It's no secret that Dark Souls is a tough game.
In fact, that's why many fans buy the games in the first place: instead of giving players a checkpoint every 15 feet, Dark Souls forces players to learn the game inside and out, from the enemies to the environments to how individual attacks work. It's not a game for everyone, but for fans, there's really nothing else like it.
That being said, Dark Souls is a four-year-old game, and longtime fans now know it like the back of their hands. At a certain point, players know the game so well that it just isn't as hard anymore. When that happens, most fans choose to start the game over again, only with restrictions on how to play. That could mean playing without using health-restoring items, playing without leveling up, or trying to complete the game using nothing but bare fists.
Of course, there are the fans who take these restrictions even further: one gamer by the name of bearzly is known for using everything but a normal controller to beat Dark Souls. Everything from a Rock Band drum set to a Guitar Hero controller is up for grabs, but bearzly's latest run takes the cake.
Instead of using any sort of physical controller, bearzly beat one of the toughest games in recent memory using nothing but his voice.
It sounds impossible (and a little crazy), but after roughly 30 hours of yelling into a microphone, bearzly managed to beat Dark Souls with nothing but his voice and a few mods. What's even better is that bearzly sounds so casual about the whole thing (via Reddit):
"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. 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."
The program in question is called "VoiceAttack" and works by translating pre-set messages to keyboard presses: "heavy" is a heavy attack, "one-eighty" turns the camera around and so on. The major caveat is everything is delayed: it takes the software about a second and a half to register what's being said. It might not sound like much, but in a game like Dark Souls, reaction time is everything — playing the game with lag is nearly impossible, and yet, bearzly somehow managed to conquer it.
Victory didn't come easily, though: bearzly reports that he died 485 times, with the infamous Ornstein and Smough boss fight causing approximately 115 of those. Even for new Souls players, that's a lot of dying — and it looks like bearzly is ready for a break:
"I doubt I will try anything more insane than this, but I'm open to suggestions :P"
If you want to make your own insane, microphone-only Dark Souls run, you can grab VoiceAttack from its official site.
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