Introduction

The Eternal Castle [REMASTERED] is a lo-fi cinematic platformer, in the vein of Another World, Oddworld, Limbo, and the like. If you’ve played those before, you’ll have a pretty solid idea of what kind of tech TEC[R] relies on, but even if you haven’t, it’s an easy speedgame to pick up. The gameplay itself, while straightforward in casual play, is opaque in some really critical ways — yours truly didn’t realize that sprinting was even an option until her third or fourth run!

Controls

A controller is highly recommended for TEC[R]. Unfortunately, while several preset controller configurations are available, buttons are not rebindable, so you’ll have to make do with what’s available. Keyboard play works with arrow keys or with WASD controls.

The following section is sourced from a basic gameplay guide by TheLeonard, and is available here: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1559960304.

Basic Controls Up: W; Up Arrow; Spacebar Down: D; Down Arrow, Left: A; Left Arrow Right: D; Right Arrow Action): Ctrl; X; E; Left Mouse; Enter; (Ranged): Alt; Z; Q; Right Mouse; (Sprint): Shift; C; Middle Mouse; (Change Weapon): Tab; (Switch Auto Walk): CapsLock;

OPTIONS: (Menu): Esc; (Music toggle): Ctrl+M; (User Interface toggle): Ctrl+U; (Timer visibility): T;

Character Actions (Jump): Up + Forward; (Long Jump): Run + Jump; (Fall and roll): Falling + Down; (Dodge roll): Crouch + Stand + Crouch (Shoot): Ranged + Action; (Aim/Distant range): Ranged + Up; (Melee attack): Action; (Melee charge): Run + Action; (Melee alternative): Sprint + Action; (Melee combo): Repeated Action; (Plunging attack): Falling + Action; (Melee block): Hold Action + Up; (Melee move): Hold Action + Move; (Melee move fast): Sprint + Melee move; (Melee stun): Melee move fast forward;

Gameplay Concepts

The following are core concepts for speedrunning TEC[R].

• Movement is Everything While certain parts of the game either require you to take a slow approach or to wait for an event to trigger, most of the time you should be endeavoring to move forward, preferably at speed. This sounds obvious — we’re speedrunning — but much of the game is designed to trip up your flow. Different actions require different lead times depending on if you’re fatigued, running, or sprinting. This is especially true of jumping! Watch those barriers!

• Pace Yourself Your character has a stamina meter, which depletes fairly rapidly when sprinting. It’s also depleted by melee combat, climbing, and jumping. It regenerates fairly quickly, too, but if you run it all the way down, you’ll be fatigued until it charges all the way up. While fatigued, you move much slower and your rolls and jumps are particularly anemic, so this is a state to avoid at all costs.

You also have a health meter, which is naturally depleted by enemy attacks. If you get to a low-health state, you suffer all the same effects as fatigue, but it takes much longer to regenerate from, especially if you’re near death.

Sitting by a checkpoint will instantly refill health and stamina, though the animation will take a couple of seconds even if you get up immediately.

• Crouch-Canceling Weapon Animations When you pick up a weapon, your character will take the time to thoughtfully examine it, during which time you are not moving forward or getting anything else done. This is, obviously, undesirable from a speedrunning perspective. However, if you tap down or the crouch button, you’ll go into the crouching animation and immediately stand back up. This is MUCH faster than any of the weapon animations.

The ideal way to pick up a weapon, of course, is to do a rolling pickup, but these are easy to miss and not always practical.

• Moments Pressing “T” will bring up a frame counter in the top of your screen. The format’s a little tricky — the frames themselves are the decimal part of the timer, which counts up from 0 and rolls over at 99. The whole numbers are what the game calls “moments.” Since the game runs at a steady 18 frames per second, one moment equals 5.55 repeating seconds, every ten moments is about 55.55 seconds, and every hundred moments is 555.55 seconds, or nine minutes and 15.55 seconds. This puts the 300-moment achievement mark around 28 minutes from selecting a save slot, since the timer doesn’t start until the loading screen disappears and gameplay starts. Since we have Livesplit and similar timers, this is mostly academic. Note that the in-game frame timer begins when you load in hanging from the tree by your parachute, and continues to tick up after final input, and doesn’t finish until the ending cutscene begins to play. Since you can control the character before the frame counter starts running, we time from first input (selecting a save slot to play it) to last input on the final boss.

