Released in 2011, Bastion is an isometric action role-playing game developed by Supergiant Games and originally published on console by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. It first launched on Xbox LIVE Arcade on July 20, 2011, then arrived on PC on August 16, 2011, and later expanded across major platforms through subsequent ports, including iOS, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch.
As a speedrun, Bastion thrives because it is built from discrete, fast-loading combat arenas and traversal “rooms” that reward clean movement and decisive routing. The core play loop is simple to read and quick to reset, but deep to optimize: moving efficiently through floating environments, picking when to engage or bypass fights, and keeping momentum through a game that constantly tempts the player to stop and interact. Supergiant’s own description emphasizes “tight responsive gameplay,” and that responsiveness translates directly into speedrunning, where small movement choices and combat handling decisions compound across an entire route.
What makes Bastion’s runs distinct is how strongly the fastest strategies are shaped by the game’s structure and triggers. A typical run is about controlling pace through three things at once: travel lines through each level, the minimum interactions needed to unlock progress, and the interruptions created by narration and short in-engine sequences. Communities documented techniques that target exactly those friction points, from roll-based clips that cut around walls and gates to text skips that prevent narration from delaying map travel, and camera behavior tricks that effectively blunt certain mini-cutscenes.
At the top end, Bastion is also famous for a defining sequence-break that changes what “finishing the game” means in a speed context. In the most glitched styles of play, runners use item duplication of cores and shards to unlock more progression than intended and trigger the ending far earlier than a full story clear would allow, while other category families keep the focus on completing the story route more conventionally. That split between a glitch-forward sprint and a more complete story-level clear is part of the game’s enduring identity on speedrun.com, where full-game categories are organized around ideas like Any% and All Story Levels, with separate mode groupings such as New Game and New Game+.
Bastion’s speedrunning roots sit in that early 2010s moment when runners were still building a lot of their “public record” through forum posts and single-run showcase uploads. A clear snapshot of that era is the way Speed Demos Archive hosted a major single-segment run with detailed runner notes that credit a wider circle of route builders and glitch hunters, the kind of documentation style that helped define early standards before every community had a modern, centralized wiki.
The earliest “standard goal” that emerges from those early writeups is a New Game Any% built around the game’s victory condition rather than its intended level list. The SDA run notes describe how core duplication lets runners satisfy the requirement of depositing 14 cores or shards while only completing a small set of levels that contain those key items, turning the category into a tight sprint of movement, controlled pickups, and a handful of strategically chosen stages. As the scene matured, that logic hardened into the familiar category split you still see referenced in community documentation: New Game Any%, New Game All Story Levels, and their New Game+ counterparts, with All Story Levels specifically avoiding core duplication because skipping cores would block access to required content like Tazal Terminals.
Timing norms also settled early in a way that fits Bastion’s structure. Community documentation in the SDA Knowledge Base frames runs as starting the moment you gain control of the Kid and ending when you choose an ending in the Heart of the Bastion, with loads and cutscenes counted rather than removed, which keeps the category definition simple across platforms and recording setups. That same documentation highlights a practical version reality: runners typically treat the live PC build as standard, largely because mouse movement produces faster, more precise traversal than other control schemes, even while the game’s broader release history spans from XBLA outward to PC and later console and handheld versions.
As record-keeping centralized, speedrun.com became the main public hub for submissions, guides, and reference links, including preserved “old guide” entries that point back to earlier community knowledge bases and tutorial eras.
As Bastion’s speedrunning matured, its organization followed a familiar arc for early 2010s games: discussion and knowledge started out scattered across individual writeups and run pages, then consolidated into a handful of reliable hubs where new runners could learn the route and veterans could keep standards consistent. The Speed Demos Archive knowledge base served as one of those early “living manuals,” collecting technique explanations, category framing, and practical scene notes in a way that preserved hard-won information beyond any single forum thread or video description.
Over time, the community’s day-to-day conversation shifted toward real-time spaces, with Discord becoming the place where runners trade clips, troubleshoot setups, and pressure-test new ideas before they become “official knowledge.” That social layer matters because it is where informal consensus forms, and where a new trick typically gets clarified into something teachable. The more permanent layer sits on speedrun.com, which functions as the public record: the leaderboard, its category definitions, and its guides provide a stable front door for the scene even as discussion continues elsewhere.
