Greetings, Yokai!
After a month of technical playtesting, we're officially wrapping things up.Over the last few weeks, you've broken our levels, broken our assumptions, reported bugs, shared feedback, and somehow managed to make our QA spreadsheets even scarier than they already were.Every run, report, screenshot, and discussion has helped us gather an incredible amount of information about the game. We couldn't have done it without all of you, so thank you.To everyone who joined us for the playtest: you're legends.
The Speedrun Challenges
Throughout the playtest, we ran three speedrun challenges across three different levels.These weren't just for bragging rights (although those are important). Each challenge helped us stress-test different aspects of our movement systems, level flow, routing options, and player expression. Watching everyone discover new tech and optimize routes was one of the highlights of the entire playtest.And now, the results.
Fishing Village Speedrun
The first challenge was simple:Collect all 8 orbs in Fishing Village. Any order. Any route. Just go fast.To make things interesting, our Level Design Intern, Arjun, put his own reputation on the line with a benchmark time of 74.017s.
Leaderboard
🥇 Lieun — 44.851s
🥈 LukeK5 — 45.431s
🥉 Dynasty Foxy — 147.703s
Prison Speedrun
Next came Prison.Already one of the community's favorite levels for movement tech and route optimization, we decided to make things harder by introducing path restrictions that forced everyone to rethink their strategies.Then our Lead Developer, Kevin, made things even worse.Kevin entered the competition with a time of 98s. Every time players got closer, he went back in, refined his route, and pushed the benchmark lower.And lower.And lower.In the end...Kevin remains undefeated.
Kevin's Final Time
🏆 Kevin — 42.370s
Community Leaderboard
🥇 LukeK5 — 44.367s
🥈 Lieun — 44.872s
🥉 Dynasty Foxy — 120.701sFor now, the prison belongs to Kevin.
Leave your mark
The winners of these challenges aren't just walking away with leaderboard glory.Each winning player will be permanently immortalized in-game.They'll get to choose artwork that will appear on the walls of the levels they conquered, becoming part of the world itself for every future player to discover.One of our favorite things about game communities is seeing the personalities behind the controller. Speedrunners don't just play levels differently; they see them differently. It feels only right that the players who mastered these challenges leave a piece of themselves behind in the spaces they conquered.
Ascension Speedrun
For the final challenge, we saved the tallest mountain for last.Ascension asked players to push every movement mechanic they'd learned throughout the playtest to its limit.Waiting at the summit was a seemingly impossible goal:Reach the top in under 120 seconds to earn Gold.Despite some incredible attempts, the mountain held strong.
Leaderboard
🥇 Lieun — 132.853s
🥈 LukeK5 — 138.250s
🥉 TheMosaicWarrior - 179.328s
What's Next?
With the technical playtest complete, it's time for us to head back into development at full speed.We've collected a huge amount of gameplay data, bug reports, balance feedback, and observations about how players interact with the game's movement systems. Now comes the fun part: turning all of that information into a better game.There's still plenty of work ahead of us before launch, so we can't share everything just yet.What we can say is that the art, design, and content teams have been cooking up some very exciting things during the playtest, and we're looking forward to showing you more as development continues.Thank you again for spending the last month with us, helping us test, improve, and shape the game.We'll see you soon, Yokai.