========= The Route

This is the route I personally use. You’re welcome to take it any way you like — I’ve shuffled this around myself several times already after taking cues from others and refining my own tech.

The Tutorial

Timing starts when you select a save slot for your new game. Mash through the wall of text, press right and Action to select Eve (or, I mean, Adam, I guess?), and hold Action to skip the (very cool) cutscene. While the “Loading” text is on screen, hold left. When the screen loads, hold right, then left, then right again to swing yourself until the tree branch snaps. If you time it right, you can get down in around 90 frames.

The platforming section that follows is fairly self explanatory, as it’s literally a tutorial. Crouch-cancel picking up the gun, and fire one (1) shot to open the door. You want every shot you can get for the Cyclops.

Once you pass the acid lake, you’ll start encountering vehicles dangling by ropes in the sky. If you sprint past the triggers, they’ll fall. The Jeep is a freebie — it’ll miss you if you sprint — but the others after the pit with the Meditation Stone in it are most emphatically not. Jump over these or get splatted.

After two vehicle drop traps, there are dogs. The dogs are jerks. Stop sprinting just before you get to their screen, and dodgeroll past them. If you sprint and dodgeroll, or sprint and jump, they will knock you down at least once and probably twice, which is much slower.

Once you meet the hermit with the gun, stop short and trigger the trap on the pole to the left. DO NOT PROCEED until the jet turbine has fallen and squished him, because it WILL kill you, too. You can try to start running before it lands, but if you start too soon, it’ll clip you and knock you down to injured status, making the next hallway much slower. Go inside, push the buttons, dodge the machine guns, and jump into the trash pit.

As the Cyclops is waking up, climb the ledge to the right, face left, kneel, and draw your pistol. When the Cyclops stands upright, let it take a step or two and then shoot once. The Cyclops will go through its damage animation. This is your cue to jump down, stand, draw your gun, and fire. Keep doing this, waiting for his damage animation to cycle, until he’s dead. Grab the Glider and jump out. Hey! You beat the tutorial! Yay!

The next three levels can be taken in any order — the Unholy Church on the bottom right, the Forgotten City on the Top Right, and the Ancient Temple on the left. The Eternal Castle, at the top, is currently inaccessible. I use the Unholy Church -> Ancient Temple -> Forgotten City route, for reasons that will become clear very shortly.

The Unholy Church

Before we begin this section, we should discuss shotgun duping. Fun fact: the levels in this game reload if you teleport back to your ship. Additional fun fact: There’s a sawed-off shotgun one screen into The Unholy Church. The sawed-off doesn’t quite one-shot bosses, but it can shave off a good 50-60% of their health in two shots. You can carry two weapons.

So: drop off the ledge, grab the shotgun (remember to crouch-cancel!), switch weapon slots, menu to Teleport to Ship, and do so. When you come back through, grab the NEW sawed-off shotgun. Now you have two shotguns. This takes roughly 40 seconds without menuing errors, most of which are spent in the teleporting-back-and-vomiting cutscene and booting up the ship. As this makes the two serious bosses in the game much less random and easier, I consider it worth the time. I have not timed this out vis-a-vis perfect melee kills on the Scientist’s Machine or the God of the Temple, but as it’s possible to bait the Scientist into killing the Machine, routes that don’t make use of shotgun-duping should probably save the sawed-off shotgun for the Temple God.

