Now Elden Ring fans are trying to beat the game without touching a controller at all

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Will they weep when there are no more worlds left to conquer?

Elden Ring
(Image credit: From Software/Luality)

We've graduated from the days when Elden Ring players were trying to beat the game with unusual controllers, or devices that were never intended to interface with video games - now they're doing challenge runs without touching a controller at all.

You might recognize streamer Luality from her previous Soulsborne challenge runs, where she took on Demon's Souls and Elden Ring with a dance pad. But now, Luality herself is the controller - she's set up a motion camera to capture her movements and translate them to in-game actions. She can stick out a leg to move forward, or hold it to the left or right to move in either direction. She's mapped a whistling motion to call Torrent, and a drinking motion to chug a potion.

Luality's first motion control stream started a bit unceremoniously - she immediately walked off the cliff to death in the first area - but after several multi-hour sessions and a lot of tweaking of the camera's sensitivity, she's making good progress. She managed to defeat Starscourge Radahn at the close of her most recent stream.

Meanwhile, another streamer named Larxa has been using voice controls to work through Elden Ring, mapping attacks and movement to commands like 'go' and, uh, 'wombo'. Larxa is now very close to the end of the game using these controls - her stream is live as I'm writing this, and she's now making runs at the game's final boss: the Elden Beast.

PerriKaryal seemingly opened the floodgates for these controller-free runs when she started playing Elden Ring with her brain. And, like, these other hands-free gaming exercises are extremely cool - but they're not using neuroscience to play Elden Ring.

Now FromSoftware is finally ready to make Armored Core 6.

Dustin Bailey
Dustin Bailey
Staff Writer

Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.