Since last Friday I've been playing around with the CMY Cave to see if it's possible to get an earlier cycle. I'll cut to the chase -- it is.

With optimized movement after collecting the tuning fork anticube, (including one tight upwards corner kick), you can shave off about 12.3 seconds. My time with early cycle was 1:31.9, and with the early early cycle was ~1:19.6. I messed up the split and was slow at the end due to excitement.

It took me about 4 hours of routing and grinding to do a full run of the room, and for a while I didn't think it was possible. It might be a long time before any of us can do early early cycle consistently, but thankfully you can fall back into early cycle very easily, without really losing anything. In other words, it's always worth going for early early cycle.

It's possible that there are further optimizations that could be made EARLIER in the room to make some of the later cycles more agreeable, but I ran into several bottlenecks based on the routing I tried. You can see this at :35, where I basically have 3 seconds to kill.

Overall, really cool skip. Might be too hard in practice, depending on how good your mechanics are.

While doing a run this evening I had something very strange happen. After solving the first block puzzle, Gomez was no longer able to drop down onto ledges. I was really surprised, because I'd never seen anything like that happen before. I opened the menu and was still able to go up and down. I play on gamepad, but when I checked with my keyboard the same thing was happening. Here's a video:

When I went back and checked, the most recent time before the puzzle room that I dropped to a ledge was during the Cyan Room climb. So theoretically, the dropping-down mechanic broke either later in the Cyan Room, at the Bell Tower, or while I was in the puzzle room. The problem persisted even when I left the puzzle room. Obviously it was a run killer.

Have any of you seen anything like this before?

I should have done more testing before mildly-frustrated quitting (how does this work on vines/ladders? What about if you walk up to a corner ledge and force Gomez to drop onto the corner?), but when I reloaded the save, everything was back to normal.