For years, the Resident Evil series has been a favorite for the speedrunning community, especially RE 4. Speedrunning occupies a unique space in gaming because it's not only a good community challenge but is incredibly accessible since gamers can basically speedrun anything. In order to have an official run, however, a game most go through several stages before a time or player can be acknowledged as a world record holder - and Resident Evil Village's record holder is in the middle of that process.
Before a world record run can be officially confirmed through leaderboards, the rules and categories for a game's run need to be established. One of the most popular and accessible categories for most games is the "any %" category, which generally only requires a runner to beat the game in whatever way is fastest, like manipulating memory in Majora's Mask, for example. These loose requirements also allow early runs to be recognized by the community up and until leaderboards are established.
Resident Evil Village has started being modded and picked apart by the speedrunning community, and many of them are already attempting world record any % runs. While there are currently no registered runs on Resident Evil Village leaderboard on speedrun.com, since categories are still being decided, plenty of streamers are perfecting and recording their runs for submission. So, as of the time of this writing, the person who holds the world record speedrun for Resident Evil Village is streamer Maxylobes, who completed an any % run on NewGame+ in 1:26:45. His speedrun can be viewed on his YouTube channel, embedded below.
What Resident Evil Village's Any% Run Looks Like
Maxylobes was also the first speedrunner to beat Resident Evil Village in under one hour and 30 minutes, only to beat his time with the current record in 3 days. Some of the various tricks he used to speedrun RE Village include memorizing what routes to take and how the village's puzzles are solved, what and where enemies will spawn, and most importantly, when bosses take damage. Something Resident Evil Village doesn't overtly make clear is that each of the Four Lords take damage differently - for example, Lady D is impervious at times when in her final form, and Moreau takes an impressive amount of punishment before he's brought down.
Record runs like this tend not to stick around very long for the first year or so of a games release however, mostly due to the constant discovery of new exploits and strategies. Maxylobes was able to best his own record run in 3 days, and will only get faster. The community will get faster as well, as they continue to post runs and share discoveries with one another, so it shouldn't be much longer until Resident Evil Village gets a new world record time.
Source: Maxylobes/YouTube