He's not just mysterious, but also a bit twitchy!

(5:26) Level 5 ('Assault on the Control Room') on Heroic. In my sixth and possibly final instalment on the cubby-hole Grunt, I cover various aspects, including some things you can do with a sniper rifle.

Released September 22nd 2026, gameplay recorded September 18th-21st 2026.

00:02 (Strange settling) From quite early on in my work with the cubby-hole Grunt, I noticed that his body sometimes settles in strange ways, as if resting on unseen surfaces. Another mystery! These six clips provide some examples.

01:28 (Swimming via sniping) I thought I might be able to set a surefire method for getting 'swimming' using the sniper rifle. Well, this method isn't quite surefire, but it does seem to give a very high success rate. It uses a zoomed sniper headshot from a particular spot. Measuring it on three set-ups, doing 50 tries with each (positioning myself afresh for each shot), two gave a success rate of 92% while the other gave 96%.

One of my captions says to be "near the front". You don't have to be very fussy about how near. But if you get too far back, you can expect more failures.

NB: the zoom is important. If you don't zoom, your shots will spread around somewhat and you can expect more failures.

02:14 (Twitching trick) While exploring use of the sniper rifle, I realised I could get the Grunt 'twitching', switching from one pose to another, back and forth from frame to frame. In two of these four examples I make him look up, while in the others I make him look down. Note that I turn off my flashlight before making the shot that wakes him. That's important. Otherwise he'd soon be alerted to my presence and would stop twitching.

I've had twitching covies in other places, notably including the hidden thirsty Grunt as seen in BCM423. But this strikes me as being the easiest place to get it, by far. In my experience it typically doesn't take many tries.

03:55 (Can also get floating) While making tries at the twitching trick, I found that I occasionally got the floating death anomaly instead (see BCM689). There are three examples here.

In the second I use a special 'steady-cam' technique I came up with, to get a steady view of the floating. Namely, after firing my shot, I quickly flick my aim up and left a bit so the Grunt is going to be fairly well centred in my view, then I release the aim thumbstick. Thanks to that release, the anti-aim effect during the floating (which caused judder in the first clip) has no effect.

In the third example I also get twitching (and was not using my steady-cam technique). It was very rare to get both floating and twitching though.

05:00 (One last wake-up call) Finally, here's another way of getting the floating death anomaly (albeit, a version in which things get cut short). You just tag the sleeping Grunt on his rear or back, to make him do a turning jump. It may well take multiple tries though. In this example I use my steady-cam technique, for a good view.

Closing remarks Well, it's been good to give this special Grunt the movie treatment at last. It ended up being a lot more extensive than expected! I'm now working on a cubby-hole Grunt article for my level 5 fun section. Should be up soon!

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