Dungeon Bypass / Video Games

Main page: Dungeon Bypass.

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• Some games with randomly generated dungeons, such as Persona 3 and Baroque, will occasionally end up generating a floor's exit right next to its entrance. You can't bypass the entire dungeon this way, but you pretty much end up bypassing that floor.
• The Adventures of Rad Gravity's very definitely final planet has a nerve-wracking maze of Magical Mystery Teleporters, but it can by bypassed by glitching through the walls with the Teleport Beacon.
• In Age of Wonders, Lizardfolk's innate swimming ability give them a powerful advantage on some maps, which is why they didn't appear in the sequels. Particularly since there was a water spell that flooded the map, giving them even more water to have an advantage with. Subverted in the mission which requires you to go through an underground tunnel under some mountains. If you try to go over the mountains instead, you'll run into a very aggressive red dragon. Also, even if you somehow managed to defeat the dragon, it actually takes longer than going the normal way because mountains give you a movement penalty.
• The mad king of Armello has fortified his palace with deadly Perils in order to keep would-be heroes out. However, if you complete enough quests, one of your contacts points you towards a way to sneak past one of the traps, enabling you to enter the Palace Grounds. Still have to deal with the King's Guard, though...
• In Asheron's Call every door that can be unlocked (including ones that require a unique key) can be unlocked from one side by simply using it. Due to the way physics works in game it's possible for two players to work together to glitch through a door.
• Avernum sets these up intentionally in the first three games. Learn the Priest spell "Move Mountains" and look for cracked walls, and you can sometimes get around the baddies (or at least find sealed-off rooms.) Sadly, as of the fourth this is no longer possible.
• Baldur's Gate II:
  • Unofficially, one of the most popular mods for Shadows of Amn is an NPC that just teleports you and your party to the end of the opening dungeon with any worthwhile items, quest hooks, and the equivalent gold roughly equal to the market value of all the junk that you could have picked off each damned corpse as well as a bunch of experience points. Because in a game with very high replay value, after a few times through, that dungeon really is that boring.
  • On that note, several mods also exist for other RPGs that allow the player to skip That One Level while still gaining all the things they could've obtained by playing through that level. Examples of this include the Fade in Dragon Age: Origins and the Peragus Mines in Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords.
  • Although the game suggest you to avoid a direct confrontation and undergo the quest to assembly the magical rod through the ancient underground ruins before dealing with the Unseeing Eye in its lair, you can totally skip that by storming its lair (which can be Nintendo Hard unless you equip the Shield of Balduran).
• Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal:
  • A variation appears upon teleporting to a city under siege. You're told that no one has been able to enter or exit using teleportation magic. The player, of course, can come and go as he pleases, though he can't target a location more specific than the point he left the city. This is probably due to this ability being linked to the fact that the main character is a proto-god at that point.
  • It is also possible to go past most of the Undercity plot by simply bribing the guards at the entrance (exit) and most other dungeons can be severely shortened through use of the transformation-teleport bug.
• The Jet Pack item from Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg allows you to float indefinitely, but only at the initial height you start floating from. Naturally, this means that if you can jump off from a high enough point, you can go over just about anything and go to pretty much anywhere in a level. At least one level in Blizzard Castle seems to encourage this to get around a particularly vicious slide.
• The Binding of Isaac has plenty of items and bonuses that allow you to circumvent barriers or outright pass floors, albeit whether or not you can use them largely boils down to the luck of what items you draw, the layout of the map, and which enemies you encounter. You could beat all the enemies in a room to unlock the doors, or you could just blow them open with a bomb or lure the explosive attack of an enemy to do it for you. You could deliberately start a floor with only one heart and hope a boss-challenge room appears, or you could blast your way in via an adjacent hidden room. You could fight Mom, or just bring a bible and use it to end the fight instantly. You could carefully navigate rooms, or you could just unlock Azazel and fly over everything. It's actually hard to play a round of this game and not find a way to bypass at least a few challenges along the way.
• This was the main reason the Teleportation Plasmid was removed from the original BioShock game, as using it in the right situations could have skipped major plots in the game.
• Blue Stinger has a maze of ice blocks in a cold storage area. It's possible to melt all the ice and swim across to the next room, but doing this means fighting a miniboss that was previously subjected to Harmless Freezing in the next area.
• In BoxxyQuest: The Gathering Storm, the second dungeon requires you to find three of fifteen hidden books, and then use codes written in their margins to unlock a door. Which three books you need are randomly chosen each playthrough, but the codes themselves are not. So if you have a list of all fifteen codes, you can just input the ones you need right away and skip the whole mess.
• Broforce:
  • Indiana Brones's whip serves this purpose. If used while a directional key is being held, Brones will automatically grapple onto a nearby surface and catapult himself upwards. This is extremely useful for dodging dangerous enemies.
  • The Brocketeer's rocket jump, though not as powerful, serves a similar purpose.
  • The Brominator's minigun pushes him backwards when firing at a rapid pace, allowing a skilled player to fly over an entire map without engaging a single enemy. In the spinoff, his palette swap Bro Caesar has the same ability.
  • In general, segments of many maps can be bypassed simply by digging underneath the relevant section using the game's destructible terrain.
  • Many of the bros have options to slightly increase their movement in various ways, most often by propelling them forward in an attack animation. Though very situational, these can theoretically be used to bypass segments of maps.
• The normal way to play Castlevania: Harmony of Despair multiplayer is to go off in different directions and open doors that would otherwise take forever to each with one player. Or you can dive kick off another player's head (or Yorick's if you're Soma) and skip tricky sections that way. Or you can glitch the physics engine to pass through walls and skip even more sections of the map.
• In Celeste, the Chapter 5 Crystal Heart requires you to take a hidden alternate path after picking up the Interchangeable Antimatter Key to bypass the door you would normally use it on, so you can instead use it to unlock the door to the Heart room.
• City of Heroes:
  • Can be done on any mission that does not require every foe on the map to be defeated as long as the players have Stealth or at least one has Stealth and the ability to teleport their teammates to their location. Stealth can be taken by any character by level 6, and the Stalker archetype has it as a required power at level 1. However, some enemies later in the game have + perception powers that allow them to see through stealth as well as some maps featuring obstacles that will suppress stealth if the player gets too close to them.
  • In the final mission of the Katie Hannon task force, players are expected to beat their way through hordes of Red Caps, find a captured witch, and get her out through wave after wave of ambushes. This happens on an outdoor map, though, and the witch is capable of flying. As a result, it's become standard practice to fly to the witch, blow away her captors, and fly her out.
  • The old trial in the Hollows has two stages: fighting your way through the tunnels to the door to the cave, then facing a single massive room full of monsters between you and the eight triggers that have to be pressed simultaneously. You have 90 minutes to complete it. If someone on the team has a stealth power and Recall (teleporting someone to your position), they can get to the door and quickly teleport everyone there. Once everyone goes through the door, then do the same thing for each of the triggers (teleporting one teammate to each). Click the triggers, trial over in a few minutes, and quite likely zero enemies having to be fought.
  • There's also an Enhancement (a sort of power upgrade) which can be slotted to Sprint, an ability earned at level 1 - and which gives the character a sort of partial invisibility as long as Sprint is active. It stacks with Stealth, the level 6 Concealment skill, for a single power slot used... and then you can get Recall Friend, to pull other members of your team towards the single objective.
  • On the Oranbega maps, some portals are bugged so they send you to a random portal rather than the partner portal on the other side of the wall. If you get lucky, it's possible to be sent from a portal just inside the map entrance to one just outside the room with the mission objective(s).
• The Chronosphere from Command & Conquer: Red Alert allows the Allies to teleport their troops all around the battlefield, bypassing the enemy defences. In a commendable aversion of Gameplay and Story Segregation, they use it story-wise as well in the final mission of Red Alert 2, when they teleport their army from Cuba to Moscow to end the war in one decisive strike.
• In the first Crackdown game, a DLC pack came with a large number of Street Race missions. These would generally be quite tough, since everyone involved - you included - would be driving the exact same car. There was also a LOT of them. Players tired of trying to beat the near-perfect AI in every race soon found alternate solutions - while the street-races took away all of your main weapons (preventing you from just bringing a rocket-launcher to the party), you were still left with your default handgun, and a single shot to the gas-tank cap would instantly detonate a car. So once the race has started, you just park your car in some nice, out-of-the-way place, and start lifting any large, heavy objects you can find to build a barricade across the track. When the AI cars finish the first lap and get tangled up in your barrier, you shoot out as many as you can. If any get through, well, you now have several wrecked cars you can use to improve your barricade for the next lap. With all other racers destroyed, you just need to open a hole in the barricade, and then hot-lap your way to victory.
• In Crash Bandicoot (1996), the second-to-last 'proper' level (not including bosses and a Breather Level) is long and difficult. If you acquired a gem from another similar level, you can take a shortcut, grab many 1-ups and finish the level in fifteen seconds.
• In the Crusader games, virtually any door that you need a keycard or combination to open can be blasted open with explosives. This will, however, set off the alarm.
• Dawn of War:
  • Dawn of War: Dark Crusade: During the Space Marine stronghold mission an early optional objective allows you to direct orbital bombardments from the Litany of Fury by co-opting the Blood Ravens' communications. The Imperial Guard stronghold has a scanner that gives you line of sight to one point anywhere on the map temporarily. Orbital bombardment can one-shot an enemy stronghold building.
