Just curious, should new attempts and submissions use the built-in speedrun mode? As far as I can tell the main difference is that it starts you beside the sword and the game basically ends as soon as the last boss is defeated. And of course, the game displays a timer during play.

Hi !
Actually, the speedrun mode release introduces some bugs that are really bad for the speedrun.
The main one is that you can't reset on the boss anymore so you can't get fast cycles.
There are smaller ones too but they don't affect the run as much.
The devs said they will fix these just after the release but it's been almost 3months and still no news from the devs or for any fixes.
So you should definitely run on the old version for all the categories except for Second Run (where you don't care of the boss and save a lot of time with the Press Pass).

But if you still want to run on the speedrun mode release you can run on either speedrun mode or not since the leaderboard is using In-game time. So starting beside the sword and ending at the boss doesn't change anything except a shorter real time (which is optional anyway).

I def noticed you can’t reset on the boss, but I’m pretty sure that’s bugged on normal now too and won’t let you do it there either. Thanks for the reply, your run of this was incredible!

Well yeah the whole speedrun mode release is bugged.
And when I'm speaking of the "speedrun mode release" I'm speaking of the version of the game.
Like you could think of it as "1.0" was the version when the game was originally released and "1.1" is the speedrun mode.
You can go back to the original version/release of the game using the steam console.
And you can drop by on the Discord too If you have any specific/tricky question.
And thanks 🙂.