Howdy, I was wondering if there is interest in a Gameover% category? Fastest way to blow up the house and everyone in a 5 mile radius. In Thimbleweed Park we have a category like that and it has some great optimizations. I feel this title would be similar with the various ways to trigger the meltdown.

Hi Sathdresh. Most of my bad ending experiments were a little later into the game than this but I think the mid-level Keypad is probably the fastest way to get to a meltdown in the game. There are alot more ways to end the game than I had long thought until the last week or two and I agree, adding some more categories seems in order.

Bad and bad adjacent endings to add...

- Meltdown%
-Hamsteak% but win instead (w/o extra turn)
-Final Fortune % (Take Extra turn & then get meltdown ending)
-Super Hamsteak (any% w/ hamsteak ending during extra turn)
-Dead end% (unwinnable w/o game over)

see also : the Misc categories thread

This route would be, "Run upstairs, trigger hidden keypad, wait". While I think it's a good idea to encourage all the endings in this game, I think Hamsteak% already makes a more challenging Gameover% than what this would entail. You still lose the game, but you serve a microwaved hamster to accomplish this.

EDIT - I get that the house doesn't explode in this ending, so maybe this can be an extra category. But I still feel in terms of a "Gameover%" Hamsteak% already does it better.

Not as fast as it could be clearly, but if you skip the max amount of cutscenes you can get the meltdown faster from the porch during an extra turn than going for the Keypad immediately from Ok, Lets Go Rescue Sandy. Not really the point you were bringing up but good way to ride out the momentum of the endgame. This was on top of an attempt to figure out some of the strats you've all been coming up with lately, so you could probably save Sandy and melt the house down in the 7:30-8:00 range the way it's been goin.

It turns out you can stack losing endings. Here's my best version of Meltdown/Hamsteak:

It seems like its best to get the other two characters out of the way before hitting the keypad for timing, or at least turning the microwave on after the timer starts sets the music back to normal and it's harder to time.

You can also survive the meltdown and get the apologies/you win sequence if timing is just right on a few things.

or have the meltdown trigger during the victory screen

Its turning my mind to taffy thinking about these combinations but I think for speed Meltdown/Hamsteak is still gonna be nearly as fast as the microwave tele-death route hamsteak runs. Nearly but not the same.