FromSoftware is in a curious position. It released Elden Ring, its most successful and arguably best game, and ever since has exclusively released games that are very different to Elden Ring. And yes, that does include Elden Ring Nightreign, an experimental spinoff that cleverly reuses some assets and shrinks the world, then builds a PvE battle royale experience around it.
We've had Armored Core 6 and we've got The Duskbloods coming, but FromSoftware hasn't announced a new single-player dark fantasy RPG of the kind it's known for. This has left many fans revisiting the RPGs FromSoft has already released, most especially Elden Ring and its gargantuan world and DLC. It's hard to think of anybody who has gotten more out of Elden Ring than Bushy, a challenge runner who's beaten this famously long and difficult RPG over 400 times by his best estimate.
On Twitch and YouTube, Bushy is known for completing challenge runs in Elden Ring, and occasionally other games, that put restrictions on how he plays. Across hundreds of clears, he's amassed a huge collection of absurd rule sets. You have the classics, like one-hitting bosses, never dying, never getting hit, always getting hit, or kicking enemies to death. Mods, some of them commissioned by Bushy just for this purpose, also allow for stranger runs with teleportation, mismatched areas and enemies, or randomized items. Then we get to the truly specific stuff, like his most recent video: "Elden Ring But I Can Only Use White Items".
It was this color-specific video series that pushed me to reach out to Bushy. Man, I thought, this guy has done everything. And it's easy to think that Bushy must be running out of ideas or growing sick of the game by now, but he tells me he's every bit as in love with Elden Ring as he has been for the past "3,500 to 4,000" hours of game time.
"I think it's the greatest game that's ever been made," Bushy says. "I always just have a ton of fun with it. If I didn't have that much fun with it, I wouldn't still be trying to come up with new, inventive ways to beat it. Don't get me wrong, part of that is absolutely that it's my job, and there are external forces that are encouraging me to play Elden Ring. But I think it's honestly more of a blessing than it is a curse."
The release of Elden Ring Nightreign did give Bushy some space to play another game, and the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC was a refreshing injection of new content and items, but he always comes back to the game.
He considers the pessimistic read of his position. "You could look at that in a negative light," he says. "You're playing Elden Ring because you have to, because it's the only thing that makes you money. But that's not really how I look at it. Elden Ring is a game that is big enough, massive enough, deep enough, that has such a breadth of content, that having motivation and a reason to actually play it that much is really quite the blessing. I get to play it a whole lot more than other people do."
Bushy's putting every last grain of Elden Ring under the magnifying glass. Like a speedrunner, he talks about individual bosses as things to "practice". His videos often see him deliberately rotate through spells, weapons, and items in order to explain and engage with multiple parts of the game rather than simply using the first winning option he can find, and his rule sets regularly lead to interesting discoveries about overlooked items and strategies. I'm reminded of MMO players running self-sufficient accounts, whose self-imposed challenges force them to play the game in novel ways.
His favorite challenge runs are those that dramatically change the game and are "higher effort" overall, like the one where he was teleported to a random checkpoint every five minutes. He also played the game with an aggression mod that made every enemy follow and attack him at all times, with basically no way to lose or avoid aggro. It didn't go well.
Now, Bushy can just throw out obscene sentences like this: "I've on average beaten the game probably twice a week since the game came out." This schedule wasn't immovable, but his channel history bears it out. I've learned not to underestimate FromSoftware fans, but I certainly haven't met anyone else who's rolled credits this many times. Additionally, Bushy says, "the longest I've gone not playing Elden Ring since it came out has probably been like three weeks."
Bushy is certainly looking forward to future FromSoftware games, but somehow reckons he's got more than enough Elden Ring challenge run ideas left in the tank. When he started playing the game for a living, building on years of streaming other games, he was "hopeful" after his early challenges got some attention. "I made lots of very bad videos and got more views than I had ever gotten at the time," he recalls. Elden Ring's massive audience was enough to turn the game into a career for him, not unlike how creators like VaatiVidya make a living by interpreting FromSoftware lore.
"I still want to do them," Bushy says of his challenge runs. "Simply because it's cool to talk about all of the unique interactions that I can find with specific weapon types and what I think they're strong at, what I think they're weak at, and share the experience that I have in this game with the people that are interested in it. As long as people are interested, I'm more than happy to do it."