  • The mission is even easier for Tau, whose commander has both long ranged weapons, jet pack and stealth. He can jump over the SM defences and blast the stronghold while remaining hidden from retaliation.
  • The Necron stronghold has a bunch of empty tunnels your forces can use (though you need to discover the tunnel exits to use them), one near your base and one near the Nightbringer. The goal of the mission is to get your hero to drop a bomb at the Nightbringer's room and evacuate before it collapses, which the tunnel makes a lot easier.
  • Eldar are extremely good in this in general, since their vehicles can skim across long distances and over obstacles, and their builder units can teleport across half the map and then build Webway portals that you can teleport your whole infantry army (and your whole base if you feel like it) through.
  • The Necrons can use their Lord's teleportation and immortality from the "Essence of the Nightbringer" skill to do this in the Imperial Guard stronghold. The Necron Lord simply teleports over a set of small islands in a river right to the enemy headquarters (the only structure that needs to be destroyed), activates the Nightbringer mode and gets rid of it; mission complete.
  • In Soulstorm, flyers in general are very good at this. Just fly them straight towards the target, overshoot a bit, then demonstrate the joys of More Dakka to the enemy.
  • The Eldar stronghold in Soulstorm can be completed by teleporting/jumping in the north-west corner where their hidden base is - provided you have detectors for stealth building. It works with the Necron and the Tau since their commanders can equip an item that grants detection.
  • The Hive Lord in one of the sequel's expansions is a monstrous creature, meaning it's flagged as a vehicle for the purposes of barging through things. Some of the missions were designed without taking this into account, meaning that the Hive Lord can counter-flank ambushes or take massive shortcuts just by smashing through a vehicle-breakable wall.
• Deep Rock Galactic: Only natural when destructible terrain and mining pickaxes are a part of the game, but one class in invokes it the most: When the Drop Pod comes down, and everyone must quickly get to it before it leaves, you could either backtrack and follow the M.U.L.E. and its flares, fighting off what ambushes you in the meantime... or just have the Driller carve a straight tunnel to it with his twin drills, and guard his back while he does. If you're lost, it's usually the easier way.
  Driller: Obstacle? More like a granite smoothie once I'm done!
  • The Driller also shines in On-Site Refining missions. In these, the players must connect three wells of liquid morkite to a refinery rig by building pipelines between them. This usually entails navigating the often very rugged terrain between the wells and the refinery, laying down sections of pipe as you go... or you could just drill nice, straight tunnels between them.
  • The Scout can also completely ignore the terrain inside a cavern by using his grappling hook to traverse huge gaps. He even lampshades this:
    Scout: Going from A to D, skipping B and C!
• Several Descent levels have this, e.g. Descent II's eighth level has a huge shortcut that allows you to go straight to the red key and the boss, bypassing about half the level. Level 2 also has a shortcut to the red key, which also allows you to go through the rest of the level backwards.
• Deus Ex:
  • Many sections of the game could be skipped via alternate routes or player ingenuity (and which the designers praise the player for):
  • A smart player could run straight through the first mission (Liberty Island) to the boss and complete it in less than 5 minutes with minimal enemy contact. Once that happens, the UNATCO troops come up behind JC and kill all of the NSF troops. A player that knows what he's doing can force open the UNATCO door with a gas grenade, bypassing the mission entirely. The game acknowledges this.
  • There are several examples of bypassing danger by taking a stealthy route to the target, particularly in Castle Clinton, where the player can use the keypad near the vending machine, go through the vents, and then find the Ambrosia while only encountering one or two guards. Likewise, you can sneak through the maintenance tunnels in the Battery Park subway station past the terrorists (and rescuing the hostages if you so choose), bypassing the situation and the objective (and getting chewed out by your brother when you arrive in Hell's Kitchen).
  • After JC sends the signal from the roof of the UNATCO occupied NSF base, it causes every single soldier inside to turn hostile. You can either fight your way down... or put a bunch of mods in Leg Strength (which lowers fall damage) and jump off the roof. Alternately, you can also carefully knock out the UNATCO soldiers before sending the signal, leaving no one left to fight you as you leave (the game even anticipates this method and gives the player a special message from the guy who sent the kill order.)
  • Several parts of the game can be skipped if the player knows the passwords to certain locked doors: The MJ12 base underneath UNATCO can be skipped entirely if the player knows the code to the exit door. The game doesn't account for this.
  • In Hong Kong, the entire section where JC goes to confront Maggie Chow can be skipped if the player sneaks into Chow's apartment via grenade-jumping and steals the Dragon's Tooth Sword early on. Also, the sidequest about Max Chen needing proof of Maggie's guilt can be skipped if the player already knows the code to the police station vault.
  • Also, the player can skip most of Versalife if they know the codes to certain doors, which allows them to access the Level 3 labs and destroy the Universal Constructor before they're asked to.
  • Lacing the East Side Cemetery with LAM's before you visit Stanton Dowd results in all the MJ12 troops that spawn in getting blown to smithereens instantly. This can also be done in the 'Ton Hotel during the escape with Paul to trivialize an otherwise-hard battle.
  • The majority of the penultimate Silo level can be avoided completely if you run to the hatch leading from the surface down to the Silo, and fire a LAW rocket into it at a certain angle (which glitches through the grate and continues straight downward, killing Howard Strong). This can cause the level to be finished in under a minute.
• In the Disgaea series, units with flight like the Mothman and Masked Hero can move through enemy units, and disregard the height of terrain, making them extremely useful for any map where you need to get a certain point to complete it, as both of those things will frequently pose problems for normal units.
• The "Excelsior Transporter" from the dnd game for PLATO computers teleports the player from the outside the dungeon to a level of the dungeon they've already beaten, so they can skip past stuff they already played through. Notably, this only works on the way into the dungeon, so escaping the dungeon to level up or beat the game still requires you to manually beat each level again.
• Donkey Kong Country:
  • The first game has six levels with a shortcut at the beginning that takes you to, or very near, the end of the level. This includes some of the hardest levels in the game.
  • Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest has one of these in every level of the first and second worlds.
• Many Doom levels can be completed in seconds by exploiting glitches to create shortcuts. In source ports that allow jumping, you can end certain levels within seconds by leaping onto the otherwise inaccessible exit switch/linedef.
• Doom Eternal: Partway through the game, the Doom Slayer faces a problem: the final Hell Priest he needs to kill is hiding on Sentinel Prime, which can only be reached via a portal that is buried deep inside the core of Mars. It would take months at least to dig down to it, time that the people of Earth don't have what with the apocalyptic demon invasion going on. The Doom Slayer's solution? Take control of humanity's most powerful weapon, the BFG 10,000, and... well...
  Samuel Hayden: You can't just shoot a hole in the surface of Mars!
  VEGA: The portal is ready.
  New Mission: Shoot a Hole in Mars.
• In Duke Nukem 3D, several levels can be easily bypassed with Duke's Jet Pack.
• The RTS game Dungeon Keeper 2 has a campaign level that has racing against the clock while your mission is to destroy the enemy Dungeon Heart, where the MacGuffin is stored in the far North, having to go through another enemy camp in the middle to get there and having overwhelming numbers against you with few resources while you're stuck in the far South. The obvious solution hinted by the mission briefing is to find the bypass. This can be done by building a bridge on the west side over the water and then tunneling past both bases straight to the enemy's Dungeon Heart. Another level gives you the choice of a frontal assault to be able to assassinate the enemy leader or to tunnel east and attack him in his own headquarters bypassing all his defenses.
• The Elder Scrolls: Arena, included the spell "Passwall". It allowed players to permanently destroy dungeon walls, letting them bypass tough enemies and other obstacles. They didn't include it in Daggerfall, but enterprising players can make use of the wonky level geometry to move through the walls into a black space, allowing you to run along on top of the dungeon paths. Be aware, though, that while it's relatively easy to pass into the Void, it's rather more complex to get back out of it. These "features" live on in later Bethesda games, with the "tcl" (toggle clipping) console command. This is also possible, if one is lucky, to do in The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind: notably, using a certain scroll which enhances your jump skill to ludicrous levels may allow you to jump through ceilings, and land in other areas of the dungeon.
• You can do this in Elona, and it's often a way to find hidden passages. If you have a really high digging skill, you can even break out of jail by just digging through the walls.
• Evil Islands:
  • Can be done a couple of times, although you still want to complete all quests because of the experience bonus. Especially since the game's extremely steep level and equipment curve means that almost any area you're not supposed to be is going to be a solid Beef Gate wall extending forever. Instead of doing the long set of quests related to entering the Dead City, you could just traverse the cave that is available very early in the game. The other entrance leaves you about ten metres far from your objective in the Dead City.
  • If you don't want to avoid all of those quests, you can still shorten them. Getting to the observatory is far easier than the game tells you. Instead of making peace with the Lizard Men living in the Middle Mountains, you can just lure the ones near the dragon to kill them elsewhere, and then just sneak the dragon. Similarly, you can avoid the quest for freezing the lake by taking a side path that goes around the lake. There are some Lizard Men there, but you should have killed many of them already by that point, and they're anyway weaker than the skeletons you're forced to fight to get the crystal required to freeze the lake.
• Fallout:
  • Fallout 2 allowed the player to bypass several levels of security in the Sierra Army Base if he had a high enough Lockpick skill to get to the personal elevator of the general who would have been in command of the base. A character could also bypass forcefields with the Repair skill.
