10 Best Games With Built-in Speedrun Achievements

Speedrunning is one of the best ways to squeeze more fun out of a game you love, and so is getting all the achievements, so a marriage of the two is a match made in heaven for games that encourage a 100% playthrough.

Unfortunately, tons of games feel great to speedrun, are explicitly designed for speedrunners, and don’t provide any achievement or reward for going fast. Looking at you, Celeste.

Luckily, a bunch of games that add speedrunning achievements have fun movement, engaging mechanics, and a world that’s a proper challenge to get through quickly, making for incredibly satisfying feats.

I’ll be looking through these games that encourage you to go fast for your reward, and I’ll be ranking them based on how satisfying and fair of a challenge it is to plow through the challenges without ever stopping.

10 Sonic X Shadow Generations

Falling A Little Short

For some reason, Sonic has always been known for his speed, but the series sorely lacks speedrunning achievements that challenge you to beat the entire game. At least we do have rank achievements in modern games.

In Sonic X Shadow Generations in particular, there are achievements for S-ranking every stage, which is a perfectly fine way to go about speedrunning-based achievements, as all the S ranks are entirely time-based.

Going as fast as Sonic or Shadow will grant you better stage times and better ranks, but I do find this process rather easy. It boils down to “just don’t die” more often than it’s about optimizing routes and not making small mistakes.

It’s great in concept, and the system would be great at incentivizing going fast over getting collectibles and good execution if it were more difficult. Still, I appreciate the thought and effort to make me good at video games.

9 A Hat in Time

Jumping Through Hoops

For a game with a ton of options for speedrunners, A Hat in Time is weirdly indirect with its speedrunning achievements. There are small ones, like clearing Ship Shape without upsetting the captain or doing Train Rush with no time bonuses, but Death Wish is where it’s at.

The achievement for getting every single mark in Death Wish is genuinely brutal, and a ton of wishes you can take on are speedrun challenges that make you get through an entire level under a very tight time limit.

You only get full marks for doing the absolute best for someone who doesn’t know every little bit of tech can do, and I adore the challenge this provides, even if I wish there was an achievement for speedrunning the entire game.

Hat in Time has some of the best movement in a 3D platformer and levels that seem built around being as seamless as possible. It’s so fun to move around, and Death Wish knows that.

8 Halo 2

A Little Too Brutal

I think asking players to finish an entire game in a few hours could be pushing it a bit already, but when it’s essentially demanding perfection while beating every Legendary mission in Halo 2 in just 3 hours, that’s a bit much.

If you want the crisp 30 gamerscore this achievement grants, you need to boot up the Master Chief Collection, lock in, be better than 99.7% of all players, or look up a 20-part tutorial on how to be as optimal as possible.

On top of demanding knowledge of movement tech and optimal lines through enemies, Legendary mode has you dying to random bullets that you can’t see, which is just an ever-so-lovely part of the game.

It feels more like a stealth game where you constantly cloak and jump around enemies in a panicked state whenever a door opens. While it’s certainly a hell of a rewarding feeling to complete, you probably shouldn’t ever try it.

7 Antonblast

Teeny Tiny Pieces

I love how ANTONBLAST keeps your momentum going forward for the majority of the levels. It’s a tough achievement that makes you get above-par times on each level, and the developers were certainly not generous with those times.

You have to time attack these levels constantly, learn them inside out, and keep rubber banding forward when you charge your shoulder bash. It’s an incredibly satisfying and time-consuming process.

I do love the concept, though. Time trials are far more manageable for most than full-game achievements, and while that’s probably not what you think of when you think about speedrunning, I love running IL’s, so I love this.

Chipping away at it every so often, learning shortcuts, and taking faster lines through each room while not getting slowed down by enemies is tough, but the ability to pick it back up whenever you want makes it far less stressful.

6 Spelunky

Cave Crashing

As you may know, Spelunky is a roguelike that throws you down a mineshaft and expects you to fall through it and blow stuff up at a rapid pace, and the Speedlunky achievement embraces that.

You have to complete the game within 8 minutes, and for a game that usually takes upwards of 20–30 minutes when playing casually with caution, it makes you run gung-ho into everything in your way.