Verification and moderation tend to reinforce that split between culture and record. Runs are submitted through the speedrun.com page, but they do not become visible as accepted history until a moderator approves them, which creates a clear checkpoint for timing standards, category legality, and basic proof requirements. Site policy leaves the exact workflow to each game’s moderation team, but it also sets expectations for how moderation operates in general, including the idea that moderators process submissions and apply the leaderboard’s rules as a community-curated standard rather than a personal preference.
On the public leaderboards, Bastion’s full game speedruns are organized around a few core “completion goals,” plus a simple split between starting from a fresh file and starting from an already cleared save. The headline categories are Any% and All Story Levels, and each of those can be run in New Game or New Game+. Alongside them, the board also tracks variations that narrow the allowed toolset or expand the objective, including Any% No MS, All Story Levels No Roll, and completion focused categories like All Weapons, All Interactive Collectibles, and All Dreams and Challenges.
Timing is treated as real time rather than in game time. Standard timing starts when you gain control of the Kid and ends when you choose an ending in the Heart of the Bastion. Load screens and cutscenes are counted as part of the run, and runners commonly lean on an autosplitter to keep the timing consistent across attempts.
The “big rule decisions” mostly come down to what kinds of duplication, menu tricks, and movement constraints each category is meant to showcase. In the SDA knowledge base’s framing, Any% categories allow core duplication as part of the fastest completion plan, while All Story Levels forbids it because it can lock you out of required progress checks like Tazal Terminals. Meanwhile, menu storage is treated as a distinct family of tricks, where overlapping UI actions can effectively duplicate or “store” menus and enable unusual resets or state changes, which is why the leaderboard maintains a No Menu Storage variant as a clearer, more restricted alternative to the anything goes line. The community has also formalized a Glitchless ruleset in discussion that bans menu storage and item duplication along with several barrier bypass and sequence break techniques, aiming for a more platform equitable run that stays closer to what an average playthrough could reasonably encounter. Finally, version and platform differences matter in practice: PC is generally treated as the fastest environment due to mouse movement, and runners tend to use the live Steam patch, with some launch options discouraged because they can destabilize physics and potentially invalidate a run.
The earliest optimizations in Bastion tended to be about fundamentals that always matter in an isometric action game: movement discipline, clean lines through each arena, and consistent combat handling that keeps the run moving instead of turning every room into a prolonged fight. The community’s own documentation treats rolling as the baseline speed skill, emphasizing chained rolls as the fastest way to travel and the kind of input timing that separates a merely functional route from a truly fast one.
From there, the run’s “fastest possible” identity solidified around techniques that reduce required content and cut the friction created by gates, dialogue, and camera behavior. Core and shard duplication reshaped routing by letting runners satisfy the game’s ending requirement with far fewer level clears, which in turn put more emphasis on choosing the most efficient core-bearing stages and executing their critical interactions cleanly. Alongside that, the scene refined a toolkit of traversal and interruption management, including wall and gate clips, narration and dialogue text skips, and camera-related tricks that minimize forced slowdowns. In practice, these discoveries did not just make the run faster. They made it more repeatable, because each new consistent skip reduced the number of “messy” fights or scripted pauses a runner had to survive.
A later evolution came from expanding what “menu tech” could do in Bastion. Community discussion documents menu storage as a family of tricks that can enable new skips and route shortcuts, and that kind of discovery typically triggers a second phase of optimization: deciding what is allowed where, and then building stable routes around whatever the leaderboard chooses to measure. That same push toward consistency shows up in tooling and standardization. The speedrun.com resources include a dedicated LiveSplit autosplitter for Bastion, and tools like that help runners compare attempts, practice segments, and preserve route structure even as the underlying strategies continue to evolve.
One of the earliest milestone “eras” for Bastion speedrunning was the moment the run stopped being a set of personal clears and became a documented route with shared assumptions. The Speed Demos Archive publication of a New Game Any% single segment run helped cement core duplication as the category defining concept and, just as importantly, modeled how the community would preserve knowledge through detailed run notes and credits. That style of writeup turned a fast run into a reference point that other runners could verify, critique, and build on.
