This Guy Beat Dark Souls Using Only His Voice

Some folks enjoy a good challenge. And then there are people like reddit user bearzly, who went out of his way to make Dark Souls even more difficult by besting the game with nothing more than the power of his voice.

Unless you’re one of those people who has to prove how big and tough you are all of the time, I think we can all agree on the fact that Dark Souls is already a pretty difficult game. That difficulty is something the series has become known for, as many players consider it a great accomplishment just to finish the game under normal circumstances.

Bearzly, though, is a different breed of player. He’s concocted more challenging ways to play Dark Souls in the past, already besting the game with insane peripherals like Donkey Konga’s bongo drums and a set of Rock Band instruments. This time, though, he decided to go totally hands-free, beating the game with spoken words and nothing more.

“After finishing Dark Souls with a bunch of Rock Band controllers, it was about time to drop the physical controllers and play the game with 0 hands and a microphone,” bearzly states in his reddit post. “The 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.”

Bearzly said he relied on a program called VoiceAttack to turn his voice into presses on the keyboard. He said that the voice detection was good for the most part, but that there was about a 1.5 second delay from spoken word to action occurring on-screen. It was also impossible to chain multiple commands together too quickly. In other words, he had to anticipate what needed to be done faster than folks playing the game with a regular controller...Which is kinda insane.

“Thirty hours of suffering, almost losing my voice several times and 485 death later, I finally completed the game,” Bearzly continues. “…This run was more than twice as long as my previous worst run and probably caused some deep emotional scarring. I doubt I will try anything more insane than this, but I'm open to suggestions.”

Other than “with his eyes closed” or “with only the power of his mind,” I don’t really know what might top this latest run. Maybe it’s time to move on to another game? Perhaps try some crazy antics with Dark Souls II or Bloodborne? How about pretty much any Mega Man game? Besting Dark Souls III before it even comes out would be a pretty impressive feat, too.