[section=Intro] Neugier is a pretty simple game at the core. This will be a pretty in-depth explanation of the game mechanics and my route notes. As of right now the route is still being changed but if new things are discovered I'll update this doc.

[section=Basic Controls] If you're looking for a speedrun route you can probably skip this but meh.

• B jumps
• A slashes your sword; either a standing attack or a jumping attack depending on if you're in the air or not. The distinction is important
• Y throws your Throw Chain, once you get it in the middle of Stage 1
• X, L, and R all swap your equipped item in the box in the top-right

When mashing text boxes you should hold B and a direction on the D-pad, and mash any other button. B, and only B, accelerates text while any gamepad input will progress to the next text box. Holding B during text has the secondary effect of buffering a jump that'll go off the frame you have character control again, giving a clear as day visual cue on when you are in control once again. Holding the D-pad buffers movement to get you moving again the frame you can move.

[section=Equipment and Consumables] There are only three equipment items in the entire game:

• Ring: Reduces all incoming damage by 2, found in a box on the boat in Stage 1
• Glove: Increases all attacks by 2 damage, found in a side-room of the castle in Stage 3
• Bracelet: Gives half of the bonus of both Ring and Glove, so -1/+1. Found in a side-room of the rooftops in Stage 5

Only the item currently being displayed in the box on the top-right is in effect, so you should either pick only one and stick with it, or dance between them. My thoughts on this are that you should pick up only the Glove. You shouldn't take enough damage for the Ring to be helpful and it actually slows down your Stage 1 (since you have to die to progress the plot), the Bracelet is too weak to be useful for offense OR defense by the time you get it 80% through the game and is way out of the way.

The Glove on the other hand is nice. Picking it up gives you a 50% damage increase if you're still level 2 in Stage 3, and even after that, it still remains a significant bonus all through the game. All of that for about a 6 second loss to go get it; you'll make this up just in the Spider boss fight!

On the other hand you have consumable items. These are used as soon as you pick them up; most of them are health, but some have additional bonuses.

• Fruit of most kinds: a small health restore; about a quarter of your starting max health
• Meat: Full health restore
• Heart: Full health restore and +8 max HP (You start with 64 HP)
• Green Potion: Gives you an extra life. You can only have one and dying consumes it to heal you to full health. There is no visual indication that you have a potion
• Chalice: Temporary invincibility
• Toadstool: Temporarily locks out your attack and throw chain

[section=Levels and Experience] In the top-right you see two values: JA Level and SA Level. These stand for Jumping Attack and Slashing Attack. As you use the respective attack it will level up, increasing its damage. Here's a crappy ASCII damage table for quick reference:

Level	Slash	Jump
1	3	4
2	5	5
3	7	6
4	8	7
5	9	9
6	10	10
7	11	12
8	12	13
9	13	15

As you can see, damage values are pretty small. The first SA Level almost doubles your damage. You can also see why the +2 of the Glove is a big deal.

A quirk to be aware of is you can start a slash attack and then jump to hit enemies who can only be hit by jump attacks. This uses your SA level, and gives SA experience, but can hit enemies like Ord and Hawks. Furthermore, you can increase your attack speed by weaving SAs and JAs together in this manner. The penalty of course is you'll be leveling SA and JA evenly, rather than dumping it all into one.

Experience is accrued per hit, meaning you don't have to kill an enemy to get it. Whacking an enemy you don't intend to kill as you run by will net you some points. Most enemies give 3-6 points per hit, and every level up happens at 256 experience.

As I have the run routed, I finish the game at JA Level 1 and SA Level 2, so Experience is hardly a factor however certain bosses would be significantly accelerated by finding a way to squeeze in another level.

[section=Rankings] You get assigned one of 20 (really 21) ranks based on your in-game time. They range from mild insults to massive superlatives before looping back around to a mild insult again at rank 1. Here's the top few ranks and approximate IGTs needed to get them:

• Rank 1: Sub-19
• Rank 2: Sub-21
• Rank 3: Sub-23
• Rank 4: Sub-25
• Rank 5: Sub-27(?)

Rank does nothing, it's just for bragging rights. It took me quite a few attempts to get to Rank 1, really!

