So, you want to run Backspace Bouken? Welcome to the run! This guide is designed to provide general tips and tricks that will help you get started with the speedrun. It does not cover the route, as that can be found in the living documents located in other guides.

General Tips

This is a typing-based dungeon crawler, so get your typing skills up to scratch! Explore our other guides for some useful website related to this.

Choose your difficulty wisely. Higher difficulty leads to shorter enemy attack timers overall. I play on the Hard difficulty due to my average typing speed; you might choose differently. Your difficulty is set by the first few screens of combat and your typing speed in them (the skeleton will announce your WPM at that point).
- Easy: 0 - 30 WPM
- Normal: 30 - 65 WPM
- Hard: 65 - 90 WPM
- Lunatic: over 90 WPM

Generally, you should focus on accurate typing before you focus on speed. Typing errors both slow you down with a stun and break your rhythm. Over time, you will improve your speed.

Want to contribute to routing changes, or want to try test out a special category? Please do! Other guides provide links to maps, current route notes, etc. - we welcome all additions to the game’s runs!

Please remember that runs should be recorded and should display the in game time (see the notes on settings below). Your real-time can be determined either with LiveSplit or a similar timer, or by logging the video time itself (starting when you select “New Game” from the menu, and ending on the last hit on Furi).

Notes on Game Settings

When you start the game, you should check out the game settings to make sure they suite your needs as a speedrunner.

• Speedrun Timer: This is critical to turn on for speedrunning. We rank runs based on IGT, which this will measure. It is at the bottom of the list.
• Fullscreen, Music/SFX Volume: All 3of these are self-explanatory and up to personal preference.
• Camera Motion: This changes whether the camera slides left/right or moves up and down when stepping forward. This is ultimately personal preference. It may help avoid motion sickness.
• Screenshake: changes whether the screen shakes with attacking and getting hit. Again, personal preference.
  As a fun side note, you can type the letters of the main menu option you want to select and you will select it!

Movement

Movement Basics
Moving around the tower effectively is a core part of this speedrun. Basic movement controls are as follows:

• W = forward
• A = turn left
• D = turn right
• S = back up
• Enter = activate sign
• Backspace = erase sign text to gain spaces

Buffering movement
You can “stack” movement within some animations to immediately take that action when the previous animation finishes. For example, if you hold W to move forward, you can also hold A or D during the forward movement animation to trigger a turn as soon as you land on the next space. Once you start your turn, let go of the turn key and continue holding the W key to keep moving forward. This can also be done with turns or the Enter key during fall animations in a few places.

There are a few scenarios in the run where this comes in handy. This is not an exhaustive list.

• Holding a movement key while you are holding Backspace on a sign.
• The opening section to quickly navigate the series of turns leading up to the tower.
• Falling into the cold basement, mash through Asterisk’s text boxes before landing.
• Turning or activating a sign when falling in the library.

Moving Backwards
The S key is your friend in this run. In a scenario where you have walked down a hallway to a sign, you can either turn around to exit the hallway or back up. If you can back up to get to your next turn/action, do it. Fewer turns = more time saved.

You can back up through stairways - for example, you can stand between a sign and the stairs on Library 1, use the sign to get spaces, and then back up into the stairs. You will automatically turn around on the next floor.

You cannot backup through doorways. If you are on the square where the door appears, you can back out of the door. You also cannot back up through enemy encounters to avoid them.

Combat

Combat Basics
Combat will always trigger on the square it’s set on, regardless of if you’re facing forward or backward. All text remains the same except for a few spots where enemies will reference your difficulty level. For example, the first skeleton, the second skeleton, and the final boss will all reference your level with a word like “alarming.” Otherwise, the text will remain the same.

In combat, you type the highlighted words on each “screen” of enemy dialogue. You confirm your word by pressing spacebar; this uses one “space” from the bar at the top of the HUD. The combat screen ends with a punctuation point; you do not need to press the spacebar after this punctuation to get to the next screen (I habitually press it sometimes after a period, which will stun you on the next screen’s first word).

If you mistype something (including not typing the whole word) and press the spacebar, you will suffer a brief shock effect that locks you out of typing. Higher accuracy will generally lead to a faster run due to this effect (especially in the No Word Skip categories).

If you ever run out of spaces, your health gets converted to spaces, and you can quickly game over if you run out of spaces early in a fight. Fortunately, the any% route avoids this situation as long as you are careful with conjunctions.

You can use conjunctions on every common conjunction present in the game. This saves a spacebar usage. Both words that combine will be highlighted to remind you of this. To effectively complete the run, you should get as many of these as possible. Missing a few is fine, but the more you miss, the less safety you will have at various boss fights.

The text will turn more red as the enemy’s attack timer builds up; you will hear a sound effect and see the enemy jiggle a little bit when they are about to attack. If you take the hit, you lose some heath, but can keep typing; you can press the left or right arrow key to dodge once you hear the pre-attack sound effect, but you will be locked out of typing until after the dodge animation.

You can start moving the instant combat is over; you will have also see a brief overlay with a combat summary, and you will be healed based on your performance (usually, a full heal unless you did very poorly).

General Combat Tips The best advice for combat is to get to know the enemy text for each fight. Other guides highlight how to practice effectively; running the game several times will also help with this, as practice outside the game will differ in several ways.

Conjunctions are crucial for completing the run. The any% route as it stands now is impossible without getting nearly every conjunction to save spaces. Nail these.

Aim for accuracy over speed in your first several runs. Speed in this game is dependent on accuracy for the most part, so executing the scripts accurately should be your priority.

In normal enemy combat, tank enemy attacks and forget dodging. You can type continuously this way; you get healed after each encounter, so the damage won’t matter much.

In boss fights, balance dodging with tanking for the sake of speed. In most boss fights, you can avoid all attacks by simply typing quickly enough; however, there will be some hard- or impossible-to-avoid attack timers that you have to decide to dodge or not based on your current health and how much you want to push it.

During the final Furi fight, you should generally dodge every attack. You cannot tank every attack in this fight. You will have at most 6 hearts in an any% run, and can tank only 3 of his 1.5 damage hits (the 4th will kill you). If you’re typing a longer word, just dodge and wait to type again; you can take some risks to try to finish a screen and reset the attack timer.

In the “Word Skip” categories, you can skip long words by hitting the spacebar or, if it is the final word in on a screen, the end punctuation. This is generally worth doing if the word is 5 letters or longer (note: needs official timing). Note that this is banned in the “No Word Skip” categories (accidental skips of words 4 letters or fewer do happen and make no significant timing difference; a good faith effort at accuracy is required, though).