How to Play KARLSON

Karlson is a speedrunning game. The creator, Dani, even said that he added a timer in the game specifically because he knew that people would try to speedrun the game. However, the engine he used to program the game in has a lot of quirks that let people break the game in ways even he wasn't ready for. Here is a guide on how to move as fast as possible in Karlson.

1. Diagonal Strafing

This game's diagonal strafing has a quirk that many games have - for whatever reason, moving diagonally is faster than moving straight. This is the foremost way of gaining speed, something that is incredibly important because momentum is a massive part of this game. There are a ton of jumps that you can do that Dani didn't intend just because diagonal strafing lets you move faster and therefore jump further than he thought.

2. Air Strafing

Another quirk that you would be familiar with if you've played the surf maps in CSGO at all. If you strafe to the side while in midair and smoothly move your mouse in the direction you're moving, you will gain a lot of speed for whatever reason. A big part of the speed runs of this game is utilizing this as much as possible. 

3. Slide Jumping

Sliding in this game is important because it lets you conserve as much momentum as possible. If you simply land and move diagonally or straight, your character will quickly fall back down to whatever max speed has been coded to be.

4. Timing your wall jumps

If you hold your jump key as you initiate a wall jump, you will immediately kick off of it. However, if you delay your jump, then you will be able to gain some height, which lets you scale ledges that you otherwise wouldn't be able to. This comes in handy during a couple of points in the game and will let you skip some platforming sections.

5. Explosives and shotguns are your best friend

If you need to get somewhere quick, simply blow yourself up or fire in the opposite direction. This applies to explosive barrels and grenade launchers (boomers) as well as the very powerful shotgun. Utilizing these techniques can allow you to completely fly across levels and skip across every single obstacle that is put in your way.

6. Bunnyhopping

Bunnyhopping is the act of jumping as soon as you hit the ground, which can be done by holding down the spacebar. What this does is not give the game enough time to slow you down to the character's max ground speed while also giving you time to air strafe to gain speed. If you continuously do this, then your character will eventually reach such ludicrous speeds that it will take a lot of finesse simply to control.

7. The grapple hook angle

If you've played one of the more fondly regarded Spider-Man games, you'll find that a lot of the same principles apply to the gadget in this game. Letting go of the grapple while you're swinging forward will give you a large speed boost while letting go of the grapple as you're swinging up will give you height. It's important to find the optimal angle to let go so you have a good mix of both speed and height.

8. You don't need to engage every enemy.

If you move with all the tricks in this guide, you'll quickly find that you move so fast that enemies can't actually track or fire at you. In fact, if you play perfectly, the only time you even have to acknowledge enemies is to use hostile grenade launchers to boost yourself.

And that's it! Karlson, like many other speedrun games, has a ton of hidden mechanics that most players will never see. I hope this guide as helped enlighten you.