[section=Memory Addresses] Here's some memory addresses to watch if you're doing more in depth stuff, or just want to see what's going on under the hood.

• 0x88: 8 bit flags, of significance: 8 = If you have the throw chain or not. 7 = If you have a potion. 1 = A debug invincibility flag.
• 0x106, 0x107: The HP and Max HP of the enemy having its health displayed under yours.
• 0x115, 0x116, 0x117: Your IGT in seconds, minutes, hours respectively
• 0x6A, 0x6B: Duke HP and Max HP
• 0x68: JA Level Experience. 256 is needed per level.
• 0x66: SA Level Experience. 256 is needed per level.

If you don't want to deal with this, I have a lua script to display it for you. Don't use this during a run though! :)

[section=Stage by Stage Notes] This isn't an ironclad route per se. I don't really route like this. These are just important things to remember and do per stage. You should accompany these notes with watching a run, and refer to them to see why I (or whatever runner) does certain things.

[big]Stage 1[/big] Remember to mash text boxes by holding the way you need to go on the D-Pad, B, and spamming any other button. This will let you take off the moment you have control again, and get through the text as fast as possible.

The 2nd room of the boat has a timed dialogue in it. If you're not out of the room by the time it comes up you lose about 5 seconds to having to mash text. This is complicated by a narrow gap of NPCs gathered around a merchant in an already narrow corridor. I actually reset here kind of often :/

You have to talk to the Groom to get the Bride to move, and she takes time to walk out of the way, oh well.

Once the pirate attack begins, there's two items that become accessible: the Ring and a Heart. I do not get either one, they take more time than they're worth.

Once in the room the merchant and crowd were in, juke right then immediately back left to get the Knife Man to throw a knife and miss, then run past him. The Knife Man can lock you down for a surprisingly long time if you don't dodge his first knife. If you line back up with him you may get a damage boost.

On deck, take damage from a cask until just below half health; this makes the forced loss boss fight go faster. Specifically you want your health to be below the right-most pixel in the name "DUKE" before you get to the boss.

On the second room of the deck you can actually go through here without using the Throw Chain, and I find it to be quicker than using it as intended. You can jump the first two gaps, then hop down to the boxes on the left and use them to climb back up on the deck, then finish the room by going north.

The boss is a forced loss, just stand still at the door and let her kill you. If you move you run the risk of standing somewhere her attack misses. If done right, one attack should do it. Each additional attack is a 5-6 second loss. It's worth standing on a cask earlier to take damage to speed this up.

[big]Stage 2[/big] If a crawler or pirate gets in your way here, kill it for free Experience. If you time your first slash right, you can get three slashes out to kill the enemy before you run into it, so you don't even have to slow down.

The green tentacles can be jumped over, and aren't worth killing otherwise. They can only be hurt with jump slashes.

The Rock Man takes exactly 8 hits from standing slashes. You could try to jump slash to accelerate this (Jump slashes are +1 damage at this point) but you run the risk of eating a rock. Also you need Slash Attack Experience more than Jump Attack anyway, and this is a free 40 Experience or so.

The last pirate before the boss drops meat. If you've done everything perfectly you should still be at full health but if you're nervous, take it. You shouldn't need it: there's another meat late in the next stage.

Iron Ball man is actually a tricky boss for the first real fight of the game. He'll walk around until you've chopped off about a quarter of his health, then jump up and spawn two pirates. Here's an important thing: while he's on the upper deck, his health is recovering, and at a very alarming rate. You need to minimize how long he's up there. You get him down by either killing the pirates, or climbing the ladder to the left.

My strategy is to climb the ladder the first cycle, kill the pirates the second, and climb the ladder for the third. He will never spawn more than two pirates at a time, so if you haven't killed any of them, he won't spawn more. Also be careful coming back down the ladder as he's in a good position to hit you with his mace; you may wish to jump off the ledge instead of climbing back down the ladder.

Another decision to make is if you want to weave JAs and SAs together (see the experience section above for an explanation) to kill him faster. If you do, you can three-cycle him. Without this you will kill him early in cycle 4. It's about a 5 second difference but you will likely give this time back on Bo Man and (if really short on EXP) Spider. I do just enough JA/SA weaving to three-cycle.

