In Party Hard, the camera looks down on a pixelated house party sometime after midnight. Music shakes the walls, guests drift between dance floors and kitchens, and one exhausted neighbor walks in with a knife. On its surface the game is a dark joke about noisy parties and an over the top solution. For speedrunners, it quickly became something different. Each party is a timed puzzle, a question of how fast a player can erase a crowded map, manipulate semi random events, and slip out the back door before the police can react.
This Speedrun Game Chronicle looks at how a small Unity stealth game from a Ukrainian studio became a niche but durable speedrunning target on PC and consoles, what its community has built around the speedrun.com leaderboards, and how runners break open levels that were designed to be slow and methodical.
From Game Jam Prototype To Cult Stealth Game
Party Hard began as a game jam experiment inside Pinokl Games, a studio that had previously specialized in casual and family oriented projects. The jam prototype about a sleepless neighbor who quietly murders party guests caught enough attention that tinyBuild stepped in as publisher and partner, pushing the concept into a full commercial release.
On PC, the finished game launched on August 25, 2015, with Windows as the lead platform and Mac and Linux following shortly afterward. Over the next year it spread across PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and later Nintendo Switch, along with mobile versions under the Party Hard Go label. The press kit and store materials framed it as a stealth strategy title about “ruining parties by any means” with nineteen distinct scenarios across the United States, each featuring randomized traps, items, and special events.
Critical reception was mixed but curious. Metacritic’s PC page records a mid sixties metascore and a user average in the low sevens, with reviewers splitting between praise for the tense, puzzle like structure and criticism of repetition and randomization. A contemporary review at Geeky Hobbies described a dozen core levels that took five to six hours for a cautious player to clear, emphasizing the importance of guard patterns, exploitable police AI, and the way random traps and encounters could radically change a plan.
What interested speedrunners was not only the premise but that structure. Levels were short enough to be practiced, failure sent players back to the beginning with minimal downtime, and the blend of fixed layouts and semi procedural elements made fast clears feel both scripted and improvisational.
How The Game Works When Time Matters
Mechanically, Party Hard plays like a top down hybrid of Hitman and Hotline Miami filtered through low resolution pixel art. The protagonist must clear each party by killing every guest or meeting a specific objective, using a basic stab attack and a set of environmental traps and items. ModDB’s developer summary underscores this focus on “unique ways of killing people,” from pushing victims onto grills and speakers to triggering gas leaks, poisonings, and collapsing stages.
Several design choices define the challenge for speedrunners:
The AI. Civilians wander through zones, react to bodies, call the police, and occasionally fight back. Guards and security units behave more aggressively and must be approached from behind or neutralized with environmental tricks. Reviewers noted that police often take direct paths and give up the chase quickly, which creates predictable loops that runners can exploit when they trigger a call at a specific moment.
Randomization. Traps, items, and special events change between attempts. One run might see a zombie outbreak that wipes the map for free, while another offers fewer explosives and more inconvenient trap placements.
Crowd density. Most parties begin with more active guests than a player can safely handle in open spaces. Efficient routes pull groups into chokepoints, use dancing to blend in, and rely on timing police arrivals so that officers arrest other guests or depart before they can grab the killer.
Together those systems make Party Hard a game where the usual stealth priority of “never let anything chaotic happen” gets flipped. The fastest players invite chaos, then try to stay one step ahead of it.
A Dormant Leaderboard Wakes Up
Speedrun.com lists Party Hard as a 2015 title with leaderboards for full game runs and individual party levels across PC and console platforms. For the first months of its existence those boards were quiet. That changed in the summer of 2016, when runners used the Steam forums to advertise the new full game category and recruit players.
On July 19, 2016, user “teletubbyland” opened a discussion thread titled “Speedrun Party Hard – Do you have what it takes?” on the game’s Steam community hub. The post encouraged players who wanted “an extra challenge” or a way to become “world famous” to submit runs to the speedrun.com page, promising that early world records were “guaranteed until someone does it faster.”
Another user, FuddleDuck, replied that after “fighting with a previous moderator” a full game category had finally been added, describing Party Hard as “a hard game to perfect, but an easy game to learn” and inviting both new and veteran speedrunners to a celebration race. That moment marks the practical beginning of Party Hard as a speedrun project. Community leadership shifted, the Any percent category was recognized formally, and the first serious routes began to take shape.
Over time the speedrun.com statistics grew into a modest but stable niche. As of early 2026, the site lists more than two hundred full game runs from over fifty players, with separate leaderboards for the High Crimes downloadable content and co op modes.
Categories, Levels, And How Runs Are Timed
The Party Hard leaderboards organize runs along a few main lines. Full game Any percent in single player is the flagship category, covering the original campaign from the opening barbecue to the final parties in sequence. There is a separate full game Co op Any percent, run with two players, and a High Crimes DLC category that includes the additional stages from that expansion.
Beneath those full game boards are individual level leaderboards that reveal how runners think about the game’s geography. Speedrun.com lists twenty four level entries, including standard parties such as BBQ Party, Biker Party, and Casino Party, experimental variations like Underground Party Remix and Casino Party Remix, Halloween and Zombie modes, and the High Crime finale. Each one tracks best times under various playable characters, including specialized boards for Darius, Cop, Ninja, Katie, Butcher, and the later additions Hinter and Edward One.