  • Fallout 3
    • If you max out lockpicking completely, you can lockpick through the exit of the dungeons. Thus, literally bypassing everything.
    • Several dungeons, such as the National Archives, the Antagonizer's Lair, and Olney Powerworks, have a hidden back door that you can use to skip all the monsters and traps and go straight to the boss/MacGuffin item/mission objective.
    • In the National Guard Depot, you can squeeze your way through a debris pile blocking a stairway to the third floor, then jump down to the Armory switch on the second floor, bypassing the Training Wing and Offices.
    • The Metro service tunnel leading to the Family's hideout also has a hidden back entrance from Northwest Seneca Station, which is the way most players first discover during the Blood Ties quest. The main tunnel entrance is from the Meresti Trainyard, which is a fair distance away.
    • You can either take the hard route to Vault 87 through Murder Pass, or if you rescued Penny from Paradise Falls, ask Joseph to turn on the computer terminal for you to hack and open the back door.
    • During the Reilly's Ranger's quest, the main marker path leads you eastbound from Metro Central to Freedom Street and the Mutant-infested and irradiated Vernon Square, which is the main entrance to Our Lady of Hope Hospital, but Reilly recommends an alternate route to the hospital from Dupont Circle through the Dry Sewers.
  • Fallout 4:
    • Some doors are chained or barred from inside and normally serve as a Door to Before, but with a Jet Pack, Roof Hopping, or tunnel crawling, you can sometimes shortcut around the impasse.
    • A few Raider hideouts such as those in the Federal Ration Stockpile and Andrew Station have a hidden trapdoor leading straight to the ringleader's headquarters, sometimes requiring high lockpick or hacking skill.
    • Played literally in the sidequest "The Big Dig", where you use a mining robot to tunnel into Hancock's warehouse from below, the story quest "Mass Fusion", where you teleport (Institute) or ride a Vertibird (Brotherhood of Steel) to the Mass Fusion Building roof, which is the only way to reach the Executive Suites until you have the keycard, and the finale "Nuclear Option", where you blast your way underground into the Institute, which could previously only be teleported to.
  • Fallout: New Vegas:
    • There is a vault that contains a maze to reach the bottom for a mission. Or you can just repair the elevator at the entrance and go straight to the bottom floor.
    • Repair, Science, Speech, Barter, Lockpick and Disguises allow you to do this a lot over the course of the game. The difficulty of Dead Money is largely dependent on if you actually leveled your skills fully or used every possible drug, magazine, and equipment bonus to pass skill checks and put the bare minimum skill points in as a result.
    • Vault 19 has a hidden back entrance via the Sulfur Caves northwest of Whittaker Farmstead.
    • In the DLC Old World Blues, a mission requires you to test out a stealth suit by reaching a safe without being detected. You could carefully avoid and disable robots, turrets, lasers, and land mines. Or you could destroy all the obstacles before the test even begins. Even better, a player with a force-field disabling weapon can use the observation level to drop directly into the final room of the test.
    • When ascending Black Mountain, you normally have to go up a Super Mutant-infested and irradiated switchback path, but if you have a Lockpick skill of at least 75, you can pick the back gate and go straight to Tabitha's hideout.
• In the PC version of Far Cry, in the second level, a lifeboat is hanging from the top of a beached carrier. A lucky shot from the lower deck of the carrier can break the chains, dropping the lifeboat into the water and skipping the section on top of the carrier altogether.
• Final Fantasy:
  • In Final Fantasy IV, the Sealed Cave can be skipped by using the Warp spell immediately after the boss fight with Golbez, giving the player the dungeon's Crystal early.
  • In Final Fantasy VII one can bypass much of the Shinra Building and its guards by simply taking the stairs as opposed to fighting your way floor by floor. This is, however, incredibly boring, time consuming, and you have to put up with your characters complaining the entire way. There are a few bits of nice loot on the stairs, however. While the remake removes the loot, it does also load all of the stairs at once, reducing the time the sequence takes.
  • Final Fantasy XI had several "secret" areas in different zones which could only be accessed by passing through long elaborate and often dangerous dungeons, some of which having doors that required multiple players to open and at least one who's entrance was in a completely different area 3 zones away. These areas generally held valuable timed spawn Notorious Monsters or quest objectives. It wasn't until the "Battle packs" added between the 4th and 5th expansions that (most of) these areas finally became easily accessible through Abyssea and/or Voidwatch warps.
  • Early in Final Fantasy XIV, Dungeon Bypassing was the norm to pull off Speed Runs in the endgame. A few seconds after being engaged bosses erected magic barriers sealing players into (or out of) their battle area. These barriers also broke aggro for any mobs caught on the other side when they went up. Players would sprint from one boss to the next, tank leading the way to aggro everything, then stand right at the barrier edge as the boss was pulled, trapping the trash mobs outside and allowing it to be completely bypassed. Square largely killed off this behavior by adding mid-level barriers that require killing all the trash up to that point to open, either explicitly by just not opening while the mobs live, or practically by requiring several uninterrupted seconds of interaction with key items.
  • Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates requires a lot of jump-climbing and in many cases the player has to meet an objective or solve a puzzle to unlock the next platform or lever or switch to allow them to climb to the next level... or, you could just dump the magicites from your inventory and strategically stack them to make a ladder. This becomes especially doable once you have Gnash (who can Double Jump) and Meeth (whose urn is a constantly-available stepstool). This is also possible in its Spiritual Successor Echoes of Time, but you have to use other party members which requires a bit of finesse as they move away from being jumped on (probably to avoid this exact thing).
• In Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light, the objective in each map is to have Marth seize an important tile (either a gate or a throne). Most times in the franchise, there is a boss guarding that tile, but in the NES version, several bosses don't start the map on it, instead moving onto it during their first turn. The player moves before the enemy, so if you can get Marth to the tile in one turn, you can end the map incredibly early. The developers obviously assumed you wouldn't get to them in one turn, forgetting the Warp Staff that you get in Chapter 3, allowing you to cut short many long maps.
• In Friday the 13th you don't actually have to do any of the "dungeons" or tasks. You don't have to enter the forest, or the cave, face Pamela Voorhees, or light the fireplaces. All you actually have to do is keep the children in the lakeside cabin alive and defeat Jason three times to win the game. All those extra tasks do is provide you with better weapons and Pamela's sweater which in effect doubles that one counsellor's health. In fact, a careful player can get his hands on the machete or torch without doing any of the dungeons at all. The former can be found by killing 60 zombies and the latter can be found at random in a large lakeside cabin after finding the note telling you to look for it, and the machete is a fast weapon that does okay damage to Jason while the latter is a slow one that does as much damage to Jason as the pitchfork.
• In Gauntlet, one level has four exit tiles near the players' spawn point◊. Other levels have most or all of the walls replaced by exit tiles, so there's no incentive to explore those levels unless players are told to "find the hidden potion".
• In The Godfather: The Game, the main goal is to run a protection racket for the Don. Scaring shopkeepers tends to bring in enemy soldiers. However, doing all the respect-earning tasks first, like finding Plot Devices and assassination missions can gain sufficient respect that most shopkeepers don't summon bodyguards. And -that- gains respect as well, allowing much of the game to be bypassed with no shooting whatsoever. In other words, playing like a real mafia man.
• In Golf With Your Friends, you generally follow the path of the "fairways" in each level, but by taking advantage of the obstacles and physics, you can skip parts of the level. While it can save time and strokes, there's usually more challenge involved, and you risk landing out-of-bounds, incurring a penalty.
• Grand Theft Auto:
  • Grand Theft Auto III:
    • At the start of the game if you are careful you can turn around and jump the "broken" bridge, bypassing the entire first island.
    • You can also get to the third island earlier than intended by running a boat ashore near the pipeline that functions as a border in the water, and pushing the boat past it on land.
    • There's another way to get to the third island early. On the second island, there's a hospital with a big dark blue window high up in the air. A player could, with careful use of cheats, get up there and find the window wasn't solid. If the player drove a car through the window, they would fall and land inside a tunnel that led into the third island, bypassing the blocked tunnel entrance.
    • "Two-Faced Tanner" involves over-taking and killing an undercover cop. As soon as you attack his car, you get the cops on your case, coming at you with just about everything they have. You can't disable his vehicle beforehand. What you can do is get ahead of him, jump out of your car, and then destroy his car with an M-16. It takes about half a magazine, and when he dies the cops automatically desist.
  • Grand Theft Auto: Vice City:
    • is full of things like this. Instead of chasing cars all willy-nilly through the streets, it's possible, with proper preparation, to blow up enemy cars and win easily.
    • Or shoot their tires with a sniper rifle to make them helpless. Quite useful on the mission where you have to beat someone in a car race to hire him as your driver.
    • This is not so effective in racing missions in general, as the races tend to start immediately if you harm any of the other cars. However, some missions where you need to kill someone seem to be set to intentionally reward a player who thinks ahead and disables potential getaway cars first.
    • The street races in GTA Vice City can be made much easier by simply killing all of your opponents in the opening seconds with a tank cannon shell.
    • One mission has you perform a hit at a golf club. Your weapons are confiscated if you use the main entrance. It's infinitely easier to park a car by a wall and jump the fence, going in fully armed.
  • Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas:
    • The factory filled with Russian weapon smugglers. Half of it can be bypassed by driving a tall vehicle to the back wall, clamber onto the car roof and jump the fence.
    • There's a mission later in the game where you have to steal a skycrane helicopter from a military fuel depot. The caption tells you to steal a military vehicle (which it promptly provides by spawning a Patriot humvee leaving the facility when you approach it) to gain entrance, but it's much easier to just grab the nearest airplane (which are freely available at this point) and parachute right on top of the target's helipad or, if you completed the Flight School missions beforehand, clean up the bulk of soldier resistance on the rooftops with a Hunter attack chopper first. You can complete the game several times over the years without even knowing there was an entire part of the facility accessible and in place especially for the shootout that would ensue if you took the regular Dungeon path.
  • Grand Theft Auto IV:
    • Possible in the mission Pest Control, where you have to kill Ray Boccino. Before the mission starts, you can see his car sitting outside the building the mission starts at, so you can simply slap a car bomb on it and set it off when he gets in. You still have to clean up his guards, but you skip the entire pursuit section of the mission.
    • There's a lot of these in GTA IV. One mission from Francis has you tasked with entering a multi-story apartment building in the projects, cutting your way through dozens of guards on several floors, and finally either killing or sparing a gang leader after chasing and then cornering him on the roof. If you don't want to mess around with all that (and don't care about the choice to kill or spare) you can climb a crane a block away, zoom in with a military sniper rifle, and headshot the dude on the roof first thing.
• In Guild Wars, the second half of the Nolani Academy mission requires players escort an NPC through a series of ravines and then fight through a Charr army to reach their general. However, if the party instead immediately heads the opposite direction from the NPC after a cutscene, he'll stop in a safe spot. The party can then take an unpopulated direct path to the general, whose death ends the mission.
• Guild Wars 2:
  • Most jumping puzzles simply require the player to reach the end point and loot a chest. Mesmers who have reached said chest can then teleport other players up there for as long as they have an interest.
  • Mounts and gliders have the same potential for bypassing puzzles and mini-dungeons which is why the developers added no-gliding and no-mounting zones around a majority of puzzles. However some puzzles were not protected for one reason or another, most notably Troll's Revenge in Lion's Arch which held the title as hardest jumping puzzle for some time.
• Halo:
  • This can often be pulled off, whether legitimately or with glitches. In fact, Dungeon Bypassing is a requirement if you're a speed runner.
  • Halo: Combat Evolved:
    • In the level "Assault on the Control Room", in the last quarter of the level, you encounter a group of Covenant Grunts, Jackals, and Elites. One of the Elites is piloting a Banshee, a flying vehicle. However, until they see you, they aren't doing anything in particular. One well-aimed shot with a plasma pistol, and you can take out the pilot of the Banshee, and wreck havoc on all Covenant forces between you and the final room. Other methods include either hanging on to your sniper rifle so you can kill the pilot before he hops in (you can even kill the pilot of the second Banshee further down the bridge), or using a rocket launcher to flip the Banshee over so he can't get in it.
    • Even before that, on the first bridge you cross in "AotCR", you can hug the cliff all the way down to the bottom. The rest of the enemies will not spawn so you skip about 95% of all the fighting in the level.
    • With a lot of practice and luck, you can even get a Banshee on "AotRC" just after you reach the first tank. A well-placed rocket launcher to the bottom of the platform high up on the chasm wall will knock off the Banshee sitting above it. You can jump in and fly your way through the rest of the level! It works because the vehicle spawns with the level, but the pilot doesn't spawn until you've walked farther into the next area. You can actually fly back and find a very lonely, very angry elite waiting where his ride should be.
    • "The Silent Cartographer" has the semi-famous "Squally's Jump." When you go back to the door you unlocked there's a ledge that triggers a cutscene showing off the near-bottomless pit. To the right, you can see the side of the complex you would be fighting through, and on the bottom floor, you can see an Overcharge. It's possible with good aim (or the fact that the game autosaves there) to land on it and take no damage. It also lets you sneak up on and kill two Elites guarding the way you were supposed to come from. The downside is, all those enemies you skipped by jumping? They stay there, and are joined by the enemies that spawn in after reaching the titular Silent Cartographer. Hope you're ready for a fight.
    • There's another spot on "TSC" where a door is meant to close before you can get to it. The intention is that you are entering on foot - with a warthog, you won't be slowed down by the enemies between you and the door, and with good timing and driving skills, you can wedge the warthog in the doorway, forcing the door to stay open. If you're also lucky, it's far enough through for you to hop out on the other side, bypassing having to fight your way to and through the back door.
    • There are in fact many more examples which can be found throughout the game, like another one in ''Assault on the Control Room" where you hug the wall down a huge valley, allowing you to take a ride in the Pelican dropship straight to the Scorpion tank.
• Part of the plot of Homeworld is your fleet executing one: to reach Hiigara you have to penetrate the Taiidan Empire and the short way means you have to face the mighty Imperial border defences, so you pass through the Great Nebula, where the only defence is a small fleet near a research station because nobody (before you) has ever entered the nebula and lived to tell the tale.
• Late in Iji, you have to destroy a generator protected by heavy doors, which you're supposed to open by finding the appropriate switches. But if you maximize you Tasen Weaponry, Komato Weaponry and Cracking skills (that's where the Nanofield Reboot ability comes in handy), you can hack together a gun that can shoot through the heavy doors, completely eluding the dungeon and its boss. This is mandatory for a true Pacifist Run as one of the switches is guarded by a boss who insists on fighting to the death.
• One achievement in Jett Rocket tasks you to complete an Atoll level in under 20 seconds. As you might expect, doing this without glitching is impossible unless you pull a Dungeon Bypass in the Gimmick Level. Don't worry; no one will call you out on it.
• In King's Quest: Mask of Eternity it is possible to take a shortcut through the Dimension of Death and avoid the hassle involving the bridge.
• In the Square game Kingdom Hearts, a section in one of the final worlds requires you to lower the positions of huge blocks through different switches placed in the world to use as a staircase to reach a boss. However, by that point, you have a glide ability that allows you to slowly but surely reach areas across gaps. Therefore, you only have to partially lower one of the blocks to be able to stand on it, angle your camera, and then glide around the other block to land on the platform behind it.
• Kingdom of Loathing:
  • The game lets you do this for That One Puzzle in the Nemesis Quest after you fail the puzzle enough times. You can restart the platform hopping puzzle by swimming back to shore... then, your character soon realizes that you can just swim to the goal that way. Through lava. You don't get the best rewards (really good spleen consumable and an accessory that gives HP/MP and sells for a lot) if you do this though.
  • Because of the New Game Plus nature of the game, you can do aspects of the quest without entering the zones if you are in Softcore and pull the items. Before it was revamped, even the level 8 quest could be done without spending a single turn, as it was two Fetch Quests (for mundane items) and one test of elemental resistance.
• Kirby. In Kirby's Dream Land you can literally float over whole levels. In pretty much every single level. Subsequent games put more of a limit on his flying ability, or otherwise took measures with level design and enemy placement to prevent the player from simply coasting through, even with unlimited flight.
• Left 4 Dead is usually linear and when hordes arrive, most players hole up in small rooms or something similar, especially in the finales. However, the infected will sometimes make their own shortcuts by smashing down walls, catching the survivors off guard.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time: The game only checks if you got the Plot Coupons from the last two dungeons, instead of the last five as it should. Normally, the game prevents access to the Shadow Temple until you complete both the Fire and Water temples by putting the entrance up high and only giving you the warp song after you complete them. And, normally, you cannot complete the Spirit Temple until you learn how to go back in time, which you can't do until you complete the Forest Temple. But Good Bad Bugs exist to get into the Shadow Temple and complete the Spirit Temple without having to fully complete the other three, making at least half-dungeon bypasses possible. Additionally, the Kakariko Well is not technically required, though it takes a lot of memorization to get through certain areas without the Lens of Truth it provides.
  • In The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, each of the four major dungeons has a teleporter at the very beginning that leads directly to the boss room of that dungeon. However, it only activates if you have already defeated the boss in a previous cycle of the game's "Groundhog Day" Loop (or, in the Updated Re-release, if you had already been in the boss room). It still comes in handy if you couldn't finish all side quests that only open after a dungeon has been cleared in the previous cycle.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess: When reaching the Temple of Time, you gain the Dominion Rod and thereby gain control of a monolithic, mobile, hammer-wielding statue, which you have to return to the first room. The hammer-wielding statue can break past all of the fiddly little gates and things that you had to work your way past on the way up. And kill all enemies in one hit. You do not know what fun is until you see an entire puzzle-room destroyed 'neath the mighty tread of the Hammer Golem!
  • The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass: Link must return periodically to the Temple of the Ocean King, a multi-segmented dungeon that requires you to trek back through previously visited sections in order to reach new ones. Fortunately, the items you collect in between visits will usually open up shortcuts that save you a ton of time going back through the temple.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks: Link must climb up the Tower of Spirits. While it is very similar in function to the predecessor's central dungeon, it notably features a central staircase that allows you bypass areas you’ve already cleared.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild:
    • The game is full of dungeons based upon puzzles, genuinely blocking the endpoint with high walls. Thanks to the game's physics-based abilities, it's a common trick to jump into the air, drop a bomb underneath Link, equip a shield for surfing on, then get knocked further upward by the exploding bomb. This propels you over the high wall and skips the dungeon entirely.
