The feats that speedrunners would do to make completing a game more interesting can be Herculean tasks that don’t seem possible. Once it turns out that just beating a game quickly isn’t enough, players will come up with the next challenge to better themselves and prove anything is possible. One Elden Ring player decided that the only appropriate challenge left to do with the game was to finish it while blindfolded.
Elden Ring is an open-world RPG where players can spend hours upon hours wandering vast open spaces with plenty of enemies to fight, collectibles to gather, and NPCs to talk to. Completing the game without any eyesight seems impossible. However, Pennek on Twitched proved that it is feasible to finish Elden Ring without seeing. Pennek did the blindfolded speedrun on their Twitch channel, with a clip of them beating the game posted on Reddit.
Pennek is a self-described speedrunner of souls-like games, which includes Elden Ring and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. Pennek has been trying to complete a blindfolded run on Elden Ring for months, using their innate knowledge of the game to figure out where everything is. Pennek has completed Elden Ring enough times that they know the best and quickest strategy to go through the title, including the most useful glitches to use and how to recognize where they are without seeing. With the blindfold speedrun finish, Pennek has proven that they know the game better than most people, a feat that almost no one else can claim. With a blindfolded speedrun possible on Elden Ring, other speedrunners will now wonder what else is possible. Speedrunning Elden Ring doesn’t stop with the blindfold challenge; it just means others will try to discover something more creative and challenging.
Elden Ring is one of the most popular open-world RPGs released in the last few years, having won Game of the Year at the 2022 Game Awards. An expansion DLC for the game was announced nearly a year after the game launched, called the Shadow of the Erdtree, described as new adventures in the Lands Between.