[big]Stage 3[/big] The box to the middle left in the first room of Stage 3 contains a potion, get it. We'll need to keep this until the boss of Stage 5. I consider using it before then to be a reset. YMMV.

There are only two kinds of enemies here: ninjas that throw knives at you, and everything else. "Everything else" lunges at you when you align with them unless you're jumping. Time jumps for when you cross the axis an enemy is on, and they'll never lunge at you.

Gunther here tells you to go talk to the Count, but don't. Instead go right and begin the climb to your old bedroom. In the giant ball room near the beginning, if you hold up+left, you'll go straight to where you need to go, and manipulate the ninja into walking right into your sword as well. Just hit him once to knock him out of the way.

In the next room, slamming yourself against the grating north of you in a jump will "clip" you past the guard. In the room after that, you need to kill the Hit Man in the north-to-west narrow hallway transition or else he causes a ton of lag.

Carefully timed moves and jumps are required for this path, you may want to check the vids.

On the way to the castle tower, you can go one room out of the way and open boxes to get the Glove. I recommend it; it costs 6 seconds and gives you a 35% or so damage increase for the rest of the game.

The foe on floor 4 of the tower drops meat. You pass by here twice, so when or if you get it should be delayed as long as possible to make sure you go forward with the most health. This is your last heal until the final stage. You can get it easily by standing north of him, overlapping half way to the right, and slashing down. If you align with him entirely he'll lunge.

Once you try to go in your room you get a cutscene, get dragged back to the throne room, then have to do the whole thing over again. Except this time, instead of starting the walk back by passing where you met Gunther, you should exit the north-east of the room you start in, and take a shorter path back to the room with the grate. It's 7 seconds faster.

Once you get to floor 5 a second time, you get the boss: Bo Man. Easiest boss in the game. Juke his staff throw and once it's out, run right and smush yourself against the right wall. Bo Man will approach you and swing his staff, but fail to hit you. He'll be stuck in a loop, letting you just beat him down. It should take either 10 or 14 hits depending on your level. Don't get too close though or he'll use his shorter melee attack and then break pattern. Let him come to you.

If you don't have SA Level 2 when Bo Man falls, you should re-visit your experience routing. You have no further enemies to attack until Spider, and you need SA 2 for Spider!

Once down, go in the room, talk to Secia, do the cutscene, then talk to her again when you have control again to progress the plot.

[big]Stage 4[/big] This stage is the first instance of platforming in Neugier, and the platforming is bad... Resets abound here.

Run north, talk to the golem, then go in the room and hit the button to activate the platforms. Now, a trick: As long as you touch the middle of a platform, you can't then walk off. So you can land on the center of a platform then buffer your D-Pad to make sure you get maximum distance on a jump when moving to the next platform.

In the first inside room you use the throw chain to pull yourself and the platform you're standing on across the room. This is used twice in the entire game; such a cool gimmick though. :(

There is a skip in this first room. It's pixel perfect, and possibly also frame perfect. I've gotten it once in a run ever. Immediately upon entering the room, press to the wall on the left and move north until you're 1 pixel from falling. From here, jump and arc yourself around the wall. It IS doable, but extremely hard.

In the conveyor belt room, the golem immediately past the center vertical wall drops fruit, if you want to top your health off. The best way to get past the first two golems is enter the room, wait about a second for the first golem to move all the way north then quickly juke past him. If you get stuck between both golems you're dead; so don't.

In the room before the boss, you need to exploit a little quirk with the platforms to circumvent a tricky platforming puzzle. Stand directly north of the right edge of the platform immediately below the lowest ledge in the room and hook the right edge of the platform. It'll move up and right. Now jump and land on the right edge of the platform and you should be able to hook to the right wall and reach the boss door. It takes a few tries to get right sometimes.

In the boss room, talk to the top right statue to start the fight.

Spider boss is actually really easy. You can only hurt him by hitting his torso when his head is detached, so just chill at the bottom of the screen, dodge the two webs, then charge in making sure to dodge the head. It looks like you may need to jump slash the torso but you don't; standing slashes work. If done right you can get 5 slashes a cycle and kill the boss in 3 head tosses.

