Baldur's Gate 3 20-Minute Speedrun Shows Bears Are Good For More Than Bangin'

Baldur’s Gate 3’s bear sex scene made waves when Larian’s fantasy RPG launched last year, but the game’s speedrunning community has proven that bears are helpful for other things, too. If you’ve spent hours strategizing and scheming your way through the game’s complex combat encounters, have you instead considered dropping a bear on the fiercest foes in Faerûn? That’s how one speedrunner managed to complete all three acts in Baldur’s Gate 3 in under 20 minutes.

Mae, a Baldur’s Gate 3 speedrunner, has uploaded a run of the game that goes through all three acts in 19 minutes and 20 seconds (thanks, IGN). The run uses a handful of other tactics that have become commonplace in the game’s speedrunning community, such as putting Shadowheart’s corpse in a box and carrying her around the world. But it turns out Shadowheart isn’t just useful as a packaged corpse. If you turn her into a bear and hit her with the right support spells, she can take out some of the game’s toughest bosses by jumping on top of them.

In the run, Shadowheart transforms into a bear, and then Mae casts Feather Fall and Enhance Leap on the newly transformed teammate, which gives Shadowheart a lot more air time than your average Baldur’s Gate 3 hero. So when she comes crashing down, she does so with enough weight and momentum to kill most enemies in the game, including Ketheric Thorm, one of the biggest bosses in the second act. However, if you also turn this wrecking bear invisible, she can freely jump around a battlefield without being detected. The end result is invisible, catastrophic damage to your enemies, and a sub-20-minute Baldur’s Gate 3 speedrun.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is the kind of game that encourages this sort of wild experimentation because its systems are so dense and elaborate. It allows you to pull off maneuvers as simple as avoiding combat encounters by teleporting around them, and feats as wild as defeating one of the most powerful enemies in the game with a giant bear. But untangling all of these amazing possibilities can also be overwhelming, so I respect anyone who’s willing to get their nails dirty digging into how all these systems work.