I absolutely love this, as I have a tendency to play randomized sandbox titles in a way conducive to speedrunning. This scratches the itch to grab whatever items I can and destroy the environment to fall to the bottom of the world.

It’s satisfying as a speedgame, and with the endlessly replayable levels, it’s an addictive premise to try over and over again to improve your time, even if you keep throwing bombs against the wall and dying to them.

5 Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove

Fun in Four Ways

No matter which of the four campaigns you’re running, Shovel Knight always challenges you to beat the entire game in an hour and thirty minutes, which is pretty tough, but never feels impossible.

It’s something that feels very achievable on a second run through the game, as a ton of the content is optional and is rather satisfying to run through in one go once you’re familiar with the level layout.

I’m especially partial to Plague Knight’s campaign for this achievement, as that speedrun requires a ton of scythe slashing through lamps and clearing through enemies effortlessly, and I adore that gameplay.

It takes quite a bit of skill, and it’s a full-game speedrun achievement, but that’s why I respect and love these four trophies. It’s satisfying, manageable, and feels great to pull off once you’re done with it.

4 Hollow Knight

Void of Speed Tech

While a ton of Hollow Knight’s achievements do something I hate by rewarding you for the most basic of game progression, the hardest few achievements are awesome, and especially tough when it comes to the three Speedrun achievements.

The most manageable of these is Speedrun 1, which just has you finishing the game in 10 hours. It’s a very manageable thing, considering you only really need three things, and can rush everything from there.

Speedrun 2 has you doing the same, but in under 5 hours. You might see this and think it’s easy, given the NMG Any% record is 30 minutes long, but Hollow Knight is easy to mess up in, and you can easily blow over that time limit.

The hardest of these has to be Speed Completion. This has you taking 20 hours or less getting 100% completion, and finding every grub or mask shard can be a headache. How can you even fit every Zote precept in that little time?

3 Super Meat Boy

We’ve Got Beef

The entire Super Meat Boy experience is feeling strangely rushed towards the exit, and every world has an achievement that determines just how cooked you really are if you want to go fast.

These all have the rather vague description of “Beat the world in as little time as possible”, which means you need to skip the longest levels, run through the shortest ones perfectly, and never make a single misstep.

This practically requires a guide unless you want to spend hours routing it all out yourself, but aside from that, damn, is this one satisfying to complete. Focusing on one world at a time keeps the intensity, but it isn’t too ridiculous.

The fact that the game controls super well means every mistake is your own damn fault. Super Meat Boy game has a pretty perfect design, which means you’ll never get bored, and you’ll only ever be frustrated at your own inability.

2 Neon White

Made For Speedrunning

Likely the most speedrunning-focused game on this list, Neon White encourages going fast with ranks and leaderboards that automatically compare you to your friends and make you feel either inadequate or godlike.

The achievements make you get the best rank that the developers intended on every level, which is never easy and constantly makes you improve, take better lines, and discover shortcuts that skip half the level.

On top of that, you’ve got color rushes that make you play through a long series of levels without dying, and all of them have their own leaderboards, which, again, help you gain superiority in the friend group.

It’s tough, it’s incredibly satisfying, and perhaps I have put too many hours into wanting to be better than everyone else. It’s genuinely addicting and makes you want to speedrun, on top of rewarding you for trying your best.

1 Pizza Tower

Papa Pepperoni, Please

Just like Antonblast or Sonic, Pizza Tower focuses on the individual levels and ranks you on your performance, which makes them some incredibly precise routing challenges for anyone wanting to nab the P rank.

For reference, S ranks are the rank below P, and even those feel impossible sometimes. You need to master the movement that feels like driving a truck covered in silicone gel, and use it to run through everything without slipping once.

It feels far too addictive for my own good, every little movement this fat italian man can perform feels like you’re slipping and sliding through the world’s most pizza-flavored water park, and I can’t get enough.

Watch any speedruns of this game, and you’ll see them going crazy with their dashes, ground slams, and grabbing every collectible they can while moving at incomprehensible speed, and I love it.