Streamer completes hitless run of seven FromSoft Soulslikes without leveling up – Ars Technica
So, what’s your excuse?
If you know just one thing about FromSoft’s recent history of so-called “Soulslike” games, you probably know that they have a well-earned reputation for absolutely brutal difficulty. But these titles apparently just weren’t difficult enough for streamer dinossindgeil (aka Nico) who spent the weekend beating seven of FromSoft’s most punishing titles without taking a single hit or leveling up even once.Nico’s conquest of what he calls “The God Run 3″ dates back to 2022, when he took down all three Dark Souls games as well as Demon’s Souls, Bloodborne, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, and Elden Ring live on his Twitch stream without sustaining any damage from enemies. Back then, though, Nico relied at least a little bit on grinding leveled-up characters and high-end gear to make the game’s most difficult bosses a bit more manageable. Even with that advantage, though, a successful God Run 3 completion took Nico 120 days of real-time effort due to frequent restarts whenever he took a single hit.This time around, Nico cranked up the difficulty even further by deciding not to level his characters even once (though he was able to increase his stats and abilities in some games with level 1-accessible items and weapons). After his first level 1 God Run attempt two months ago, Nico’s efforts culminated in a roughly 11-hour multi-day marathon run over the weekend, which saw Nico break down in tears at the end of the ordeal.”We did it,” he says while embracing his partner at the end of the run. “Almost two years, almost two years. Oh my god, we did it… that was perfect RNG, literally perfect RNG, it couldn’t have been any better.”In a follow-up stream on Monday, Nico called his latest gaming achievement “by far the most difficult run I have ever completed. We did the same run leveled, but it is not even close to as difficult as the level 1 run. The level 1 run, the difficulty level is just insane.”Aside from being an incredible individual achievement, Nico’s level 1 God Run helps put FromSoft’s reputation for difficulty into perspective. While these games can punish failure very harshly—and require lots of arcane knowledge to play well—Nico shows that they’re also designed to be fair to players with the steely nerves to attack and dodge with perfect timing.After almost 2 years of attempts!
IT’S FINALLY DONE!
7 Games, 0 Hits, Character Level 1!WE DID IT!Here is the last fight! (and sorry that it is cinder again) 😅https://t.co/0g24MY4wRy— Nico (@dinossindgeil) February 16, 2025With his ultimate FromSoft achievement now complete, Nico said he’s “going to take a vacation now. And by vacation, I mean I’ll continue doing hitless runs, I will continue being live every day… but we’re going to do some smaller ones for now.” In the longer term, Nico hinted that he is “going to work on one really big project again,” but wasn’t willing to provide details just yet.If you want to follow in Nico’s hitless FromSoft footsteps, he puts out instructional videos laying out the specific paths and strategies needed to get through specific games (Pro tip: It involves a lot of well-timed rolling and memorizing attack and stagger patterns). Nico also took the time to recently rank how hard he finds each game in the God Run, putting Elden Ring in the easiest tier and Dark Souls II in the hardest.Ars Technica has been separating the signal from
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