With nothing but their voice, a skilled Dark Souls player defeats the game’s first major boss, Asylum Demon.
Dark Souls games from FromSoftware are known for their high difficulty and impressive boss battles. The original Dark Souls, a relentless game in which players battle a wide range of overwhelmingly powerful foes, demonstrated this right from the start. The Dark Souls games are difficult enough to play with a standard controller, but some players have decided to increase the difficulty by using more unusual controls.
Some players have used bananas to defeat bosses in the Dark Souls series, but now a player has defeated a boss using singing controls. Tonitanuki, a Reddit user, recently posted a video of themselves using singing controls to defeat the Asylum Demon from the first Dark Souls game, and while the Asylum Demon is the game’s first major boss, it’s still an incredible feat.
The Asylum Demon can be found in the Undead Asylum, the game’s starting area, for those who haven’t played Dark Souls in a while. It’s meant to serve as a warm-up for the high-intensity boss fights that players will face throughout the game, giving them a taste of the difficult challenges that lie ahead.
The Asylum Demon, despite being the game’s first major boss, is no pushover, and defeating it with singing controls is quite impressive.
Tonitanuki can be seen rolling out of the way of attacks, slicing at the Asylum Demon, and even healing with their Estus Flask in the video, all while speaking. One commenter on the post asked tonitanuki to do a full playthrough of the game using only singing controls, and another suggested that he do so. Tonitanuki hinted that they might try it at some point in the future.
FromSoftware fans have used a variety of unusual control inputs to play the studio’s games, including singing controls and bananas as controllers. Dark Souls players have used Dance Dance Revolution pads and Guitar Hero controllers to get through the games. MezzPlays, a Twitch streamer, even managed to beat Dark Souls 3 with a Guitar Hero controller without getting hit once.
Dark Souls fans will undoubtedly continue to invent new ways to play the games, making the already difficult games even more difficult. Meanwhile, it’ll be interesting to see if tonitanuki can use the singing controls to defeat more Dark Souls bosses.