    • In a more extreme example, players have managed to use Octo Balloons, which can be attached to items to make them levitate, to a working airship (or, more properly, an air raft), which they then used to fly over The Very Definitely Final Dungeon and leap straight to Ganon.
    • There are three outdoor labyrinths that lead to shrines in the overworld. The shrine's location has its entrance hidden under the walls, but once you've memorized where it is, there is little to keep you from gliding or climbing to the top of the maze and hopping straight to the secret entrance.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom has four main abilities to replace the Runes from the first game, all of which can be used to cheese shrines and dungeons.
    • Ascend allows you to burrow into the ceiling and pop out on top of the thing you dug through. While most shrines and dungeons have been pretty well insulated against Ascend by itself, you can still use it to climb mountains in seconds, just by finding a deep enough cave.
    • Recall allows you to rewind time, moving objects backwards along their paths. This can be used to skip past many shrines simply by moving a platform to the end with Ultrahand and using Recall to create moving platforms, or moving objects up, holding them there with Recall, and using Ascend to burrow through them and pop out on top.
    • Fuse allows you to merge anything with a weapon, which may not seem like much, but when you consider that you can do things like strap rockets to your shield, you can see how this can be used to cheese many areas in the game. There's a good reason dropping Zonai devices in shrines is disabled.
    • Ultrahand is probably the worst offender for this — not only does it let you pick up and move pretty much any object, it also allows you to stick them together. Plenty of shrines can be cheesed by strapping fans to a platform to create a makeshift hovercraft, moving platforms around, climbing on and using Recall to make them retrace their path, or sticking every available object together to make a bridge that allows you to bypass the puzzle.
• In LittleBigPlanet 3, the Popit Puzzles teach you how to use certain tools in Create Mode. The final tutorial gives you Sackbots and you have to use them to solve puzzles. However, you can also just change the mesh of the Sackbot from Sackboy to Swoop the bird and use the "Record" function to take control of Swoop, have him pick up Sackboy, and fly to the end of the level instead.
• Interplay's 1990 adaptation of The Lord of the Rings allows you to skip the Old Forest, if you play your cards exactly right. As in the book, if the Hobbits try to leave the Shire by the road instead of the forest, they will be set upon by a Black Rider. This would normally be an unwinnable fight, but if you learned the !Elbereth word of power from the Elves in the Shire, you can use it to drive the Rider off, allowing you to walk straight into Bree. This isn't even Sequence Breaking; the game just rewards exploration and offers alternative solutions to many problems. You're even free to go back into the Old Forest the "wrong" way if you want to explore it anyway.
• In The Lost World: Jurassic Park arcade light gun game, successfully completing objectives at certain points (saving a triceratops, inputting a passcode to lock a door, etc.) enables the player to bypass some parts of levels.
• Mass Effect:
  • A justified aversion in Mass Effect 2. On Illium, at the start of the mission to find the Assassin (whose target is in the penthouse of a skyscraper), Shepard notes "Why don't we just fly up to the top?" His/Her informant, however, comments "They have a lot of mercs carrying rocket launchers, just waiting for you to try."
  • In the Mass Effect 3: Citadel DLC, Shepard's team has to break into the Citadel archives to stop an identity thief. Brooks mentions that it will be tricky finding a way inside. Vega's response is to hold up a bomb and say, "Not really."
• Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater: One of the most frustratingly difficult bosses in the entire game, The End, can be entirely bypassed by simply saving during the boss fight and waiting an entire real-life week (or tampering with the system clock) - The End is a very old man who will have died of old age in the middle of the battle when you reload the save.
• Metroid:
  • Besides the usual Sequence Breaking of the series, the Space Jump (allows for infinite jumping, and destroys anything you touch if the Screw Attack is equipped) and the "Shinespark" technique in Super Metroid and later 2D games (run until you get "charged", and then thrust in a chosen direction, jumping extremely high and possibly breaking some walls) are perfect translations of dungeon bypass.
  • Metroid: Zero Mission on the GBA let you use a morph-ball shinespark to acquire super missiles early, bypassing a few minibosses. It was a tricky technique, and probably more time-consuming than just killing the boss. Worryingly, the skipped bosses register as dead if you come back later, down to scenery-alterations caused by their death throes. If you didn't kill it, then what did...
• In Might and Magic IV, the game's world has six magic mirrors that can teleport you to each other; all you need to do is speak their name or location and step into them. But one of them, the Sixth Mirror, has no name — and is portable, so nobody knows its location. Much of the game is spent searching for it, only to discover that it's been claimed by the Big Bad, Lord Xeen. Cue epic rush through his massive castle to reach him and stop him from using it for his nefarious plans... or, if you're smart, cue walking to one of the other five mirrors and typing "Lord Xeen", which teleports you to him instantly. You can even do this right at the start of the game before you should know it'll work, although that's likely to get your lowly level one party murdered by Lord Xeen.
• Minecraft:
  • Strongholds and dungeons appear in the procedurally-generated terrain, and since any player is going to be equipped with a pickaxe one might think the walls of the dungeon would present no obstacle at all. But, to make the player think twice about breaking down a wall, the stone-brick block that comprises the dungeon walls are randomly populated with identical-looking blocks containing Silverfish, a vicious swarming enemy that can cut even an armored player down in numbers, and that tends to make more of itself when attacked.
  • For ocean monuments, the devs went a step further—besides the greatly reduced mining speed underwater (which can be eliminated with enchantments), each one of these fortresses includes three boss monsters who (using a lovely Jump Scare) repeatedly inflict you with Mining Fatigue, which reduces mining speed by a ridiculous 99.73%, making tunneling through the structure virtually impossible until you track down and kill the bosses. Some players just take this as a challenge, though, and come up with alternate strategies, such as using glitchy tricks to set off TNT underwater and blast their way through, or stockpiling milk and drinking it to nullify the status effect every time it's applied.
• In Monaco, the Mole's whole shtick is this. His abilities allow him to dig through walls with his "freedom spoon," opening up long passageways through many dungeons.
• In NetHack, a game which very much prides itself on its flexibility, you can begin the game with a pickaxe or acquire one very early on. A pickaxe can break down every wall, including the ones that separate one level from another. By diligent digging, you can literally bypass the entire dungeon, stopping only to bushwhack a few mandatory bosses before ascending to ultimate victory. This means playing with a very underlevelled character, but is quite exciting. The technique is known as digging for victory.
• Neverwinter Nights:
  • It is possible to do this in the Golem Dungeon, as there is a door right at the entrance that leads straight to the final room of the dungeon. It takes a lot of lockpicking skill to open it, however.
  • In Neverwinter Nights 2, the supposed Door to Before in the Temple of Seasons can be opened from the "wrong" side by any decent rogue, skipping the entire dungeon.
• Nocturne: Rebirth allows the player to spend Reviel's EXP and MP to break through doors and barriers that normally require a puzzle to bypass.
• Nuclear Throne has almost as many shortcuts to bypass levels as it does regular levels.
• Ori and the Blind Forest has one in the last section of the Misty Woods, where you can Bash to a ledge leading to a secret shortcut that bypasses a tricky moving wall platform puzzle. Another is in Sorrow Pass, where the first Spirit Gate can be skipped by projectile-Bashing a breakable ceiling below and behind it.
• Outer Wilds: The main mystery of the Echoes of the Eye DLC is about how to unlock the mysterious vault aboard the Stranger, as any plaques depicting the three codes you need are all burned. The intended solution is to exploit bugs in the Stranger's simulation to bypass the codes — by jumping off the raft as a transition to a new area is happening you can get out of bounds and reach the first lock, the second lock you can reach by walking so far away from your Artifact that the world fails to load properly and makes the invisible platforms visible, and the third you can reach by dying in the real world, making you unable to hear the bells that would otherwise wake you up from the simulation.
• Akihiko Sanada does a bit of this in Persona 4: Arena during his story mode: The master of the dungeon he's going through made invisible walls in order to guide his path to the fight that he was supposed to take on. However, said master forgot that the windows of the dungeon could be shattered to completely avoid the invisible walls altogether. This ends up being subverted, however, as Akihiko gets into an unexpected fight with Kanji Tatsumi and the dungeon master promptly puts him on the correct path again, putting invisible walls in front of the windows to prevent any further loopholes.
• The famous Photopia puzzle: to escape the crystal maze, fly above it with your wings. By the way, you have wings.
• Pitfall The Mayan Adventure features two really tough boss fights against a duo of jaguars and a transforming jaguar-man. However, in some ports of the game (such as the SNES version,) the triggers for boss fights are wonky enough (requiring that the player be on the ground, for one thing) that the player can simply leap right over them and head straight to the exit.
• Planescape: Torment differs from many RPGs in that instead of having to assemble the whole party in the transition zone in order to move to the next location, you just need bring one character there. If you have an experienced thief with well developed stealth ability in your party, you can bypass most of the heavily infested locations. Of course, sometimes the exit is behind a locked door but guess what? The experienced thief can steal the key!
• Plants vs. Zombies 2: It's About Time: The Swashbuckler Zombie and the Relic Hunter Zombie will drop deep into your defences while Breakdancer Zombies can kick other zombies further into the lawn. There are also ambushes, which will also drop zombies midway into your lawn.