In individual parties, the fastest clear times hover around a minute or less, with top runners like Savash72 posting sub ninety second records across multiple stages. That level segmentation matters for full game routing because it shows where most time is lost, which parties are bottlenecks, and which maps are highly dependent on favorable random events.
Timing conventions follow the usual speedrun.com standard, beginning when the player starts the first party and ending on the final mission’s completion. Some runners also track in level splits to measure improvements in specific scenarios.
Routing A Murder Spree
Because Party Hard relies on stealth and semi random layouts, its routes read more like conditional flowcharts than strict scripts. A route writer can specify how to handle a party if a certain trap spawns in one location, or if a special event triggers early, but they must also plan backup lines for when those pieces fail to appear.
Yuraite’s “General information and routes” guide, linked from the speedrun.com guides page, reflects this mindset. Written as a set of evolving notes, it walks through parties with explanations of thought process, emphasizing priority targets, patrol loops, and ways to force the AI to cooperate with set pieces.
Across most Any percent runs, a few broad principles recur:
Early consolidation. The opening seconds of a party are precious. Before the crowd spreads out, runners try to push guests toward traps, start fires, or lure groups onto dance floors where mass kills are possible.
Police manipulation. Because officers take predictable paths and give up the chase, runners often “burn” a police call at a time and place where they can easily break line of sight. In optimal situations, they can even frame another guest so that the police arrest the wrong person and leave the killer free.
Event exploitation. Random events such as sharknadoes, zombie uprisings, or rampaging bears can either ruin a run or save huge chunks of time. Fast players learn to read early cues, decide whether an event will actually help, and reset quickly if the pattern is bad.
Character selection. Full game Any percent is usually played with the default killer, but individual levels and challenge categories explore the other playable characters described by the developers like the cop who can carry bodies without arousing suspicion or the ninja who is fast but must remain unseen.
If a level happens to roll a favorable layout and event combination, a runner can race through in well under two minutes. If not, they must decide whether to adapt the route on the fly or reset and hope for better random elements.
World Records And The Thirty Minute Barrier
The history of Party Hard full game records is not as exhaustively documented as some larger esports titles, but the current leaderboard tells a clear story of compression over time. The earliest runs on record show times well over an hour, including a one hour three minute Any percent by BACONGUDEN and a fifty one minute clear by TheArgentWolf, both recorded around nine years ago.
As routing improved, runners pushed those times down into the forty and then thirty minute ranges. Players like Airshock22 and Kairal151 logged mid to high thirty minute clears, followed by a succession of sub thirty results, including a flat thirty minute run from ChurchnSarge eight years ago and a thirty two minute run by FuddleDuck. Both of those names later appear as moderators on the board, reflecting how early competitors often take on administrative roles.
By the time individual level boards filled out, newer runners such as Savash72 and Cedrate held many of the best party times, setting a foundation for a fresh push in full game optimization.
As of early 2026, the single player Any percent world record belongs to Navarro4, whose 26 minute 32.130 second run sits at the top of the leaderboard. The run description notes that it relied on “a lot of luck and good RNG,” which is consistent with how the community views late game optimization. Second place currently goes to sporkslayer at 27 minutes 3 seconds, with times around twenty eight minutes rounding out the rest of the podium and top five.
Given the structure of the game, shaving further minutes off that mark would likely require a combination of new strategies, more aggressive risk taking, and extraordinary luck with random events and trap placements.
Co op Runs, High Crimes, And The Later Years
Party Hard’s speedrun presence is not limited to the core campaign. The High Crimes DLC, which adds new parties and scenarios, appears as its own full game category on speedrun.com, with a current record in the mid twenty five minute range. Dedicated level boards cover remix and special modes such as Underground Party Remix, Halloween Party Remix, and Zombie versions of the early stages.
Co op Any percent, meanwhile, brings a different kind of run. The category highlights dual control over the same chaotic map, ping ponging responsibility for distractions and kills between two players. Threads on the speedrun.com board document community requests to expand co op coverage to individual levels and to properly categorize new playable characters like Hinter and Edward One as they were added.
Outside the leaderboards, Party Hard’s design has kept it visible on streaming platforms thanks to its Twitch integration. ModDB’s summary and marketing materials emphasize that stream viewers can trigger events inside live games, from summoning more guests to calling in SWAT teams or causing storms of sharks, creating scenarios that blend performance and speedrun routing in unpredictable ways.
A Small, Persistent Corner Of Speedrunning
Compared to flagship speedrun titles in the platforming or action genres, Party Hard remains a small game. Its SteamDB listing shows roughly twelve thousand user reviews, a steady but not massive presence, and its speedrun.com stats place it among the middle tier of tracked games by run count and player base.
Yet within that space it fills a distinctive niche. For runners who enjoy stealth, improvisation, and routing under pressure, Party Hard offers a compact Any percent campaign, short individual levels, and enough randomness to ensure that no two attempts play exactly the same way. For new speedrunners, the early community promises from 2016 still hold true in a softer form. If you can finish the game, you can learn to speedrun it. If you can learn to speedrun it, you can join a small group of players who have turned a late night noise complaint into a carefully timed art.