Hello, I am looking for some games to speedrun on PC and can't find any that I want to do. I would like the game to have a somewhat big community but not so big that all the records are basically optimized. Does anyone have any suggestions?
I like to play any game. I would like the runs to be a bit shorter, under half an hour if possible.
https://www.speedrun.com/gbt has about 150 runners. Most of the main categories are optimized, but some of the category extensions and main categories aren't that good. It's easy to learn, and runs are usually less than 2 minutes long
You could play Diablo 1 not sure how optimized it is but it is under the half hour mark for all of the classes the more you play the game. Now with PC games it is really hard to find a short game 30min or lower that is not optimized especially the more people running it however games around an hour and some odd minutes are considered pretty short for Speedrunning standards but again when you get to 30min and below thats when games start to get pretty optimized really fast. You could also check out Mirror's Edge as the top 47 runs are in the low 30's in terms of time and around 40min if you stay inbounds.
Catastrophe Crow and Boodunnit?! Are free and really good, Boodunnit has alot of bugs still yet to be found and is on game jolt, itch and steam. Catastrophe crow is a game off of a ARG download link can be found on the speedrun.com page
Streets Of Rage 4 has a very healthy community. We are all talkative in each other's streams and eager to share strats and have fun.
There are around 200 total runners but maybe a couple of dozen who are continually active, so it has both scope but also room for you to slot in.
As there are 17 characters / 7 game modes / plus 12x Individual Level boards for each of those characters x game modes -- there are technically over 1,000 categories, however most people pick one to three characters and play either Easy or Mania.
I think the most runners on any one board are 11, but there is competition between a couple of runners on all of the main boards. Very few of the runs are extremely optomised - the top tier Mania players have optomised their runs but can still find timesaves - so I think it fits everything you are looking for.
A healthy community. Room to grow within. Plenty of scope for improving the existing records.