Dark Souls speedrunner earns every achievement in just under 4 hours

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At this point, is there any challenge left in Dark Souls?

People have beaten Dark Souls with guitar hero controllers and with Dance Dance Revolution mats. Hell, even Twitch has beaten Dark Souls. But I was surprised to find out that, earlier today, speedrunner NaxHPL set the world record for getting every achievement in just under four hours. Here's the video. 

Unlike a normal speedrun, where your objective is just to get to the end as quickly as possible, NaxHPL has to make time to complete every achievement in the game. If you take a look at this Steam page, you'll see that means going off the beaten path to do things like farm the best weapon of each elemental type, join every covenant, and even acquire every spell and miracle. It's not surprising then that a huge chunk of this run is devoted to speed farming materials, which is unconventional (and also relies somewhat on random chance). Fortunately, NaxHPL is allowed to make use of skips and glitches.

The previous world record for this category was 4:02:01, but NaxHPL managed to shave a few minutes off for a time of 3:57:29. Simple_one on Reddit sums up my thoughts on this perfectly: "What the fuck I literally got the Dark Soul achievement [the final achievement you get for unlocking all others] yesterday and that shit took a dedicated four months."

For more speedrunning goodness, be sure to check out our picks for the best runs from this year's Summer Games Done Quick.

Steven Messner
Steven Messner

With over 7 years of experience with in-depth feature reporting, Steven's mission is to chronicle the fascinating ways that games intersect our lives. Whether it's colossal in-game wars in an MMO, or long-haul truckers who turn to games to protect them from the loneliness of the open road, Steven tries to unearth PC gaming's greatest untold stories. His love of PC gaming started extremely early. Without money to spend, he spent an entire day watching the progress bar on a 25mb download of the Heroes of Might and Magic 2 demo that he then played for at least a hundred hours. It was a good demo.