• Pokémon:
  • Pokémon Red and Blue:
    • You can, after acquiring the usage of Surf and Fly, bypass the extremely annoying Seafoam Islands dungeon by surfing south from Pallet Town, landing in Cinnabar Island. It means skipping Articuno, but it's easy to pick it up later.
    • The Celadon city Rocket hideout can be skipped entirely by using a Pokedoll on the Marowak ghost.
  • In Pokémon Ranger: Shadows of Almia, your boss, Barlow, repeatedly deals with the age-old RPG problem of impassible locked doors by kicking them down. Over and over. Less awesome, it does not get.
  • After you get Cut in Pokémon Diamond and Pearl and Platinum, you can easily bypass repeat visits to Eterna Forest without waiting to get Fly.
  • Pokémon Mystery Dungeon:
    • The Mystery Dungeon series has the Pure Seed item, which teleports you to the stairs down instantly. However, your limited inventory space and the rarity of the item makes it so you can't skip through the entirety of a longer dungeon, making them best used for skipping floors with a high number of rooms (Where finding the stairs can take a long time), or as a means of escaping a dangerous situation.
    • There's also the Absolute Mover IQ skill, which allows the user to traverse any manner of terrain and plow through walls by simply walking into them. Certain Ghost type Pokemon as well as holders of a Mobile Scarf are also able to walk through walls, but won't destroy them in the process. These coupled with the Stairs Seer IQ skill made getting to the next floor a very easy task. Presumably for balance reasons, Absolute Mover ended up being limited to a single Pokemon in Explorers, while the Mobile Scarf became the sole method of wall walking in Gates to Infinity and gained the harmful side effect of rapidly reducing a Pokemon's HP for every turn it spends in a wall.
• Portal:
  • Several levels have a "normal" solution which is also the hardest / most labor-intensive solution (notably level 14). Finding the shortcuts is usually necessary for solving the challenge levels.
  • In the commentary, the designers admit that there were a few bypasses that play testers stumbled upon, allowing them to skip portions of the puzzles. Many times, they decided to leave it in because the shortcut was less intuitive and a bit more challenging to use. Still, knowing how to do this could save some time.
  • In fact, in one of the test chambers, the commentary even explains how to bypass the entire puzzle!
• In the first level of Unit 3 in Quake II, you can skip the Laser Hallway jumping puzzle by detouring through the moat and an underground passage that drops you out at the exit. Don't forget the secrets on the main path, though.
• In Ragnarok Online the teleport skill and flywings would make bypassing dungeons possible if you got lucky enough. Some quests, such as the fox quest in Amatsu which is necessary to access the dungeon are nearly impossible without getting around the hordes of hydras guarding the shrine. Seeing as how this dungeon was the best way to gain levels for a new acolyte becoming a priest it made poor acolytes spend half an afternoon trying to get lucky enough with their teleport skill to bypass the hydras. The Abyss Lake dungeon normally requires a set of dragon parts to enter, one for everyone. A lucky teleport can dump you on the island with the entry and save some of those parts, though it doesn't open unless somebody does it the right way. The undisputed Kings/Queens of the Dungeon Bypass, however, are the Taekwon classes. Using the High Jump skill they are more than capable of jumping over walls as long as teleporting is permitted, even indoors. While a lucky teleport will get you there faster if it comes up early, jumping over walls is more reliable.
• Ragnarok (Roguelike):
  • The game has potions of phasing, which allows you to walk through walls (except in the shop level) and even between planes, letting you skip the tedious process of looking for portals. If you walk off the map in the dungeon, however, you'll fall to Niflheim and take a lot of damage, usually dying. It also has pickaxes and wands of digging, which allowed for you to dig through walls and floors, saving you the trouble of finding a stair - especially if you have the rope item which allows you to climb through holes in the ceiling. And if you can handle the fall, digging through the bottom of the dungeon is a good way to get to Niflheim without using the River Gioll (which is guarded by a painful Beef Gate).
  • Dimensional travel is the game's way of saying "go wherever you want, we won't stop you." It sends you to the Crossroads, and from there you can travel semi-controllably to most areas in the game, evading all obstacles in your way. You can get it with a single wish - while the potion of dimensional travel can't be wished for, you can wish for a dead breleor.
• In Rainbow Six: Raven Shield's ninth mission, a Stealth-Based Mission, leaving one operative in the Extraction Zone will automatically trigger the "mission complete" flag after the other operative completes the objectives, saving you the trip back.
  • Rainbow Six Siege fully embraces blasting your way through destructible walls and floors, especially if you are an attacker trying to avoid killzones and traps laid by the defenders.
• Ratchet & Clank:
  • The series have had a couple of these, thanks to many platforms that the player should probably never reach still being made solid. In Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando, the final level of the game has a very large wall surrounding the entire first half of the level. Getting on top of it allows the player to essentially run around it until they reach the back of the level, jumping into a teleporter to let them skip to the second half of the level. (Using this, and an alternate dungeon bypass on Grelbin, one is capable of skipping the Hypnomatic fetch quest, which includes large chunks of Smolg and even completely skipping Allgon City, Damosel.)
  • Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction is perhaps the most egregious example in the series, with a couple tricks taking advantage of physics with a well-known Game-Breaking Bug. The first of which is the Hyper Strike (when Ratchet slams his wrench down in midair), which gives you added height and length to your jump. A few areas in the game can be sequence broke by making a hyper strike in the right place, just barely getting over a wall or gap.
  • The most well-known, however, is the Razor-Claws glitch. (A weapon that, while cool, did not make it into A Crack In Time, for obvious reasons.) The weapon allows one to climb walls, which can turn platform heavy levels into a case of "Climb a wall, walk/glide over the level, land at the end/in the boss' area" followed by "Fly to next level. Rinse and repeat."
• Red Faction has entire levels with destroyable walls, making it necessary to punch through them in order to bypass locked doors and the like. There are even achievements for bypassing levels with the least number of explosives.
• Resident Evil:
  • Resident Evil has the well-known "Jill Sandwich" trick. By approaching the room with a shotgun in it when playing as Jill, a cutscene will allow her to be rescued from that room instead of needing to find the broken shotgun to switch for the shotgun. This gives her early access to a mainstay "heavy" weapon and allows her to complete the game much faster.
  • In Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, speed-runners prefer to face down Nemesis outside of the police station — not to fight him, which is extremely tough due to limited ammo resources, but because that way they can grab Brad's ID card and use it to access the S.T.A.R.S office, instead of needing to complete a long, winding route that requires passing through some heavily zombie-infested areas inside of the station.
  • Resident Evil 4:
    • If you fight off the Ganados in the village before entering the house containing the shotgun, Dr. Salvador won't spawn here. Don't go into the path leading to the next area, since he guards the door there. Also, fighting the second El Gigante is optional, although you have to fight a camp of Ganados and the "Chainsaw Chicks" if you take the alternate path.
    • A well known Good Bad Bug in the game involves using the TMP to shoot locked doors from the wrong side. Normally you can only open such doors from one side (meaning many of which serve as Doors To Before) but it's possible to approach the "unopenable" side and clip through them to snipe the lock because of the way the TMP is shot from the hip. This allows for several bypasses, most notably in the Castle segment of the game.
    • A similar Good Bad Bug involving the Stryker allows you to run at 1.5x speed. Since this can sometimes clip you through walls, careful abuse of this allows you to skip the entire minecart segment by getting through the right spot and essentially running on air until you reach a cutscene trigger. The speedrunners love this one!
• Many Roguelikes share this property; ADOM also allowed you to modify the map on most levels. In fact, digging was the only way to reach the Elemental Temples.
• RuneScape's Stronghold of Player Safety adds a teleport spot to every level you've cleared, which will allow you to skip from the beginning of that level to the end. Going up a ladder/rope/vine/tentacle/chain of bones also bypasses the dungeon and takes you out of the Stronghold completely.
• Shadow Complex has one about halfway through the game. After your girlfriend gets kidnapped for the second time, you can make your way back to the Jeep which brought you to the area to start with...and just leave.
  Jason: "There are plenty of other fish in the sea..." drives off
  Award Unlocked: "Status Update: Single"
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • Any game (with the exception of Sonic Adventure 2) in which Tails or Cream (who both have the ability to fly) is playable; also Knuckles to a lesser extent (he can't fly but he can glide and climb walls).
  • Sonic 3 & Knuckles (and some of the Sonic Advance Trilogy) took this into account though, providing alternate routes only reachable by using those abilities.
  • In Sonic the Hedgehog 2's Oil Ocean Zone, Sonic neither sinks nor dies in the ocean of oil at the bottom of the level as long as he jumps out in time. One can run under the entire level until they hit a wall, jump on top, continue the level like normal, then drop back into the ocean and repeat.
  • Sonic himself can do this in open levels and a spindash, jumping over half a level with ease. Especially if he is Super Sonic (or, in the 3D games, Metal Sonic in the multiplayer of Sonic Adventure 2: Battle)
  • In Sonic Unleashed, there's one stage that can be won in under five seconds by Sonic turning around and railjumping to the exit. The Air Boost in this game alone can turn a platforming segment/puzzle into a two-second solution of "Just jump and boost over it," among a ton of other small tricks to speed up levels. Specifically, a couple levels in particular with the description of "Complete X Laps!" can be sequence broke by turning around at specific points, tricking the game into thinking you've reached a certain lap early.
  • In Knuckles Chaotix you can play as Charmy, who can fly for as long as you want without ever needing to land, so you can basically go straight through the levels without doing anything.