Moving on…

Jump past the middle of the screen when you come to the gates. A text box will pop up, but if you’re in motion you’ll carry it through and gain a few more inches. Once you get past this screen, visibility will drop SHARPLY. The next few screens are semi-random. There are bogs you’ll trip and fall into, and movement through them is incredibly slow. Unfortunately, there’s no good way to signpost them — you’ll just have to stumble into them until you learn where the hitboxes are, or watch a run and learn to pick out the appropriate pixels. If you can tell you’re going to land in the muck, do a rolling landing, and this should carry you a little further, possibly enough to get out and keep running.

Throughout this area are mutants who will attack you. They can run faster than you, even at a sprint, so mix in dodge rolls whenever they approach you. If you get hit, you’ll be knocked down. Run through the bog and the graveyard and jump off the cliff over the dogs. In the next couple of screens are roots, pipes and grass — jump over these, or you’ll trip. Mount the wall at the end, and enter the Unholy Church proper.

Inside, go through the door before dropping down. Pick up the item to the right — it greatly improves your aim. Then, go back out and descend.

In the following area, the Kranker will be looking for you, and he’ll pound you into paste if you stand still. In theory, you’re supposed to sneak through this area very, very slowly, but you can just run and dodge roll at the right time to avoid the Kranker’s blows. If you’re having trouble with him, sprint until you see him, then crouch and stand still until he rushes to the left. Once he’s offscreen, you can run and then sprint away. Keep your eye on the background throughout this section, because there are four symbols that will be written on the walls and you’ll need to remember the order they appeared in for the puzzle.

Enter the symbols in the correct order. When the puzzle finishes processing, the floor will give out. DO NOT PRESS ANY KEY DURING THIS, or you will be diverted to a section where you fall into a vat of chemicals, turn into a mutant, and have to go cause a mutant jailbreak before you can turn back. Obviously, this is not desirable. If this happens to you, be aware that when the screen changes color, your controls will reverse, so switch up which direction you’re holding when it happens.

When you do this properly, you’ll fall into a junk pit. Grab the health recharge item to the left, then proceed to the right. Parkour over the barriers and dodgeroll under the machine guns. When you get to the pipes puzzle, just solve it as quickly as you can — there’s no tech to speed this up, but it’s easy enough once you get used to the various permutations. Step to the left when you’re done to trigger the platform — it won’t leave until you do so.

Move to the left, press the hidden switch on the left side of the screen, and drink whatever you’re hydrating with because the Scientist’s transformation cutscene takes FOREVER. Once it’s done, dodgeroll IMMEDIATELY to avoid the Machine’s attack. Getting two clean shots on the Machine can be tough, since the Scientist will want to get in the way. Do so as quickly as possible. Once you’ve fired, get as close to the Machine as possible, strike it as you can, and bait the Scientist into a leaping attack, which should finish it off ASAP. Grab the Glider and you’re done — you don’t actually need to kill the Scientist (though there is an achievement for it, if you’re hunting those).

The Ancient Ruins

Three screens into the Ancient Ruins, there’s a pit trap that leads to an arena. Sprint across the screen just before it, and jump right at the screen transition. Jump again as the pit begins to collapse, and you should make it over. Drop down the pit on the next screen and proceed. Take the first door on the following screen.

Climb up and cling to the opposite edge. Wait for the guy below you to walk under you, then use the drop attack to knock him down and quickly go through the door. Run across the hall to the other door, walk through, roll to the right and pull the lever, and hop onto the barrier to the left. Fall down instead of jumping over so you don’t hit the wall, then go past the now-open gate to the right.

Drop down, avoiding the platform, and roll as you land. In the next room, there’s a few guys on arcade machines — all but the rightmost will attack you, and the doors will lock until you defeat them. They’re not difficult, but they can stunlock you and waste time. The guy on the right is way too into his game (mood, amirite?) and will not attack you unless you hit him.

There are two ways to approach the next segment — either jump up onto the middle path, sprint across and leap over the gap, and clock the guy with the pistol so you can steal it, OR crouchrun through a hidden tunnel underneath the room. Either way, in the next room, there’s a guy with a hammer — kill him with a sneak attack or with the pistol, and take his hammer. You’re going to want it for what comes next.

