Dark Souls completed by throwing literal crap at bosses

Dark Souls is a majestic fantasy world of grimness and grandeur, a game set in the ruins of what was once the land of the lords. It is also a world where you can literally throw shit at enemies, in the form of an item somewhat coyly named a dung pie.

It's kind of surprising it's taken this long for someone to pose the question, but here comes youtuber LilAggy to ask: can you beat Dark Souls just flinging crap at enemies?

To explain, a dung pie has two effects. It builds up the toxicity status of the player, while also inflicting the toxic status on its target. The in-game purpose of this is that, in the hellish Blighttown, there are multiple enemies that can infect you with an extremely deadly strain of the toxic effect: but you can negate this by pre-poisoning yourself with a less virulent form of toxicity from the dung pie. I dunno what the chosen undead does, lick it or something.

The fact it inflicts toxic makes this a top-tier trolling item in PvP, but as LilAggy shows it can also be used to inflict toxic on bosses, at which point it absolutely eats through their health bars. The streamer spent about seven-and-a-half hours on this run (the above video is a 24 minute highlight reel) and one of the charming aspects of it is the lack of planning, which does seem to fit the theme: when you gotta go, you gotta go.

Ultimately LilAggy does emerge triumphant, the Dark Lord of poop, though the Gwyn sequences are worth watching for one attempt where Gwyn should die, looks like he's going to die, but just... stops dying, and then demolishes LilAggy with a two-hit combo. It's almost like the king of the gods' honour was so offended that he just stops the universe for a moment.

Even Gwyn, however, cannot escape the toxic taint indefinitely. And now you know that, yes, it is possible to complete Dark Souls just by flinging balls of shit around. Oh and for future poo-flingers, the item's in Elden Ring too. Get tossing.

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Rich is a games journalist with 15 years' experience, beginning his career on Edge magazine before working for a wide range of outlets, including Ars Technica, Eurogamer, GamesRadar+, Gamespot, the Guardian, IGN, the New Statesman, Polygon, and Vice. He was the editor of Kotaku UK, the UK arm of Kotaku, for three years before joining PC Gamer. He is the author of a Brief History of Video Games, a full history of the medium, which the Midwest Book Review described as "[a] must-read for serious minded game historians and curious video game connoisseurs alike."