  • Due to an awesome Good Bad Bug in Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric Knuckles was capable of unlimited air jumps. You can bypass so much of the game that an under one hour speedrun is possible.
• StarCraft:
  • StarCraft:
    • The 6th Terran mission in has you rescuing a downed ship in the center of the map, surrounded by a ring of mountains. The game expects you, with your base in the east, to circle around clockwise to the west, taking you through the enemy bases on the way before you ascend the mountains around the ship and fight your way down to it. But if you put some units along the cliffs to the west and get sight up there with an air unit or a comsat sweep, they can kill a couple of anti-air turrets to create a safe landing zone for you to ferry them up there and fight a much shorter, much easier way to the ship. Alternatively, the downed ship has two worker units, some mechs and two bunkers defending it—destroying one of the bunkers gives you room to build a barracks, and you can fight your way out from the inside.
    • The 7th mission can be completed in about thirty seconds by simply casting "Defense Matrix" on the SCV with the Psi Emitter and sending him directly to the beacon in the enemy's base. The right route there results in very few defenders in your way, and with the Defense Matrix they can't kill the SCV in time before he gets to the beacon.
    • The 7th Protoss mission is a terrible pain, pitching you against three strategically positioned enemy bases, but you only have to destroy a single building to win. Instead of building up your base and taking out theirs as is expected, you can simply utilize the Dark Templar's invisibility and go kill the objective in about five minutes, as long as you take the right way in that lets you bypass most of their defenses.
    • In the expansion pack, a mission has you escorting a leader unit to a beacon in the middle of the enemy base. If you take along an escort unit or two to clear the anti-air turrets on the way, you can use a Shuttle to fly her to the beacon, bypassing the enemy base entirely.
  • StarCraft II:
    • In the third-to-last mission in StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty you are supposed to plough through a sprawling Zerg base in order to get to another downed ship. If you have the Deep Striking ability, you can send some Ghosts directly to the ship and nuke the three target structures. Lacking that, pack some heavy ordnance into the transports and fly them along the map edges, bypassing the base and facing only minimal resistance.
    • One of Zeratul's missions has you destroying three targets inside of a very well defended Protoss base. Building up the necessary forces to destroy the defenses is time consuming, difficult and requires a lot of skill. Simply creating seven or eight Dark Templar to bypass the minimal detection is quick and relatively easy.
• In Stardew Valley, one of the craftable items is a stairway that you can place in the mines to take you to the next floor. Normally, you would have to find the stairway by clearing rocks or killing enemies. In the Skull Cavern, you can also find shafts that will allow you to bypass multiple floors.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • Several games have shortcuts that lets you cut through large sections of the dungeon. For example, in World 1-2 of the original Super Mario Bros., for example, you can smash through the ceiling and run over the entire level all the way to the end... and then keep going and skip half of the game. Then, world 4-2 has another warp zone (better hidden, but still accessible) to let you skip to the last world, cutting out roughly 80% of the whole game.
  • In some levels of Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels, such as 8-2, these are required to exit the level. Worse, some warp zones send you backwards.
  • Playing as Luigi or Toadstool in Super Mario Bros. 2 allows you to easily bypass large chunks of several stages. The princess can skip straight to the end of 4-3 by floating over the gap separating the two towers at the beginning of the stage.
  • Super Mario Bros. 3
    • The Lakitu's Cloud item lets you skip entire levels.
    • Then there are the Warp Whistles, which let you skip entire worlds. There's two in World 1, and using them together can take you directly to World 8, bypassing almost the entire game.
    • Then there's the P-Wing, which can make almost any level a breeze (and unlike the cloud, they stay beaten if you die). Shame they are Too Awesome to Use (until you beat the game and get an inventory loaded with them).
    • There are also the Dungeon Bypass opportunities within levels. For example, there's a level where you go up against a fleet of battleships... but you can bypass all the weapons and enemies by swimming under the ships. In what is apparently lava, no less.[1]
    • In other levels in the game, there's a massive wall between the start and finish line, with the majority of the level in a cave underneath it. Which means anyone with the P Wing can just fly straight up, right over the wall and down to the finish block.
  • Same with the Feather, Flying Yoshi, or Lakitu's Cloud (again) in Super Mario World, on levels with no ceiling.
  • Once you gain access to the Star Road in SMW, you can skip the rest of the game straight to Bowser's Castle by keyhole-clearing each of its levels. Especially glaring if you get there through the Donut Secret House, as the 11-exit speedrun does.
  • Super Mario Sunshine:
    • The Goopy Inferno is a No Fludd Run of a level covered in lava that requires you to climb around the village underside to reach the goal. However if you're careful and patient you can just walk along a fence to the giant tree and take a mad dive from the top straight to the end goal, all in all completing the level in about a minute.
    • The Runaway Ferris Wheel normally requires you to climb the maze on the back of the Ferris Wheel to reach the monster on top and take him out to slow the wheel back to its normal speed. However, if you run up the ramp that takes you to the Roller Coaster, which is much faster and easier, you can make a mad jump and easily wiggle past the fast-moving Ferris Wheel using the hover nozzle to bypass this entire mission in about 5 seconds.
  • In Super Mario Galaxy 2, halfway through Rightside Down Galaxy, you can backflip above the maze and walk around the top. Exploring the area nets you 4 1-Ups and the ability to re-enter right on top of the Star. There's also the first Bowser Jr level, the Fiery Flotilla, where you can skip most of the level by jumping on the castle walls and just long jumping to Gobblegut's boss arena.
  • Super Mario 3D Land, if it's not an exaggeration or parody, has W7-1. It's normally a water level, where you start on solid ground, go through an underwater area, then use a pipe to reach the flagpole, which is also on solid ground. As a matter of fact, you can even see the flagpole from the start of the level... and, if you have a Tanooki suit, jump over to it, allowing you to skip the entire level and beat it in 5 seconds.
• In the Super Monkey Ball series, although most notably 1, 2, and Deluxe, a surprisingly large number of levels may be passed through manipulation of the floor's layout by means of physics exploitation. For example, upon coming into contact with a lip on the edge of the ground, the player will be popped upwards, and will fall back down. In certain situations, this may be used to completely bypass a handful of the more annoying levels of the game.
• This is why you have bombs in The Swindle. Some parts may even be sealed off and require you to bomb your way in.
• Parodied and subverted in The Sword and the Fish, where after slowly making their way through several screens of very tough monsters, the party is confronted with the entrance to a large dungeon. They figure they can be clever by just going around and using the back entrance, which indeed takes them right to the boss, who complains about how they completely avoided all of his lethal traps and mazes. Later, though, it's revealed that the front door to the dungeon led to an empty room with no enemy encounters which led directly to the boss chamber, meaning that sneaking around the back way actually forced the party to fight more enemies than they would have if they had taken the front door.
• Deconstructed in The Swords of Ditto. Your first task in the opening cutscene is to infiltrate Evil Sorcerer Mormo's fortress. Since your Sword has very little practical combat experience besides killing a few mooks outside of her castle, she impales them with an Ether spike almost immediately after their arrival in the throne room.
• Thief: The Dark Project has many secret passages that cut short levels. The most important example is in level 3, where you descend upon a big, deep catacomb full of undeads in order to steal some artifacts and then you have to backtrack all that Hell to the surface (unless you play on the easiest difficulty or you find a secret tunnel near the end). The most gamey example is a Sequence Breaking in level 6, where you are supposed to go inside a haunted cathedral, steal a magic item, try to escape, find that the doors have been magically sealed and then investigate all the structure and its crypts in order to find how to escape: but you can block the doors with a skull or a rock in the beginning, preventing their closure, which was NOT supposed to be how to play the level (this was fixed in Thief Gold where they close anyway).
• Tomb Raider:
  • Older games often had methods to bypass Fetch Quests or large chunks of levels, some deliberate and some accidental, that could only be used by clever players or those with a firm grasp on Lara's Difficult, but Awesome acrobatics and platforming. The Colliseum for example has a massive skip where it's possible to gingerly drop into a pit with spikes without being skewered on them, effectively bypassing an entire segment of battling lions, while Palace Midas can be cut in half by a player who has a firm grasp on jumping from sharp-angled platforms.
  • Tomb Raider III had several of these, but they often resulted in you missing out on secrets, all of which were required to access the Secret Level.
• In TOME, another roguelike, you can get a spell that can remove walls in all unblocked directions at once (with any class) as a result of a lost sword quest. Or make walls in all unblocked directions for when you want to wall in every annoying critter (breeders and stuff that summons greater dragons recursively come to mind) that saw you as a result of the first spell, and then pickaxe yourself a path around them. It's quite random to get either spell, but you usually get a few super powerful spells along the way.
• Trove: Given the prevalence of extra jumps and wings / flying mounts, you can simply jump over most enemies in dungeons. Combine this with the ability to destroy certain blocks to enter dungeons, and you can simply make your own entry / exit point.
• In Turok 2's first stage, you get the keys to both the second and third levels. Playing the levels in the order 1-3-5-2-4-6 is initially more difficult, but allows you to get the heavier weapons earlier.
• Ultima:
  • Ultima I had spells which allowed you to instantly travel one floor up or one floor down inside a dungeon. Using these, you could skip all the dungeons entirely by simply spellcasting your way down to the appropriate level, killing whatever quest monster you were sent there for, then spellcasting your way back to the surface. Later games kept the spells, but subverted the trope by making your objectives in the dungeons more complex.
