Dark Souls is a spirit-crushingly hard game. And it’s intended to be that way. Instead of letting you glide through on story mode and enjoy the experience, the game kills you over and over demanding that you learn each enemy’s attacks and how to counter and defeat them without the comfort of just mashing buttons until they disappear in a red mist. That’s why most people wouldn’t play the game without a controller.
Most people wouldn’t play the game using only the accessories that come with Rock Band — using only a drum and a guitar to get through the games merciless onslaught of death-bringers. And most people probably wouldn’t play the game using only their voice. That sounds like an even deeper hell than the game already is. YouTuber gbbearzly, however, isn’t most people. Instead he’s both a glutton for punishment and a seeker of glory, running through one of the hardest games ever created using only the voice that he’s been given. Why? Well, it seems like it’s a good time to him. From Kotaku:
“After finishing Dark Souls with a bunch of Rock Band controllers,” he wrote on reddit, “it was about time to drop the physical controllers and play the game with 0 hands and a microphone. This run was suggested to me many times and I never knew if it would be possible, but after someone showed me a program that did the hard work of voice recognition for me I had to give it a shot.”
Okay, but if all your friends were jumping off a cli…you know what? Never mind. This guy obviously knows what he’s doing. If you’d like to give this kind of thing a try yourself — why? Is sticking hot pins under your fingernails just too boring these days? — Kotaku reports that you can use a program called VoiceAttack to replace the keyboard. But there’s a 1.5 second lag between command and execution. And that lag translates to death after death after death. Bearzly writes that this is the hardest run he’s ever completed. And watching him play (he completed the game in 30 hours), you’re bound to believe it.