The arms race to beat Elden Ring using the most mystifying input method possible continues. A dance pad? Passé. A guitar? Easy mode. Your actual, literal brain? Well we all beat Elden Ring with our brains, didn't we? Most of us just had a gamepad or keyboard as an intermediary.
Okay, to be fair, maybe this one isn't as wild as the brainwaves thing, but I'm still impressed. Spotted by IGN, a streamer called DrDeComposing has beaten Elden Ring using an electric saxophone, completing a "hitless doot run" of our 2022 Game of the Year in which, true to the name, he didn't take a single blow from an enemy.
Last night, I beat Elden Ring (any%) without taking a single hit while using an electric saxophone as a game controller; the World's First No-Hit Run of Elden Ring using a non-traditional controller (e.g. dance pad, Guitar Hero controller, etc).THE HITLESS DOOT RUN IS COMPLETE! pic.twitter.com/6jhtC7luzUJuly 31, 2023
DrDeComposing beat Elden Ring in a breezy three hours in a couple of livestreams on Twitch (the last of which is below), merrily dooting his way across The Lands Between and through bosses like Morgott and the Fire Giant without taking a scratch. It's actually quite soothing: An almost wordless playthrough of the Fromsoft classic soundtracked only by a gentle susurrus of whoops and squeaks. That is until the good doctor overcomes the Elden Beast without taking a hit and erupts in joyous, tearful screams of "Let's gooooooo!"
This is, as you might have guessed, DrDeComposing's first successful hitless run-through of sax-guided Elden Ring. His previous personal best saw him take an agonising single hit, but he can now rest easy, his world-historic task concluded. In a tweet announcing the run's success, the streamer called it the "World's First No-Hit Run of Elden Ring using a non-traditional controller," meaning stuff like guitars, dance pads and, yes, saxophones. I'm not an expert on the field, but I've had a look around and I can't find any evidence to disprove that claim. It's damned impressive either way.
If the Elden Ring stream has awakened a previously dormant hunger on your part to see people play games using a saxophone, you can see previous streams of DrDeComposing doing stuff like this in other Fromsoft games on his YouTube channel. For now, here's that hitless doot run of Elden Ring in full.
Correction: This piece originally said DrDeComposing beat Elden Ring in two hours. In fact, his run was split across two streams totalling three hours.
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