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Phasing through walls, gates, or invisible barriers that are supposed to keep you locked into the intended path.
Games use invisible collision walls and trigger-gated barriers to control player progression. Barrier skips bypass these entirely using techniques like clipping through geometry, abusing ledge grabs, exploiting camera angles, or manipulating velocity values. Some skips are as simple as walking into a corner at the right angle; others require multi-step setups involving item manipulation and frame-perfect inputs. A single barrier skip can cut minutes off a run by bypassing entire dungeons, cutscenes, or boss fights that the developers assumed were mandatory.
Example
In The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, the 'Barrier Skip' at Hyrule Castle bypasses the requirement to collect all the Triforce shards, a multi-hour fetch quest. Discovering this skip in 2014 cut the Any% time nearly in half and revitalized the game's speedrunning community.
Why it matters
Barrier skips are often the most impactful glitches in a game's speedrun history, collapsing intended hours of gameplay into seconds. They reveal how game designers create the illusion of mandatory progression and what happens when that illusion breaks.
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