Trying To Kill Children In Lego Star Wars Reveals Surprisingly Useful Exploit

Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga adheres to the old videogame tradition of preventing the player from killing children. If you whack them with a lightsaber, they take the impact from the hit, but don’t pop into Lego bits like other enemies in the game. So, naturally, players are comboing young Anakin Skywalker, and other kids, from one part of the map to another to save time.

Twitch streamer Red Orb has dubbed the technique “Child Flight.” (opens in new tab) Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga has a new combat system that resembles character action games like Devil May Cry. You can repeatedly hit enemies—or immortal children on your team, like Anakin—in the air without falling back to the ground. This can be used to cross gaps in the levels that you’d otherwise be unable to jump over.

Red Orb spent some time testing this on their stream. They found many different ways of launching the kids, and themselves, using the various characters in the game’s huge roster. Yoda, for example, pummels the kids upward instead of horizontally like Qui-Gon Jinn. Speedrunners will probably spend the next day or so sifting through the characters to see who can perform the best Child Flight.

Even casual players might want to make use of this technique, though: Red Orb showed how attacking a child with Obi-Wan can be used to reach collectibles with vertical flight. Why do jumping puzzles when you can infinitely attack a kid straight to your destination?

Child Flight may be the first major speedrunning technique for Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, but because the game just came out, players are still figuring out how best to use it. The Discord servers for Lego speedrunners (opens in new tab) and The Skywalker Saga (opens in new tab) are quiet for now, but I’d expect to see this absurd technique worked into the routing soon.

Tyler has covered games, games culture, and hardware for over a decade before joining PC Gamer as Associate Editor. He’s done in-depth reporting on communities and games as well as criticism for sites like Polygon, Wired, and Waypoint. He’s interested in the weird and the fascinating when it comes to games, spending time probing for stories and talking to the people involved. Tyler loves sinking into games like Final Fantasy 14, Overwatch, and Dark Souls to see what makes them tick and pluck out the parts worth talking about. His goal is to talk about games the way they are: broken, beautiful, and bizarre.