I despise this level. SO many places where you can get screwed over and have to reset due to seemingly minute errors or just unlucky RNG. This record could easily go 15-20+ seconds lower, my sum of best is also ~8-10 seconds faster already so its definitely doable if anyone was to commit the time to getting a much better time, however I am not going to subject myself to attempting that unless I really have to because of how annoying this level is lol.

0:38 - doing this fast enough brings the shielded enemy closed to the top of the room allowing knack to punch both of the last 2 enemies in succession, skipping a slow motion effect that normally triggers on the last enemy of this room

0:52 - doing this jump without punching is easier than it looks and saves some time

0:57 - it's hard to do consistently, but the fastest way I've found to enter vents is to punch as big knack, immediately jump and swap to small knack, and land in the vent if you timed it right. I wonder if there is a way to skip this gate by jumping over it rom the extra height of the vent as you can jump out of the vent as small knack and get a surprising amount of height...

1:12 - the more I rewatch this run the more I think hitting this sunstone is not required and you could save time by skipping it maybe... though there might be some unintentional knock-on effects down the line caused by this since its such a long level

[this description ended up being over 4000 characters so will be replying the rest later]

Time starts at 29.600 and ends at 275.867 at 30 fps to get a final time of 0h 4m 06s 267ms. Retimed using yt-frame-timer