Sequence Break Explanations

Zips:
Moving vertically or horizontally, Alex moves normally, but at certain diagonal angles, his movement speed is much faster.

There's a speed slider in the game which tells the game how long to wait between animation frames. This delay is measured in ticks, or 1/60th of a second. For reasons that might not have been intentional, the top delay value is 0, which messes with the calculations, and the animation delay is no longer tied to time, but to how many CPU cycles you can cram in there. It's like the game asks, "is it time to move yet," and the answer is always, "Yes."

So why doesn't Alex move at top speed all the time? When Alex completes a turn and faces a non-diagonal direction, there's code that suppresses his speed by 2 levels. Our speculation is that the devs did this to prevent the horizontal and vertical walk animations from looking too cartoonish.

Alt skip:
On August 8th, 2020, sluicebox revealed that the tile maze can be completely skipped by pressing the Alt key. Due to a bug, pressing alt bypasses all of the tile code, and you can walk around the room as you please. And if we don't care about points, there's another bug that saves even more time. ALT‑clicking on the edge of the screen bypasses the code that normally tells the game which room to put you in next. Alt-click the direction you entered from and you'll warp to the opposite room without walking across the screen.


Gnome skip:
In response to Jaki's acceptance to the big stage, sluicebox dug into one of the items on his "to investigate" list, and revealed something amazing.

The trigger for the gnomes to appear is this brown area. On every cycle, the game checks to see if you're in it, and if you are, the gnomes march out. But what if there were a way to move over the trigger, without triggering it?

Each screen in the game is a room, and rooms can only have one script running at a time. If we could somehow activate a room script while walking over the trigger, the beach would skip summoning the gnomes because there's already a script running.

The problem is that starting a script puts the game in handsOff mode, which means that the cursor is locked, the menu is locked, and, crucially, if Alex is walking, the handsOff code makes him stop walking. However, what sluicebox discovered is that turning is not walking.

So, first, get Alex in a position where he'll need to turn. Click walk and quickly press Escape or Delete to bring up the menu. Alex needs to be in mid-turn for this to work. Now we just need a room script, and thankfully, there's one right in the menu: this option to play a teaser from Girl in the Tower.


Cataclips:
On November 23rd, sluicebox posted this image to discord, with the promise of a new route to be revealed that night. The metaphor of the game being blown apart by an atomic blast wasn't an exaggeration.

In the catacombs, Alt-click to skip past the tiles, grab the shield, which you need to get past a stone archer later in the game, and walk back to the entrance room.

We now do a trigger skip in this room, similar to what we did with the gnomes, but use the boring book because you can only use the map on the beach. The game puts you, not in the next room to the left, but in the topmost room on the lower level of the catacombs.

You can then travel to this screen. Those of you familiar with game dev may not be surprised to learn that the different rooms of the catacombs are actually one room, but presented in different configurations, so there's actually a trigger, that you can't see, to go north. Book skip again, hitting the north screen trigger, and you'll end up in a sort of phantom room that isn't normally accessible during gameplay. Do that one more time, and you've phased directly into the minotaur's lair.

Now, since we can book skip to the second level of the catacombs, we don't have to wait out the long animation of falling between levels, or light the tinderbox. We don't need to do the ceiling crushing room. We don't need to get the brick, since its only purpose is to stop the gears.

We don't need to use the hole-in-the-wall, so we don't need to play the flute for the wallflowers. We don't need the flute, so we only have to visit the pawnshop once, in the very beginning, to get the mint, magic map, and the nightingale.