I not-so-affectionately refer to this next room as the D A N C E P A R T Y, and it is the slayer of runs. What with the flashing lights, it’s practically impossible to see if you’re being stunlocked by a scrum of enemies, and the flashing itself may pose an epilepsy hazard, so please tag your videos and streams until we hear otherwise. The important thing to remember about the D A N C E P A R T Y is not to wildly flail, because the majority of the people dancing in this room do not care about you at all, they’re just here to get their groove on. Dodgeroll through the crowds to draw aggro, then roll back to the beginning where there should be enough space to smash their faces in with the hammer. If you aggro anyone else by accident (which has been known to happen for entirely nonsensical reasons), you have to take them out as well. Once all the aggro’d enemies have been killed, the doors will unlock, and you can proceed to the right.

The next section is largely about rooftop parkour, and it’s just a question of memorizing the layout and jumping at the right times to catch platforms to climb up. There’s enemies all over, and they’ll try to hit you, but if you’re moving cleanly and dodgerolling at the appropriate time, they shouldn’t pose too much of a problem for you. Most enemies get serious poo-brain when you change levels or move to a surface they’re not on, and you can take advantage of that in a lot of areas besides this one.

Eventually, you’ll come to a tall tower, where a single enemy awaits with an axe. If you enter, the doors will lock, and two additional enemies will be spawned. If they do spawn, you’ll have to kill them too, but if you stand in the doorway and get the miniboss to come after you, you can kill him without crossing the trigger to spawn the additional two enemies — then, you can sprint and jump across the room to leave the right-side door before they can climb up and lock the door on you. Slide down the ladder (or jump down and catch it at the last second to save time if you’re feeling saucy), run to the right, and get ready for a bunch of traps and platforming.

Walk, don’t run, up to the horizontal slit in the wall — a blade will come out as you get close. Once it’s out, you can run by it without any problems. In the next screen, there’s a spike trap on the floor that will burst from the ground and kill you. Sprint and jump over that. In the next screen, the blades are timer-based. Jump to the top, run by the blade, operate the switch to open the gate, and move on. If you time this right, you can skip a cycle, but it’s tricky and costly in terms of time if you fail. Jump as you’re entering the next screen to grab the higher ledge — this saves a lot of time. The next jump is scary, but if you run and jump normally, you should make it. Sprinting actually makes timing the jump harder! Pass through the next platforming section to the final trap section. Go past the timed blade trap on the top and walk through the door. In this room, you’ll go to the right, grab the ladder, slide down, sprint across the floor, roll into the switch and operate it, then return. Come back past the timed blade and proceed.

In the next screen, a giant spike-covered boulder will chase you down a hill dotted with pits. This is just a question of knowing when to jump. Roll into the tunnel at the end to maintain speed and avoid bonking. The room below is pretty much just a giant door. Go through. Save at the checkpoint in the amphitheater and descend to meet the God of the Temple.

THIS GUY. This Unbelievable Jerk. Not only does he regenerate health, but he summons random enemies to come fight you on his behalf. He also hits like a truck — his jumping spinkick may actually be a one-hit kill.

Thankfully, we have the shotgun. Unload it into his face, one barrel at a time, and switch back to the hammer to finish him off. The shotgun really does trivialize this fight, which is why I’ve kept it in the route thus far.

Enemies will swarm the room when you defeat the Jerk, but usually you can just grab the Glider before they get to you. Sometimes, though, they’ll knock you down and waste a second or so, so if it looks like that’s going to happen before the Glider spawns, just whack ‘em with the hammer to play it safe.

The Forgotten City

The Forgotten City is a beast because in all but a very few circumstances it’s best not to let enemies get behind you, because practically everyone here is packing heat. However, since we picked up the AR Aim addon in the Unholy Church, we’re a very good shot now, and if we get the drop on enemies, we can almost always one-shot them.

