TheDark Soulsseries of action RPGs developed by FromSoftware are notorious for their extreme difficulty, so much so that they and their predecessorDemon’s Soulsspawned an entirely new video game genre. In a recentpoll of Japanese gamers about the most frustrating gamesever, two FromSoftware titles ranked in the top five:Sekiro: Shadows Die Twiceand the originalDark Souls. The most recent game in the trilogy, 2016’sDark Souls 3, didn’t relent on the difficulty.
One perk about theSoulsgames that many players might not realize is that the intimidating difficulty can be mitigated somewhat byfarming souls to level up and improve stats. Other people, however, don’t find the games hard enough and spend their time thinking up grueling challenges to make things tougher. This might be in the form of ‘no hit’ or ‘no death’ runs, playing without using hands, or turning all manner of household items into game controllers.
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One Twitch and YouTube content creator called Rudeism recently beatDark Souls 3using a one-button Morse code controller, which consists of a wooden box with a single red button. The playthrough took about two weeks to complete, with some bosses proving much more challenging to take down than others. Those that required camera movement — like Aldrich, Curse-Rotted Greatwood, Deacons of the Deep, the Twin Princes, and the Nameless King — during the fight were particularly difficult. According to Rudeism, the toughest part was timing, because the Morse code controller has a built-in 250 millisecond delay. And a quarter of a second can feel like an extremely long time in the heat of aDark Souls 3boss fight.
In August 2020, Rudeism playedFall Guyswith the Morse code controller. He’s also played a number of games with a range of unusual devices, includingUntitled Goose Gameusing voice-activated honks,Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Orderwith a motion-controlled lightsaber, andFortnitewith a real unicorn pickaxe. Rudeism frequently creates unique video game controllers and sends them to other streamers to try out, and recently he completed an 18-month collaboration with Ubisoft to design and build customFar Cry 6-themed controllers for content creators to use.
Rudeism’s motivation behind building innovative and challenging controllers isn’t all fun, however. After beatingSoul of Cinder inDark Souls 3, the last boss, the Twitch streamer pointed out that “difficulty options are accessibility options.” Many video game purists argue that difficulty options would ruinSoulsgames, but that argument falls apart when Rudeism and others point out that many of these same people are just fine with players intentionally making the games harder by adding challenges.
Dark Souls 3is available on PC, PS4, and Xbox One.
