Before booting up Zexion on my Steam Deck last weekend, I made a grievous error: I looked it up on YouTube and saw that someone had finished the game in three hours. Did I immediately intuit, as someone well-versed in the sicko behavior of gaming speedrunners, that three hours was probably a really fast clear time for this indie game with its throwback 8-bit graphics that includes its own built-in randomizer? Of course not.
"Three hours!" I thought. "What a breezy, compact adventure this will be. A perfect little snack while I take a short break from dying over and over in Silksong." Well, I've now spent almost three hours dying over and over in Zexion instead, and I'm nowhere near finished with it. Apparently Silksong had beaten the ability to spot a speedrun right out of me.