Pick up the gun at the beginning, dropping your now-empty shotgun. The next screen has two enemies. Walk onto the screen with your gun out and aimed, and fire two shots. You should kill them both. Run, roll to pick up one of their (full) guns, and continue through the next screen, which is empty. On the next, there’s three enemies. Draw, shoot, and move on. Get used to this: it’s going to happen a lot in this level.

Jump over the wall. If you’re still getting used to the game, I suggest going back and saving at the checkpoint in the building. Otherwise, proceed. Drop into the pit, roll, and jump up the ladder. You don’t need to do anything about the warcrime you’re passing by, unless you want to get an assault rifle early. This can make the next few screens easier, but it takes time, and it usually means you’ll have prisoners getting in the way of your shots.

On the next screen, approach the door with gun drawn, and when it opens, fire twice. You should kill both enemies inside. Pick up a gun and move on. There’s another door on the next screen. Lather, rinse, repeat.

DO NOT sprint to the the next screen — there’s a drop down and a ledge up, and you want to go up, but if you’re sprinting you’ll almost certainly miss the ledge. Climb the ladder on the next screen. Saving here is not a bad idea — the next screens have enemies with shotguns.

For the first, sprint, slowing to a run only for the door, then climb up. If you’re lucky, the enemy up top will hear you and drop down to investigate, allowing you free reign to climb all the way up and run to the right. If you’re not, he’ll sit there and shoot you when you try to get up.

On the next screen, there’s two enemies on the far side of a pit. If you’re quick with your surprise shots, you can get them both before they entrench themselves.

The City is on the far side of the field beyond. Inside, the NPCs are friendly, and there’s a convenient checkpoint. Save here unless you are pathologically self-confident, because the next section has a habit of being a meat-grinder.

Beyond the city is the War Zone, and the people of the city are all too happy to have you there to do their fighting for them. Usually, there’ll be a gun somewhere in and among the entrenchment at the cliff, dropped by an NPC who caught a bullet as you were running up. Sometimes it’s a shotgun, sometimes an assault rifle. Sometimes, the NPCs get lucky and you get unlucky. This is why it’s important to maintain a high ammo count — sometimes, you’ve gotta take on the whole enemy army with nothing but a pistol.

The first two screens are devoid of enemies, so take it at your best speed. The third will have enemies on the far side. Take cover and start squeezing off shots. These enemies are armored, so they’ll usually take two shots to kill. Move up and loot one of their rifles if you can.

The following screen is an entrenched building and a pit. The good news is that the pit is not instant death. The bad news is that the route that uses the pit is slower — you want to get over the chasm, and to do that, you’ll need to quickly kill not only the enemy soldiers, but knock down the barrier so you can get a running start and clear the pit.

Either way, the screen beyond this one triggers a cutscene. Hold Action to skip it.

The next screen is more of the same, except a sniper’s drawing a bead on you, so standing still for any length of time will just get you shot. Luckily, we’re speedrunners, and standing still is something we’re really bad at! Move up, clearing out the armored enemies. If you’re deft, you can actually dodgeroll and sprint past them, but you’ll probably take at least one shot doing so.

There’s another drop past this section — this one is mandatory. The section beyond is another locked-gate puzzle, but it’s easy. Go left, jump up, and then run into the pit. You’ll catch the lip — press crouch to let go, and grab the ladder on the screen below. Stay low and run all the way to the right, where the gate switch is. Flip it, then return to the first screen and climb the ladders here.

Sometimes the second ladder that leads off the screen sticks at the top, preventing you from climbing up onto the ledge. If this happens, do not jump to the left, you will die. Lower yourself off the screen and climb back up. One or two reps of this should let you pass.

Run through the next area, climbing when necessary, then go up the ladder and jump to the left. You’ll climb up once more and find another ladder waiting for you.

