Baldur's Gate 3's uber-hard Honour Mode has already been beaten in less than 40 minutes

Among the massive haul of updates and additions that came with Baldur's Gate 3’s latest fifth patch was the mercilessly tough Honour Mode difficulty setting, and, unsurprisingly, a speedrunner has already managed to beat it in less than a hour.

For those who aren’t keen on subjecting themselves to something tougher than Tactician, the premise of Honour Mode involves ensuring that you live in a perennial brown trousers-verse by adding the likes of permadeath and the inability to reload previous saves to the equation. It also does some other stuff that adds to the challenge, but quite frankly the quest to earn the coveted Golden D20 already looks hard enough without even mentioning that.

However, as spotted by TheGamer, for speedrunner Chronos - the current holder of BG3’s all acts any% run record - all of that was just window-dressing for a casual stroll through the game in a leisurely 38 minutes and eight seconds. The run, which you can watch in full here, features a lot of the famous strategies devised by the BG3 running community since the game came out, including some messing around with Shadowheart and a bouncy disembarking of The Nautiloid.

The key was just to remain rapid, but minimise risk while en-route to an outcome somewhat less terrifying than bear sex. That said, Chronos did have some nervy moments while battling the Netherbrain, after their ingenious strategy of blowing it up using enough wogglims, popdrakes, and squidjins to level a building failed to result in an instant one hit kill. Luckily, there was some delayed fire damage to finish the job.

After completing the run Chronos faced the arguably even bigger challenge of finding the option that enabled their newly won dice, dubbed ‘Shining Honour’, in Baldur’s Gate 3’s menu labyrinth, a test they managed to pass after loading up an old save and getting sent to prison for an errant shove.

In other Baldur’s Gate 3 news, the game’s latest patch also includes a huge new epilogue that boasts a cheeky little reference to an Imp named Bing Bong, whom you might remember if you watched BG3’s cast play D&D.