal. Something I had, had happen though was if you kill an Echo as a blackout ends, they won't respawn (As it stands at the moment I have only tested this with a gun kill). I would guess that the timing is the same as activating the glitches you mention above. After I finish my playthrough and start looking around and playing with these glitches I'll get some recording to share with you all. I had also come across an animation bug while crouching and putting your gun away, while looking down as far as possible. It appears that you almost fold yourself in half. I doubt there is any practical use to this as it's such a small, specific and obscure thing but wanted to let the community know if someone else also decides to take a further look in to it. You can find a couple of pictures here: https://imgur.com/a/FdgXbe0 . Again, I'll get video of it once I have finished my playthough.