If you go into the cage on the left, you’ll find the Bullet-Proof vest. This reduces the damage you take from bullets. There’s only a very little bit of gunplay left — this is honestly not in the most useful place — but it can make you a little more survivable, allowing you to take chances in the next section. Pick up the assault rifle, unless you’ve somehow managed to keep one, and walk to the right with your gun out. The next room is filled with melee enemies, and you’ll want to kill them all before they get within striking distance of you. If you have a fresh assault rifle, you can pretty much empty it to clear the room, then go back and get the one the game provides you — otherwise, watch your shots, because you’ll need at least a couple for the rooms ahead.

Go to the right, and up the stairs. There’s enemies with pistols in the next area, usually two on the current floor and three on the top floor, but sometimes they move between levels, so there’s no guarantee. Fire quick shots to kill the enemies on your level, steal one of their guns unless you’ve got a practically-full assault rifle, and move up a level to repeat. Climb the ladder at the far right.

DO NOT LINGER ON THIS PLATFORM. It gives out after about five seconds! Getting to the ledge across is tricky, but if you run right at it and don’t jump or roll, you should make the transfer cleanly. There’s 3 enemies with shotguns past the door on the far side, usually one on the bottom floor and two on the top. It IS possible to sprint past these enemies and dodge shots, but you do NOT want to be injured for the next segment. Go up the stairs, and meet the Sniper. He wants a parkour race.

Welcome to the “boss” of the Forgotten City — a parkour chase against the Sniper, with a helicopter’s machine gun bringing up the rear. It’s actually possible to beat the Sniper to the end, and there’s an achievement for it. Once you get to the end, the Sniper will impale himself on a spike, and you can take the Glider.

The Eternal Castle

Namedrop!

There’s actually two ways to approach the Eternal Castle, and it depends entirely on your performance in the short autoscrolling ship level that precedes it. If you crash at any point, you have to approach the Castle on foot over toxic land, dodgerolling through nuclear enemies and avoiding exploding grenade-spiders before fighting a horrific machine-monster called the Guardian. If you make it to the end, you crash through the Castle’s walls and arrive at the final boss immediately. The latter route is much faster, but I do recommend casual or beginning players to give the on-foot segment a go at least once. It’s fun, and if you’re a cheevo-chaser there is an achievement for it (and for defeating the Guardian)! The easiest way to clear the autoscroller is to dodge shots normally until they speed up to the point where it becomes impractical, then fly up and forward until you’re nearly offscreen in the right hand corner — you don’t actually fail the level and crash until your ship slips off the bottom of the screen, so if you keep yourself as high and as far forward as possible, it makes it much more likely you’ll make it to the end.

Once you arrive in the final chamber, run to the center of the catwalk and interact with the console. You’re at the final boss! The AI is a three-stage boss battle that becomes progressively more difficult in each stage. The first stage is mostly a lot of waiting, with the AI doing practically nothing to defend itself. In the second, she’ll fire waves of energy shots that will stunlock you, knock you down, and do a lot of damage to boot. In the third, she changes up when she fires the shots, and summons enemies to get in your way.

The method for defeating the AI is the same in all three stages — when the AI morphs into a ball and either descends or flies to the left or right, follow her, being careful not to touch her until she begins to morph back. While she’s morphing, she doesn’t have a hurtbox, so you can climb up to the side platforms as soon as she arrives. Once her arms are out, you can strike her hitbox with any weapon. Doing so will cause her to degrade and float toward the middle of the level. Follow, and crouch to interact with the kernel she leaves behind. This will bring up a spiraling QTE puzzle, in which the objective is to lock the circles such that the green line is able to reach the core. If the spinning circle currently active is in an unfavorable position, you can change the direction of its rotation by tapping left or right — this is important, because in stages two and three, the QTE becomes MUCH more complex, and often will generate solutions that are impossible without controlling the direction of the spinning circles. If you fail the QTE, the AI will regenerate and start her cycle over again.

The direction the AI travels in is random, but if she chooses to descend to the middle of the arena, it’s slightly faster, both because of the time it takes her to travel there and because her degrading kernel doesn’t have to travel as far to reach the center.

Time stops on final input on the third stage — the screen will load a bunch of nifty glitching visual noise, and a cutscene will follow. Congratulations! You finished your run!