  • In Ultima IV, each dungeon presents two objectives: a magic stone somewhere inside, and the altar rooms, which hold Plot Coupons and connect to multiple dungeons. However, a secret passage in Lord British's Castle will allow you to skip straight to the bottom level of Dungeon Hythloth, whereby all three altar rooms can be accessed. The stones still take some doing, but since the altar rooms connect the bottom floors of all seven dungeons, and the stones tend to be on the lower floors...
• In the spider web maze of Uncle Albert's Magical Album, it's possible for the fly to force itself through the walls, although doing so strongly attracts the spider. Alternatively, there is a hidden passage in the bottom part of the page. Said passage is indicated in a making-of video of the game, meaning this is an intentional design choice rather than an oversight.
• Untitled Goose Game has a glitch that allows you to clip up insurmountable slopes or through closed gates by wiggling toward them while repeatedly dropping and picking up an item until you get past. Not only can you skip directly to the pub by doing this, but you can also skip the majority of the final task by abusing this.
• Valkyria Chronicles:
  • This is usually the best (and sometimes only) way to get A ranks on missions. At max level with all of her potentials unlocked and their chance of awakening boosted with a special order, Game-Breaker Alicia can quite literally run across the entire map, shrug off or dodge anything the enemy can throw at her, and capture the enemy's base camp in the space of a single turn without having to fire a single shot.
  • Even before this is possible, using the Lancer's rockets or the tank to knock down walls to make shortcuts is also a common way to reach targets quickly.
• Valkyria Chronicles 4: Beating the final mission requires you to get Riley to a certain spot for story reasons, and then defeat a boss tank. To beat the tank, you have to chase it all over the map while knocking out its defence guns and building ladders up the sides so that saboteurs can get on top. Alternatively, if you have unlocked the correct orders, you can move Riley to a different spot in turn one, and then have her hammer the tank's weak spot to death in turn two. Mission accomplished!
• Warcraft:
  • The third episode of the expansion's Nightelf campaign involved finding the current "evildoer" inside a complicated (but still pretty linear dungeon) then escaping before the timer runs out, using the main character's blink ability, which allows her to teleport short distances and even go through walls, as long as the destination was previously revealed. during the escape only, a hidden room is revealed, right next to the entry hall. The player can blink into the room, then through the wall, skipping almost half the dungeon.
• World of Warcraft:
  • Possible in many dungeons if you use an all-stealth group. Having all druids is most effective, as they can occupy any slot in a group (tank, healer, DPS). Though Blizzard got a bit crafty recently and allowed some of the enemies to detect stealth.
  • Rogues (and anyone with the Engineering or Blacksmithing professions) can pick the locks of some doors that ordinarily require keys found on bosses in that dungeon. Others can't be picked, however, and there's no way to tell except by trying.
  • Some dungeons however are designed in a way that lets player skip some bosses. The Botanica being the most notable since you can skip every boss, but given the ease of most of them, its pretty pointless to do so. They are the ones that give the nice loot, after all. In addition, crafty players have found ways to bypass several normal enemies with various tricks, although the usefulness of some are debatable. And one of these, the infamous wall-walking bug, was almost entirely patched out of the game after a number of rather blatant exploits.
  • Indeed, the Deadmines fall under this trope — but only so far: when the players reach the big evil's ship, rather than wading through hordes of henchmen, they can simply hang a left and move right on to the miniboss via the edges of the cavern and a conveniently-placed slope.
  • There's another anti-stealth technique used by some encounters, in which a boss will summon all the monsters you haven't yet defeated in the nearby area to assist it, with hilarious consequences.
  • Many dungeons have some bosses that are optional in this sense, that they are in an alcove or side room and you can clearly go on to later bosses without even disturbing them. A smaller number of dungeons, though, have small, nonintuitive, easy-to-miss, often one-way paths that let players circumvent content. This often requires jumping off a ledge, such as in Blackrock Depths, lower Blackrock Spire and the Slave Pens. Sometimes, like in the Slave Pens, if you don't jump at exactly the right angle it's possible to miss the ledge you're aiming for and make a lethal drop or simply fall below your goal and have to run back the long way.
  • Levels 60 to 77 were originally designed for players who didn't yet have flying mounts, but later allowed the use of flying mounts anyway. This meant quests that involve killing a specific NPC, normally requiring you to fight through a large number to mooks in the way, could simply be flown over. Levels 86 and up had similar setups—Mists of Pandaria, like prior expansions, didn't let you have a flying mount for the area until you hit the level cap, and flying mounts in Warlords of Draenor or Legion weren't available until the correct patch happened, and the players had to jump through some hoops even then (but at least once flying mounts for an area were unlocked for one character, they were unlocked for the entire account).
  • Attunement for Blackwing Lair and the Molten Core raids allowed players to teleport directly into the instances, whose actual entrances were located deep inside other dungeons.
  • The underground layout of AQ40 is such that the stairs on which you fight the first boss are directly above the chamber just before the final boss. One guild decided to use a third party hack tool to remove the stair's texture^note Classic was well known for faulty seams in ground textures and virtually every player could share at least 1 occurrence of them falling through the world into the void beneath allowing them to jump down the whole and bypass everything between the 1st and last bosses. Predictably, retribution was fierce with the Ban Hammer being applied to every member of the guild.
  • Starting with Warlords of Draenor many raids include quests to kill certain raid bosses, which in turn creates a portal or unlocks a door to later portions of the raid. This allows guilds that have no interest in killing the early, easy bosses to skip right over them.
  • Since Legion, Demon Hunter Players have managed to find a way to get to Illidan Stormrage faster in The Black Temple Raid from Burning Crusade, by using their classes Double Jump and Glide abilities to jump up the chain in the northwestern corner of the Sanctuary of Shadows to reach the second floor of the Den of Mortal Delights: bypassing four Raid Bosses.
  • Amusingly averted in one situation. During the legendary ring questline one sequence involves a lengthy stealth mission in an Iron Horde base. If the player attempts to skip this by flying over in any way, the quest giver teleports them back and snaps that this is a stealth mission.
• In Wizardry 8, if you visit the Ascension Peak before the endgame and leave behind a portal, you can later teleport right past the Rapax, who bar passage to the Peak the moment you are told by the story to actually go there.
• In the N64 Bond game The World Is Not Enough, the first level consists of obtaining the contents of a lock-box, infiltrating the bank, stealing files, and getting the drop on an NPC, all while not setting off any alarms. However, if the player chooses to trigger the alarm before opening the lock-box, they can obtain the items and walk out of the bank with a "mission cleared" in under 30 seconds, effectively skipping the whole level.
• X-COM:
  • In the original (X-COM: UFO Defense and X-COM: Terror from the Deep), most walls can be shot through with a powerful enough weapon. Eventually, units can be outfitted with flying armour and weapons powerful enough to punch through the hull of a U.F.O - making it possible to simply blast your way into the bridge.
  • Early in the game, clearing a house or even a stable of aliens can be very dangerous and time consuming. A simpler tactic is to throw a Heavy Explosive against a wall to make a hole and then fire exploding and/or incendiary ammunition into the building. This will clear out any walls or any other obstructions that can hide an alien. Any surviving aliens will end up in clear line of sight of your soldiers.
  • A favorite tactic for The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: The expected route is to fight your way through the alien base and destroy the central computer. A team of skilled psychics, on the other hand, can complete the mission in the first turn without even leaving the starting area, by simply mind-controlling the aliens to do it instead.
  • The final mission of XCOM: Enemy Unknown pits you against three Ethereals, one of whom is far more powerful than anything you've faced to date, as well as a group of Muton Elites. Sending a trooper far enough into the final room (far enough to see the Final Boss) triggers a cutscene and a cryptic Motive Rant from the Final Boss, all of which can be skipped if you simply lob in large amounts of heavy ordinance. Which is good, because the sheer amount of enemies in that one confined space can result in a Total Party Kill within a single turn.
• X-Men Legends II has the "Ancient Labyrinth" section, which, true to its name, has a lot of mazes. One large maze takes quite a while to find your way through... Or you can just bash straight through the walls. The Juggernaut can even use his Super Move to casually stroll through the maze without breaking stride.
• Acknowledged in zOMG!, which has guards stationed at the west and north entrances of Barton Town to try and prevent low-level players from leaving town in those directions (into Zen Gardens and Bassken Lake areas respectively). This doesn't work as well as you'd think, because the early-game areas don't have monsters that automatically attack players, so a surprising number of newbs ignore the quest chains, walk through the low-level areas without fighting anything and gaining experience, and then wonder why all the enemies in the higher-level areas suddenly aggro and oneshot them.
• The bazooka in Zombies Ate My Neighbors could not only blast open locked doors, but could also blast open many walls and barriers. This mechanic made this weapon too valuable to actually use on enemies.
• In the "Vacillia Battleships" stage in Zone of the Enders: the 2nd Runner, you're normally supposed to fight your way to each ship's Wave-Motion Gun and take that out, which leaves its weak point in the back vulnerable to a shot from your own Wave-Motion Gun. What they don't tell you, is that your Wave-Motion Gun is actually powerful enough to take down those ships outright through sheer damage. If they get close enough, you can cripple one ship, wait until another gets close, then fire your cannon and just sweep the beam down it's length, then finish the first ship off.