Elden Ring streamer beats the game using her mind
What is it with people finding increasingly difficult ways to beat palm-wreckingly difficult games? Most of us struggled to hack and slash our way through the Lands Between when Elden Ring first dropped, so imagine going back and doing it all over again with some peculiar peripheral instead of your controller.
There have been some weird and wonderful ways to play FromSoftware's foul fantasy, with us previously covering the woman that was tackling the game using a harp or someone who modded a Fisher Price Gamepad to play as the Tarnished. But, what about using your mind to beat Elden Ring?
Elden Ring streamer beats the game with her mind
As a labour of love, Twitch streamer Perrikaryal has been chipping away on her mission to best the Elden Beast. Having beaten Melania a matter of days ago, she's now polished off the final fight and seen the final credits roll. Sharing highlights of her stream, Perrikaryal is like her very own Professor Xavier.
As reported by GamesRadar, Perrikaryal's brain imaging device doesn't let you actually move, meaning she still uses a standard controller. Still, attacks are controlled using the power of the mind, which is a pretty impressive feat.
She's already looking at her next challenge, and in a subsequent tweet confirmed, "Completely hands-free Mario Kart, Super Smash Bros., and the new Elden Ring DLC. No controller needed; all mind control." We'd rather you than us.
How can you beat Elden Ring with your mind?
Click to enlargePerrikaryal apparently first wanted to use the machine in Minecraft, but then turned her attention to Elden Ring. The Electroencephalogram (EEG) device uses electrodes to "pick up different changes in electrical activity that come out from your brain."
Although it's usually used in neuroscientific research or to diagnose brain disorders like epilepsy, Perrikaryal found a whole new use for the EEG. It's a complex process where even a single spell takes hours of testing and training.
"Holistically over the whole brain, is a pattern of brain activity. And then you record what you look like when you're talking, and it remembers what your brain looks like for that," explained Perrikaryal. "The attacking is imagining pushing something heavy forwards," which can then be mapped to an attack key.
She admits that she's not mastered movement yet, adding, "It works but it's sometimes unreliable and I have to keep adjusting it." Even 30 minutes before a stream, she'll be training, so it's not this is a challenge just anyone can try.
Basically, taking on Starcourge Radahn with the power of your mind isn't as easy as you'd think. And we thought slugging through Souls-like games with a pair of Donkey Konga bongos was hard enough.