A second milestone was the consolidation of standards into durable public hubs. The Speed Demos Archive knowledge base preserved techniques and level strategy in a way that outlived any single thread, while Speedrun.com became the official-facing record where categories, rules, and submissions could be maintained transparently. As the scene matured, major rule clarifications became milestones of their own, especially around menu storage, where community discussion helped define what belonged in “anything goes” Any% versus what should be separated into more restricted variants.
The other watershed moments were the ones that expanded visibility and reinforced consistency. Bastion’s appearances at Games Done Quick events, including an All Story Levels showcase at Summer Games Done Quick 2015 and a later All Story Levels (New Game) run on the Awesome Games Done Quick 2019 schedule, brought the game’s routes to a much larger audience and made “explaining the run” part of the culture. In the same spirit, shared tooling like the LiveSplit autosplitter became a quiet milestone because it standardized how runners practiced and compared attempts, even as strategies continued to evolve.
Primorix | Any% (New Game) | 4 m 16 s 620 ms | “2 years ago” (as of Feb 1, 2026) | PC | A modern benchmark run that reflects the fully optimized Any% route and its dominant time-savers.
Harpa | Any% (New Game) | 4 m 19 s 060 ms | “5 years ago” (as of Feb 1, 2026) | PC | A top-era time from the mid-history of the category that sits close to the current frontier and helps define the “clean” execution standard.
Vulajin | Any% (New Game) | 5 m 13 s 450 ms | “10 years ago” (as of Feb 1, 2026) | PC | A classic early-leaderboard era mark, useful as a reference point for how far the Any% route compressed over time.
Primorix | Any% No MS (New Game) | 12 m 57 s 190 ms | “2 years ago” (as of Feb 1, 2026) | PC | A representative ceiling run for the No Menu Storage ruleset, showing how fast the category can get without that family of tech.
SomeDude | Any% No MS (New Game) | 13 m 16 s 740 ms | “5 years ago” (as of Feb 1, 2026) | PC | An important high-placement No MS run from a period when the category’s “fair-play baseline” was being sharpened and standardized.
Vulajin | Any% No MS (New Game) | 14 m 10 s | “11 years ago” (as of Feb 1, 2026) | PC | A durable older benchmark that’s handy for documenting early No MS expectations before later refinements.
Vulajin | SDA single-segment (large-skip glitches) | 0:12:40 | 2014-10-21 | PC/360 | A major preserved historical artifact for the game’s early “end-trigger” style routing, with extensive community crediting in the run documentation.
Primorix | All Story Levels (New Game) | 42 m 20 s | “3 years ago” (as of Feb 1, 2026) | PC | The modern benchmark for completing the story route efficiently, and a good “what ASL looks like when solved” example.
IanSynth | All Story Levels (New Game) | 45 m 15 s | “7 years ago” (as of Feb 1, 2026) | PC | A long-standing high-tier time from a mature route era, useful for illustrating consistency-focused execution before the most recent optimizations.
Vulajin | All Story Levels (New Game) | 47 m 03 s | “10 years ago” (as of Feb 1, 2026) | PC | An early top-era ASL mark that also aligns with the period when the run gained wider visibility through marathon play.
Vulajin | All Story Levels (Marathon) | 0:50:28 | 2015-07-29 | PC | Summer Games Done Quick 2015 showcase run; a watershed exposure moment for the category’s public-facing “explained live” route.
Primorix | All Story Levels (New Game) (Marathon) | 0:45:30 | 2019-01-08 | PC | Awesome Games Done Quick 2019 showcase run; a strong “marathon-stable” representation of the category with an official listed finish time.
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Supergiant Games. “Bastion Coming to Steam on August 16!” Supergiant Games (blog). August 2, 2011. Accessed February 1, 2026. https://www.supergiantgames.com/blog/bastion-coming-to-steam-on-august-16/
Supergiant Games. “Now Available: Bastion for PC on Steam!” Supergiant Games (blog). August 16, 2011. Accessed February 1, 2026. https://www.supergiantgames.com/blog/now-available-bastion-for-pc-on-steam/
Supergiant Games. “Announcing The Stranger’s Dream DLC for Bastion!” Supergiant Games (blog). August 13, 2012. Accessed February 1, 2026. https://www.supergiantgames.com/blog/announcing-the-strangers-dream-dlc-for-bastion/
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IanSynth. “bastion autosplitter.” GitHub repository. Accessed February 1, 2026. https://github.com/iansynth/bastion-autosplitter
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