There are things we’ve never seen before. For example, a player who plays through the probably hardest Soulslikes with a blindfold on.
A speedrunner managed to do what “normal” players would at most do at a party as a drinking game: Playing through Sekiro, but without looking! The player “Mitchriz” blindfolded himself and played through From Software’s hard-hitting Souls-like game completely by ear.
Fortunately, Sekiro offers numerous sound cues in battles, so experienced players can definitely tell from sounds which attacks are about to happen. In addition, locking onto enemies helps to keep the character looking in the right direction.
Playing through the entire game with the crunchy bosses is nevertheless a remarkable entry in the history book. The first blind speedrun took around 4 hours and 35 minutes.
How did the player do that?
When fighting bosses, Mitchriz could at least orientate himself by the sounds and help himself with the lock-on function, but navigating through the levels was more difficult. After all, there are cliffs in Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, and Mitchriz fell off them a few times.
To recall the paths through the levels from memory and convert them into mouse-keyboard inputs, the speedrunner counted the seconds from one fixed point to the next. He also used other movement functions such as pike to divide paths into manageable units.
The bosses in particular made him sweat a lot: Mitchriz’s samurai occasionally died and the player also had to teleport to reset points. In the end, however, there was a visibly relieved (and happy) winner who can put an unusual achievement in his mental display case.
All in all, the effort (and practice) must have taken an enormous amount of time. However, Mitchriz has not yet had enough and now wants to optimise his run to achieve an even better time.
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice was released in March 2019 and turned out to be a huge success for From Software. Meanwhile, the fan community is eagerly awaiting the latest game Elden Ring from the Dark Souls developers, which is being made in collaboration with bestselling author George R. R. Martin (Song of Ice and Fire).
