Spike Room

Spike room is one of the scariest hallways in the game. It's very easy to miss something and die. One of the biggest run killers for beginners. This room has a LOT of different strategies that can be used

Beginner strats

The beginner strats are all follow-ups to the right path used early on and previously shown here

Jet strat

This strat is very comfy but the slowest of all as Rush Jet speed is quite slow. There are a few things you gotta do still.

First you need to boost the 2nd spike enemy while facing left, this is important as for whatever reason Jet gets a speed boost for each reversed dboost. Make sure to avoid all refills as you SHOULDNT need them for Jet.

Balloon strats (with Buster start)

Having buster at the start of this room actually gives a small advantage as the first spike enemy will be as low as possible.

After killing the small skull head, you switch to Balloons and take a back boost from the spike enemy you then should have enough time to easily back boost the second one and reach the 2nd ledge. You wanna avoid using balloons here as it will trigger the refill which might kill you if you are not used to it. The rest is pretty straight forward past that point, you do wanna pick up all refills in this room while picking Balloons (not like you can dodge them anyways)

Note that most of the back boost are not necessary, they do save time and can make some sections a bit easier. So try them out if you feel comfortable enough with this room, else just boost off.

Intermediate strats

Lets move on to the early balloon strats.

There's a lot of ways, we are going to from easiest and slowest, to fastest and hardest.

Friendly way

No tricky boost, the iframes last quite long so you can usually get a full slide before dying on the spikes.

Back boosts

They can vary a lot. But we can first add all the back boosts to save extra frames.

We can do an early back boost which can be the first quite tricky trick to pull off, but can gives you a few advantages.

It saves a bit of time as you get pushed forward instead of backwards and thanks to this the next spiky enemy will be much lower as your iframes will ends up later. So you dont need as big of a jump off the balloon.

With everything we've seen so far, this is what we can do by optimizing the current strat.

These strats are good enough to be played at a top level speedrun. Most 37 runners still uses this strat.

Advanced Strats

Most advanced strats are quite tricky and only used at world record level. 

Triple balloons

One of the strats is to get rid of one of the spike damage to save time. We wanna take advantage of the balloon slides to reach the top ledge in time.

Ladder balloons

One final add is to add ladder balloons. When placed on specifics spots on the ladder, a balloon is placed downwards. Giving you a few frames to land on it and jump off of it. Which then allows to place another one to skip the whole ladder.

Adding every together gives this result.

Fastest Room

Fastest recorded room is performed by Chelney with a 14'27