8 Wonderful Moments From AGDQ 2017

Salt and Sanctuary

Grimelios is one of my favorite runners to watch, and he showed off a very impressive All Bosses run of Salt and Sanctuary, which is a game I can’t believe I hadn’t heard of until AGDQ 2017. He did an amazing job, so I feel a little bad that the focus of this item on my list is him struggling with something out of his control. Difficulties are a part of every AGDQ, whether they be technical or RNG or just human mistakes. But every time, the audience is insanely supportive of runners, and the runners always come through as Grimelios does.

After his successful and impressive All Bosses run of Salt and Sanctuary, he jumps into an incentive category of any%, which requires defeating one boss and then pulling off a weird trick to warp right into the credits. It involves kiting an enemy to a specific spot and having that enemy do a specific attack (which it will do 90% of the time) while using a certain item in a certain way. It’s very precise, but we’ve seen him do a similar trick earlier in the All Bosses run, so we know Grimelios can do it.

But gosh darn it, the enemy just isn’t doing him any favors. It looks like a weird evil unicorn, and it keeps performing the one attack it isn’t supposed to do. Or it won’t kite properly, or another enemy shows up to ruin the party. The poor guy has to try multiple times before he finally gets the unicorn to behave, and it’s all out of his control. But he does it. And we are all so much more appreciative as a result because we all know the hell of trying to do something right in front of an audience and having a unicorn, or whatever else, eff it all up.