Repton 1 speedrun in 17:52I didn't notice until I opened this topic that this is an anagram of my first ever time, 25:17
I'm finished with Repton 1 for now. The run has some small inaccuracies that lose a couple of seconds here and there, but I'm pretty sure there are no more major improvements to find, and it doesn't seem worth it to keep grinding runs for a slightly better time.
Instead, I'm moving on to Repton 2, which is a much harder game. The main new game element is the "spirit", which follows the walls to its left until it reaches a cage, and there can be up to eight of them per level. So now, routes have to be carefully planned to manipulate spirits' paths and get Repton around as fast as possible without collision, and there are many more places where a small slip can have large consequences. In addition, eight of the levels have a planetary surface that you can go above (and you have to, in most cases); and six of those drop meteors randomly on you when you are above the surface
The meteors are pretty slow but can fall in clusters that are tricky to dodge, and of course the unpredictability makes it harder to plan consistent routes for handling the spirits.
Still, I'm making decent progress; I've recorded six videos of routing and practice on the individual levels (which isn't quite six levels; it's complicated, but some levels are in chunks that are accessed separately, so one of my videos contains half of one level and half of another). My plan is to finish going through all the levels like this and then start full game runs. The only previous speedrun is a 57:07 TAS by George Foot, so it will be quite an achievement if I can beat that with a real-time run