#Strats

So far I think the best strat for completing levels quickly is to not stop and ideally jump over all the enemies, but running through them is also a good option. If you're about to die you can take an intentional death right next to a checkpoint which will give you full health back and spawn you right back where you are. Waiting for enemies to move out of your way takes too much time.

#Movement Tricks / Speedtech (Grounded)

Keyboard controls suck in this game and sometimes did not respond to my inputs, so I've done all this testing / runs on my Xbox One controller. I haven't played with keyboard much but playing with controller is definitely more fluid and allowed me to chain "slide flips" easier

The fastest form of movement is "slide flips", which is holding down the control stick while sliding and then jumping immediately after. I believe doing this multiple times in a row speeds up Belle, however I'll need to test more.

#Movement Tricks / Speedtech (Swimming)

Water sucks, your movement is very limited in water so your best bet is to avoid it at all costs.

Spamming the jump button to swim is NOT faster than tapping it in a rhythm. Hard to explain but basically don't spam it, instead try to tap a bit slower than spamming it.

You are able to do acrobat tricks while running at the bottom of water, but they feel more inconsistent. Not sure if that is true, don't think its worth

I don't know if this is a glitch but I was occasionally able to be knocked back by the bell thing when I threw it against walls. I could not make this consistent though. This would save a lot of time over standard swimming though.

#Glitches

You're able to softlock yourself in every cutscene that allows you to pause if you pause the first frame text appears on the screen. If you do this you gotta alt + F4, game gets hardlocked. Probably should let the developer(s) know about that one

Nice catch on that softlock, I've let the dev know. As for movement under water, if you're on the ground or a platform you can spam down as you walk to constantly do little slides, makes you move much faster. And for upwards movement under water you can do a Chime bounce (where you jump and throw Chime directly downwards causing you to bounce on him and get extra height pretty quickly). I've not had any issue with keyboard dropping inputs, but if it's problem it's a problem, I'm not here to say you're wrong about it. Aside from that, I think it's just personal preference, I like using keyboard for this game more than controller.

So I also found some cool tech, but idk how to use it in the run. You can do a slide flip and immediately throw Chime at the angle you are slide flipping into. You'll then do a faster Chime bounce that takes you diagonally.

That's a pretty sick find, I hope this gets implemented into some runs.

I also found a skip in level 4 I'm pretty certain this is known about but I will post about it anyway incase it's not. Once you pick up the flower you can death warp back to the checkpoint to skip running through a few rooms, saves like 10 seconds.

A little off-topic but, may I suggest that the category be called Demo Any% or just Any%, in my opinion this sounds better than Demo%.

Yup, dying on purpose after the flour pickup is slightly faster than optimal movement (at least as far as we know, it's still early days haha) And you can actually chain two or three of those Chime launches together if you do 'em fast enough and have enough space, get some real good height and distance. Only trouble is the little pause you do for the throw animation which means apart from particular cases where you NEED the height as well as distance (Ayoto makes good use of it in 1-1, check his run) it's more often faster to just chain long jumps. Not as mechanically satisfying, but definitely faster.

Two tricks, one large, one small: First, when getting a jump boost from something (such as a bounce pad), jumping at the same time as the boost will give you a super jump. With the double-jump, this also applies to chime bounces and vaulting off enemies. Should also work with a chimeapult but the window seems to be VERY small, and might only increase the vertical velocity.

Second, and this is pretty situational, when using a spring ring next to a string, jumping onto the ring and then immediately onto the string will launch you after a brief delay as if you were using the boost from the ring. I personally call it the Spring Ring String Sling, but I don't think it's common enough to be of much use. Jumping will cancel it however.