Splatoon Raiders players are conquering Awlmun Den in seconds

1 hour ago 3

Published Jul 28, 2026, 11:30 AM EDT

It turns out that Splatoon Raiders is a great speedrunning game

Deep Cut and The Mechanic pose in Splatoon Raiders.

There are two kinds of Splatoon Raiders players. First, you have your casual fans who are perfectly happy toying around with whatever weapons and gadget mods they can get their hands on. (I’d more or less put myself in that class.) Then you have your absolute sickos who are playing a different game entirely. You can see that contrast at play in one of Splatoon Raiders’ toughest levels, which has already been outright trivialized by big-brained fans.

Awlmun Den is one of the toughest challenges (outside of Pudyin Den) in Splatoon Raiders. It’s a Salmonid Den where the goal isn’t to clear waves of enemies, but rather to complete a platforming challenge and splat a Stinger at the top of the level. That gets even tougher on spicier difficulties, which add more Stingers that ink up your path. Completing it requires perfect execution just to reach the end in a buzzer beater moment. Or, alternatively, you could be an absolute genius.

The Mechanic stands at the start of Awlmun Den in Splatoon Raiders.

Just days after Splatoon Raiders launched, its fans were already finding ways to bypass Awlmun Den’s intended route entirely. The motivation, in part, comes from the fact that you’re likely to get some high-level rewards if you clear the challenge on Ultra Spicy difficulty. Redditors wasted no time figuring out reliable routes to get the job done as quickly as possible. One post from LeficiosG shows a player using the Flywire, Jump Bomb, and Dash Bomb to skip entire stretches of the level, clearing it in just over 20 seconds.

That’s some impressive tinkering, but it’s far from optimized: the fastest route I’ve seen takes only nine seconds. A YouTube video by Dvard shows that it’s possible to skip the entire level, going from the starting line straight to the Stinger. It requires pretty much the same gadget loadout, relying heavily on the Jump Bomb and Dash Bomb, but with mods that significantly reduce their cooldowns and increase the number of times you can use them. It’s so confoundingly quick that it feels like Dvard must be using cheats, but it’s just good old-fashioned ingenuity.

This is everything I love about Splatoon Raiders summed up in one quick level. Once you unlock the ability to equip three gadgets at once and max out the number of mod slots on them, you can really push levels to their limit. That mostly plays out in endgame dungeons where you clear fierce enemy waves in an instant, but Awlmun Den lets you flex your creativity in a completely different way. Platforming can be a puzzle solved by gadgets. Even watching some of the fastest videos made me realize that I could have been using Splattelites to instantly destroy some boxes blocking a platform rather than stopping to shoot them. Genius!

If post-launch updates are in the cards for Splatoon Raiders, I hope to see more platforming challenges sprinkled in. Awlmun Den proves that the gadget tinkering system is so flexible that it can power great movement challenges as well as wave-based battles. Give these Inklings more chances to flex.

Splatoon Raiders is out now on Nintendo Switch 2.

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