Encouraging thorough planning and creative solutions, StarCraft 2 has been the king of the RTS genre for well over a decade now. Despite how beloved Blizzard’s iconic strategy game and its many DLCs still are all these years later, one level – In Utter Darkness – has yet to be truly beaten. You see, you’re not supposed to win. Like Halo Reach’s iconic Lone Wolf mission, you are expected to crumble beneath the unsurmountable waves of Zergs to serve the story, seeing the Protoss race inevitably go extinct. Thanks to one dedicated player, however, this seemingly impossible mission has finally been conquered – well, sort of.
In Utter Darkness is the fourth and final mission of the Zeratul campaign in the StarCraft 2 Wings of Liberty expansion, seeing you control a Protoss army to defend your base. Even if you beat the objective of killing swathes of Amon’s army, eventually and inevitably, you will be overrun. It’s arguably the most iconic mission in the RTS game for this very reason.
That hasn’t stopped YouTuber ‘Davey Gunface’ from coming up with the only ‘winning’ strategy to beat In Utter Darkness – creating a stalemate. Davey’s run begins much like a standard attempt, seeing the construction of strong but cost-effective units as soon as possible, claiming resources, and building up the base. What sets Davey’s run apart is a cheeky manipulation of StarCraft 2’s spawning rules to halt Amon’s army and ultimately cause a stalemate.
Due to engine limitations, StarCraft 2 has a spawn limit that controls the size of the enemy army. In this mission, you’ll be assaulted by both ground and air units, though Davey has used this to his advantage.
By teleporting Dark Templars to an unreachable area of the map before morphing them into Archons to clear up the enemy air units, the remaining ground enemies are unable to reach their comrades and continue the assault. Eventually, the enemy army composition will be made up entirely of ground units and will be unable to create more air units. In other words, so long as you don’t kill any more of Amon’s troops, they can’t even reach you, let alone kill you. Yes, this does create a paradox in which the Protoss aren’t wiped out, solely because they’re holding up camp on a rock, isolated from everyone else for all eternity. But hey, a win’s a win, no?
Davey’s approach isn’t exactly the most exciting way to play one of the best PC games, but it’s the only winning one discovered so far after over a decade of trying to crack the iconic strategy game’s missions.
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