This Spyro Reignited freeflight glitch lets you soar wherever you want

While Spyro is a peppy and cute little dragon, you've gotta admit: his flying skills could do with some work. Aside from when using power-ups or on speedway levels, Spyro's stumpy little wings can only take him so far, leaving players to jump and run their way across the game's platforms.

Now, thanks to a newly-found Spyro Reignited Trilogy glitch for PS4, you can soar through the skies whenever and wherever you want. You can even fly outside level boundaries to discover some truly weird and wacky stuff, including planets and a giant floating dragon head.

Oh, and I guess this could potentially be pretty useful for glitch speedruns. Flying is so much faster than walking.

First discovered by YouTuber BetaM, the glitch is a little fiddly to get working, but once activated can be used in any level of the trilogy, and remains running until the game is closed or the player enters the Canyon Speedway level.

According to BetaM's instructions, players need to pause the game on the first frame of entering the Ripto's Arena level of Spyro 2. Fellow YouTuber Dray says this is likely the trickiest part, and took them about 10 attempts to complete successfully.

Following this, the game plays a cutscene (don't skip it) while also loading a "hub" level in the background. While effectively blinded by the cutscene, players must run backwards into a speedway level portal, die, and then hit the restart button. Tricky, no?

BetaM has created a simulation of how this works (which you can see in the video), and according to those who've used the glitch, the easiest way to replicate this is by paying attention to the controller vibrations. On feeling the first vibration, press the d-pad up for two seconds, before hitting up+left. If you're successful in entering the portal, a saving icon will appear on the bottom right of the screen. When you see this, hold square until you feel three vibrations, then hit the X button (thanks, Deep-Crash & Spyro).

If all goes well, you should be loaded into the boss level while retaining the flight abilities of the speedway level. To make the glitch permanent across levels, simply die once in the boss fight, then you're good to boot up any level you want - or even switch games within the Trilogy.

So, how on earth (or off) does this work? According to Digital Foundry's Tom Morgan it could be that Spyro Reignited keeps several levels cached, "even if you leave one and enter another", meaning the game can be "confused by loading and retrying stages in quick succession". As mentioned by BetaM, you'll probably need a fast hard drive to replicate the glitch. Tom says an easy way to achieve this is by putting an SSD inside an external HDD shell, and attaching this to your PS4 via USB.

It's still early days for the glitch, but Spyro fans are already testing its perks - and limitations. Some levels (such as Frozen Altars and Glimmer) are apparently too high for flight and will slam Spyro to the ground, as the game believes you're still playing Canyon Speedway. Talking to an NPC in Glimmer will prevent the glitch from working, and in some levels you'll need to die once before the glitch appears. Finally, as highlighted by channel SRT Glitches and Stuff, the speedway's 10-minute timer also carries over, meaning you have a short window to fly around each level before respawning. Thankfully, this doesn't remove the glitch, but merely resets the timer.

That golden 10-minute window is enough for players to explore, however, and several YouTube channels have started uploading footage from their adventures. One of the weirdest discoveries is a massive floating dragon head, which can be found when flying around outside Crush's Dungeon. Drogon, is that you?

Other videos include a flight to the stars in the original Spyro's Town Square level, along with a moody sunset soar in Toasty's realm. It's kind of serene, in an end-of-the-world, horribly ominous way.

SRT Glitches & Stuff also managed to use the freeflight glitch to produce a burnt Spyro skin glitch, which bizarrely requires flying around space, respawning as a dead body, and then... er... just walking it off?

Unfortunately we don't yet know if the glitch works on Xbox One, so it's worth keeping an eye on the Spyro subreddit for further news. If you want to learn more about how the glitch works, BetaM says he's planning on uploading a follow-up video to explain the process soon. Personally I can't wait to see what else players find - providing the glitch doesn't get patched soon. I 'Avalar of time for this.

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