2021 Kicks Off With A Newly Discovered Secret That Lets You Skip The Whole Game

With 26 different endings and epilogues, Nier: Automata is one behemoth of a game. While the player technically only has to play through the game at least three times to get most of the story, there's still a ton of content to digest. But for those who want to skip all of the hassle of playing through the game a few times, a new cheat code has been discovered that lets the player do just that.

This secret code was recently discovered by Lance McDonald, a popular game modder. McDonald uploaded a video onto Twitter demonstrating the cheat code, which has him inputting a series of various commands to skip almost the entirety of Nier: Automata, right after beating the first boss. In the tweet, he explained that this exploit is "not a glitch, it's an actual cheat code hard-coded into the engine." In a follow-up tweet, McDonald said that it took him "hundreds of hours of reverse engineering" to uncover the secret.

The code that McDonald discovered allows the player to skip straight to the post-credits screen of Nier Automata, a place in the game that normally requires the player to complete the game a minimum of three times. Afterwards, the player will unlock Chapter Select, Debug Mode, the Debug Room, and the Trophy Shop. McDonald uploaded a video on YouTube explaining this process along with the specific inputs the player has to put in at the very start of the game.

When McDonald made his initial tweet, he mentioned Nier series creator, Yoko Taro. Taro retweeted McDonald's video and wrote, "3 years 10 months," referencing the amount of time that passed when Nier Automata was released, and how long it took players to uncover the intentional cheat. McDonald explained in a separate tweet that Taro had hinted to players that there was one "last secret" to the game that players had yet to discover. Turns out that this hidden shortcut that McDonald found was what Taro was referring to. Additionally, the official Japanese Twitter account for Nier confirmed that this code was the "last secret" Taro had mentioned years ago.

With this cheat code being the final unlockable surprise in the game's code, it looks like there's nothing else left for players to uncover in Nier Automata. Although this may seem to be the case, there are probably tons of unintentional glitches and exploits that data miners and speedrunners are sure to find in years to come.