For most average gamers, simply finishing a game stamped FromSoftware is already a small accomplishment in itself. Between the very punitive mechanics that define the Dark Souls trilogy, the complexity of Elden Ring, the aggressiveness of the enemies of Bloodborne that puts reflexes to the test or the parry system of Sekiro that requires metronomic precision, those who appreciate a video game that resists them tend to be served.
But as always, some particularly gifted players have acquired an impressive mastery of the Japanese studio's catalog. For them, finishing these games known for being particularly demanding is just a formality; Rather, their goal is to achieve this by imposing arbitrary constraints on themselves in order to make the experience even more difficult.
The God Run, a challenge of the highest order
The most famous of these is undoubtedly The Happy Hob, an extremely talented player who went down in history by becoming the first person to complete the merciless Dark Souls without being hit once—an XXL challenge now known as the no-hit run. He pushed the concept even further a few years later by doing the same with the entire Dark Souls trilogy, and then once again by adding Bloodborne to the list. An extremely difficult course that requires a rare mix of patience, talent and perseverance, hence the fact that he inherited the nickname "God Run".
Happy Hob thus became the instigator of a major unofficial competition, where the best players in the world each tried to imitate his video game exploits. Over time, the community has invested so much that today, no-hit runs are almost part of the routine. These controller aces have therefore been forced to imagine even more absurd challenges to satisfy their thirst for difficulty.
This is how the latest iteration of God Run was born, soberly named God Run 3. The objective: finish Demon Souls, the three Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Sekiro and Elden Ring one after the other without suffering the slightest scratch on all 7 games. Needless to say, this is an absolutely extraordinary challenge, knowing that you have to string together more than 10 hours of extremely demanding gameplay without the slightest error of execution or inattention.
Impossible? Probably for you and me — but not for BushidoYu, dinossindgeil, The Happy Hob (him again) or even GinoMachino, who have all managed to climb this video game Everest after long weeks of digital self-flagellation.
Always higher, always stronger
Of course, these exploits were all applauded with both hands by fans of the genre. But many players were also starting to wonder if the community had not just crossed the last humanly imaginable threshold. After all, what kind of challenge could possibly surpass the inhuman ordeal that is God Run 3 before the release of a new game? It’s impossible to raise the bar any higher, right…?
But that was without counting on the legendary tenacity of this community of madmen, who quickly found a new, even more insane goal: welcome to the era of God Run 3 SL1.
You see, all the games mentioned above have one thing in common: they are structured around a level-based progression system. This allows the character to gain power throughout the adventure so that he can stand up to increasingly formidable enemies. Skipping this system therefore increases the difficulty of the adventure exponentially.
A prospect that is oh so intimidating for ordinary mortals, but particularly tempting for Happy Hob and his successors. They therefore set out to replicate God Run 3… without ever going beyond the very first level (or SL1), where the player's avatar is particularly vulnerable and deprived of most of the most powerful objects.
But this time, the community hit a wall. Even these elite players quickly realized that this absolutely inhuman challenge would probably be beyond their reach despite their immense talent; one after the other, they (almost) all gave up on this digital equivalent of the quest for the Holy Grail.
dinossindgeil conquers Everest
It took more than that to discourage dinossindgeil, the second player to have completed the legendary God Run 3. In 2023, he began to regularly chain attempts on his Twitch channel — but success unfortunately fled him like an antelope before a hungry lion. Week after week, month after month, he multiplied promising runs that sometimes ended in heartbreaking fashion after a stupid mistake, due to the accumulation of mental load.
No one would have blamed him for giving up and moving on. But he decided to persevere against all odds, sometimes at the cost of his own psychological health, in this adventure that was beginning to resemble more of a long way of the cross than a leisure activity.
Fortunately, dinossindgeil's self-inflicted ordeal has finally come to an end. Almost two years and hundreds of cruel disappointments later, he finally managed to complete his magnum opus: Sekiro, Dark Souls II, Demon Souls, Dark Souls, Elden Ring, Bloodborne and Dark Souls 3 completed successively in that order, at level 1, without being hit even once. An XXL feat that some Internet users immediately called the "greatest feat in the history of video games", as evidenced by his emotional reaction after defeating his very last boss.
Perseverance incarnate
For some observers, this This kind of challenge might seem completely futile, or even symptomatic of an obsession bordering on psychological disorder. After all, why devote several years of one’s life to making pixels line up on the screen in a very specific way?
However, this is a rather reductive conception of this adventure. More than a story of video games, the epic of dinossindgeil is above all a formidable example of extreme perseverance — the kind of unwavering self-denial that few individuals are capable of, whatever the discipline. Whether you like video games or not, we can only encourage you to pursue your own version of God Run 3, whether at work, in a sport or artistic discipline, or whatever else; whatever your goals in life, you will probably come out of it stronger!
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