'Elden Ring' Player Beats Game With No Damage Or Levelling Up In 2.5 Hours

We’ve seen Elden Ring players pull off some pretty unbelievable feats in the last few months since its release. While a regular run of the game is already pretty dang challenging for most players, people have gone above and beyond with their own additional challenges, from beating the game with a dance mat, to blasting through to the credits in about the same time it’d take you to make breakfast.

With so many wild ways to beat the game already in existence, it’s hard to choose which you could consider to be the very hardest of the bunch, but this one is a pretty strong contender. As reported by Kotaku, one player has completed Elden Ring without getting hit or levelling up once - and he did the whole thing in just two and a half hours.

Speaking of that dance mat run... take a look at it in all its glory below.

Twitch streamer Ainrun is no stranger to no-hit runs - he’s been doing them since 2020, and has completed the entire Dark Souls trilogy and Sekiro this way. As such, he was the perfect candidate to give this mind-bendingly difficult challenge a go. 

While most players tend to skip the very first boss, Grafted Scion, Ainrun opted to complete the fight: “I spent a lot of time practicing it, looking for openings to take advantage of,” he told Kotaku. “I was also motivated by the fact that a majority of other players choose to skip this boss. In my opinion, a ‘challenge’ run like what I’ve done is supposed to be challenging, [so] using shortcuts doesn’t really make sense.”

Even when someone’s as experienced as Ainrun is, though, the run obviously wasn’t a walk in the park. One of his attempts ended tragically at the very end of the final boss fight, when he got caught off-guard by an attack: “The Elden Beast was supposed to do another attack (Rings) that I usually use to figure out where the boss will appear next and kill him as he comes up, but he did a needle rain attack instead, which is very difficult to avoid and the last few needles clipped me and ended my run,” he said to Kotaku.

It’s incredibly impressive, anyway, and I’ve got to say that I will not be attempting this one myself any time soon.