World Record Shattered: Hollow Knight: Silksong Speedrunner ‘Nebula’ Achieves Astonishing Sub-One-Hour Finish, Eyes Even Faster Route

PHARLOOM, September 26, 2025 – In a staggering display of mastery over the newly released, massive metroidvania, Hollow Knight: Silksong, speedrunner Nebula has become the first person in the world to complete an ‘Any%’ run in under one hour, setting a monumental benchmark just weeks after the game’s highly anticipated launch. The record-breaking run, which clocked in at an unbelievable 58 minutes and 52 seconds, immediately sent shockwaves through the competitive gaming community, particularly among fans of the notoriously challenging action-platformer genre.

The sequel to the critically acclaimed Hollow Knight, Silksong, launched to universal praise but was immediately noted for its immense scale and punishing difficulty. With a typical first playthrough taking an average player around 26 hours for the main story, according to player-reported data, the achievement by Nebula—dismantling the core narrative in under an hour—underscores an extraordinary level of technical skill, route optimization, and intimate knowledge of protagonist Hornet’s new, acrobatic skillset.

The Anatomy of a Sub-Hour Run: High-Level Speedrunning and High-Performance Gameplay

Nebula’s run, submitted for the “Any% No Major Glitches” category, showcases numerous advanced techniques and sequence breaks. Hornet’s enhanced mobility, including her ‘pogo’ strike and the new ‘Clawline’ grappling ability, is leveraged to its absolute limit, maintaining a near-constant state of breakneck velocity across the kingdom of Pharloom. The strategy meticulously exploits movement tech—like using repeated pogo-jumps for faster horizontal movement than standard running—to shave off milliseconds in every transition.

• Extreme Boss Efficiency: Key bosses, notoriously difficult for casual players, are dispatched with alarming speed. Footage of Nebula’s run shows encounters like the Widow being defeated in approximately 50 seconds and the first fight with Lace in a blistering 30 seconds, relying on perfect attack patterns and zero-damage execution, a testament to the speedrunner’s preparation. This aggressive style necessitates exceptional reflexes and an unyielding commitment to high-risk, high-reward plays.
• Minimal Gear Focus: Crucially, the run largely avoids the game’s deep “Tool” and “Crest” system, which normally offer significant combat and exploration bonuses. Acquiring these upgrades simply takes too long, forcing the runner to rely solely on Hornet’s base damage and movement abilities. This “less is more” approach in an exploration-heavy Metroidvania highlights a paradigm shift in optimal routing.
• Strategic Route Changes: A critical element of the sub-hour success was the adoption of an updated, high-difficulty route. Nebula noted in the run’s description that the older “Mist” route is now “slightly outdated.” The new strategy involves a high-skill sequence break through the perilous Last Judge area, a detour that can save approximately 40 seconds but demands near-flawless execution of advanced skips.

The Road Ahead: Planning an Even Quicker Optimization

Remarkably, despite achieving a time that many in the community deemed initially impossible, Nebula is already focused on further optimization. The speedrunner confirmed intentions to master the difficult Last Judge route to fully realize its time-saving potential, stating plans to integrate the more challenging skips for an even quicker overall run.

“I decided to try and go for sub hour with the Mist first… and well… got this run lol,” Nebula commented, indicating that the sub-60-minute achievement was almost a fortunate consequence of a practice run using a less-than-optimal path. The very next target is a time further below 58 minutes, pushing the theoretical limits of Silksong’s intricate mechanics.

The speedrunning community, a vibrant and rapidly evolving ecosystem for games of this caliber, is now in an official race to find the next major optimization. The sheer difficulty and complexity of traversing Pharloom means that new, minute skips and “frame-perfect” tricks could be discovered at any moment, promising a fierce competition for the coveted World Record title and potentially driving the time closer to a sub-50-minute finish in the coming months. This intense scrutiny and mechanical deconstruction are a hallmark of the genre and a huge boon for players seeking to improve their own gameplay.

The astonishing new benchmark cements Team Cherry‘s Hollow Knight: Silksong as a masterpiece of design, one whose underlying mechanics are already being rigorously stress-tested and dismantled by elite players. This achievement is a strong indicator that the game’s competitive scene is set to explode, offering players a continuous stream of high-octane content to watch and aspiring runners an impossibly high bar to aim for.

The entire speedrunning community eagerly awaits Nebula’s next attempt, as the hunt for new routes, glitches, and sequence breaks in this sprawling metroidvania continues.