After learning a crucial skip in speedruns from Alan Wake2 expansion The Lake House During Awesome Games Done Quick 2025 in early January, developer Remedy Entertainment promised not to fix the bug that enables the strategy.
“Thanks to (the AGDQ 2025), run by suavepeanut, the House on the lake The development team discovered that you can actually interact with the elevator from the outside… and immediately decided that this is not something that will be fixed,” the studio said. via his official Bluesky account. “Don’t mention it.”
The skip is basically as Remedy described. At various points during The Lake Houseplayers must ride an elevator between the different floors of the titular building. But by manipulating the elevator and choosing the desired floor outside the transport after the doors close, speedrunners can teleport between floors instead of sitting through travel cutscenes.
During their AGDQ 2025 performance, current world record holder for The Lake House suavepeanut said that each time you skip, which can be “awkward” because you have to press four buttons at once, saves 20-30 seconds. If this is used successfully up to seven times over the course of the game, it can save a relatively large amount of time on a speedrun that takes less than 20 minutes.
It’s rare for a major studio to leave its game in a less than perfect state just to appease a small group of diehard fans. Hollow Knight fast runners, for example play a much older version of the game because developer Team Cherry infamously fixed many of the bugs they used to beat the game as quickly as possible.
Remedy Entertainment did not immediately respond to Polygon’s request for comment.