The trick is to maximize how far his head has to go. You do this by dodging the webs across the bottom of the screen and once the 2nd web is in view, run, "tag" a bottom corner of the room, then immediately start charging in to attack the spider. He'll fling his head all the way to a corner and be open to attack for longer.

[big]Stage 5[/big] If you're hurting for health, the 2nd hawk in the stage drops a heart, but it's a slow kill. Don't do it unless you're very worried about dying.

Once you enter the castle tower you need to buffer down and immediately jump down past the Hit Man, or he'll block the stairwell and wreck you.

You can jump over rats, and should whenever you can.

The room that has two ninjas, one below a stairwell and one above it, is what I call "Gatekeeper ninja room". You will probably need to bait the upper ninja onto the catwalk to the left then quickly run up the stairs before he comes back to block it. Do NOT try to win the race up the stairs with the ninja throwing knives at you; you won't make it.

The boss fight here is Ord. Rule 1: if he has a blurry white outline around him, he's invincible. This will be most of the time. He's only vulnerable in Phase 1 when he has a fireball out, and the fireball will home in on you. So you need to dodge it and get in jump slashes when you can. If you're lucky you can get 2; extremely lucky you can get 3. After 4-5 hits, he moves to Phase 2.

If you're really fast, you can charge the middle of the screen and get several hits on Ord while he's changing phases. You have to go the moment you see Phase 1 vanish, though.

Phase 2 is simple; he fires a trident of fire at you then splits into four invincible Ords and fills the center of the screen with ball lightning. Stay at the bottom of the screen, with your sprite blocking the little clover/flower just to the left of center and you'll be safe. Once the shots fire run up and jump slash when Ord re-combines. You can only get one hit per cycle here, so don't sweat it.

Phase 3 starts having Ord teleport around the room firing shots in all four directions. The shots come from where he's going to appear, so run there and spam jump slashes. You can start hitting him even before he appears; as long as the shots come out he's there. He should only need about 6 or 7 hits to finish him off. You can get 2 or even 3 hits per jump.

It is expected you'll blow your potion here, it's why you have it. Don't worry if you do, you get another one easily in Stage 6. Of course if you DON'T, you save about 6 seconds in potion refill animation time.

If you have less than about 8hp, the forced loss to Gunther will take your potion before triggering the scene of Secia rescuing you. Blah :( Nothing to do about it.

[big]Stage 6[/big] Final stage, and it's all platforming. The area to the right is a 3x2 grid of crystal-filled rooms, with doors that can appear or disappear based on the state of switches spread around the stage. Your goal is to destroy 3 magic circles and exit to the north of the stage.

The specific route is best taken from a video, so I'll just note general thoughts here.

Falling will waste far more time than taking a moment to align your jumps, but in most rooms you're on a time limit before a bat gets you, balancing speed and care is important.

The first circle is straight south from the first room, then you should continue on and flip the switch in the next room by throwing a box at it.

Once back in the crystal rooms you should go east until you hit the second magic circle. Flip the switch in the next room too. In this room, the boxes contain a heart and a potion; you should throw the potion box (the right one) against the box sitting closest to you to open it and get the potion, then throw that box into the switch. Skip the heart. Of course, if you didn't lose your potion from Stage 3 to Ord, you can skip getting the potion too!

Head one room north and east again for circle 3, and flip that switch too. Then head one room west and north to exit the crystal rooms.

The final boss is Gunther. You should have (almost) full health and a potion, so a quick kill should be possible without risk. Start by moving up just enough to hit Phase 1 with the very tip of your sword and spam slashes. You should have this phase dead before he does anything.

Phase 2 is a wolf. If you align with him he'll lunge at you, but you can stand about half a sprite-width off to the side and he'll just slowly walk toward you while you swing away. When he knocks you back, walk back north toward him while swinging; he'll eventually bump you all the way to the south end of the room where he'll get stuck on the door jam and let you finish him (or die long before this).

Phase 3 is a dragon. He'll always do the same thing: fire one shot at you, the fly to the south end of the screen and slam down on the ground. Once he slams, spam slash attacks until he lifts off again. From there you can finish him with jump slashes.

Easy no? While RTA ends as soon as Gunther disappears (I consider that the end of character control, okay?), IGT contines ticking until credits start. If you care about IGT, mash through the closing cutscene.