Dark Souls is known for being difficult. Really difficult. So difficult that Bandai Namco's marketing department has turned it into the franchise's major selling point.
When one person beats a boss in Dark Souls, it is a major accomplishment. When hundreds of players on Twitch manage to do it, it is practically a miracle.
It may have taken them a whole week, but that's exactly what happened. If you are unfamiliar with the "Twitch Plays" phenomenon, it's a way for hundreds or even thousands of people to "play" a game together. Using a modified version of the game, players input commands for the onscreen character by typing button commands into Twitch chat.
As you can imagine, hundreds of people doing this all at once is more than a little chaotic, and that doesn't even factor in the trolls who revel in causing as much mayhem as possible. Still, players have managed to finish Pokemon and numerous other games by working together.
Dark Souls is an entirely different story. The game punishes even the slightest misstep with instant death. Even minor enemies can become deadly if not taken seriously, and that says nothing of the game's infuriatingly difficult boss battles. Up until recently, the stream mostly consisted of players flailing their axe at nothing or running continuously into a wall.
How, then, is it even possible for Twitch to defeat the Asylum Demon in Dark Souls? For starters, the Asylum Demon is the boss for the game's "tutorial." The creature is still difficult, but not nearly as hard as some of the game's other encounters. Second, the Twitch stream has modded the game so it can be paused — permitting players to "vote" for which action their onscreen avatar should perform next.
You can watch a video of the battle here. Note that user g1370 has edited out the paused portions of the stream to create a "real time" outcome.
Pausing certainly makes playing the game this way a little more manageable. It turns Dark Souls from an action title in which the player is constantly flirting with death into a turn-based strategy game in which players are flirting with death... slowly.
Even with the new pause feature, it's probably safe to say that few expected Twitch to make it this far. It's a truly remarkable achievement — but Twitch has a long, painful way to go until the players can say they've defeated Dark Souls proper. Then again, if somebody can complete the game with a Guitar Hero controller, why not with text commands voted on by hundreds of people? We'll see what the future has in store for Twitch vs. Dark Souls, but right now, only one thing is certain: death.
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