Elden Ring Player Is Beating Bosses With A Harp
Ah, it's music to our ears in the Land Between. There's no escaping the fact Elden Ring is a palm-shreddingly difficult game - that even caused its own Director to apologise for it being too hard. Like any FromSoftware release, challenge runs have become the norm. If you've got a musical bone in your body, how about trying to best the Elden Ring bosses using a harp?
Souls-like games are known for their difficulty, but that hasn't stopped challenge runs and bizarre ways to play from becoming the norm. Remember when someone tried to beat Demon's Souls using some Donkey Konga bongos? We've also covered the brilliant brainwave of using the Fisher-Price Gamepad to play Elden Ring, but a harp... that's a new one?
Can You Use A Harp To Play Elden Ring?
Posting on YouTube, Harpist Anna Ellsworth shared the impressive feat of taking on Margit using a harp. During the fight, Ellsworth plucks away to roll past Margit and even heal. If you weren't already impressed, she finishes the Fell Omen without her Tarnished wearing any armour. Talk about a flex!
Ellsworth explains how you can also play Elden Ring with a harp. She hooks the harp to her PC and then runs it through two specific programs. The first detects pitches and translates them into MIDI, while the other binds the sound to a keystroke. Pluck, pluck, slash, slash.
"My character continues walking until I play a completely different string, which cancels all of them. I also have 4 strings that control camera movement in small increments. Because of that, it's difficult to make sharp turns and do 180s which is why I fight locked on," said Ellsworth. For example, Roll is high A note, Light Attack is G, while lower strings are used for movement and secondaries like healing. Sadly, she's still to find one for Heavy Attack because all (reachable) strings have been used for essential actions.
Fans React To Playing Elden Ring With A Harp
Her work soon went viral on Reddit, where stunned Elden Ring players can't believe what they're seeing/hearing. Given Margit's infamy as the first big boss that stopped plenty of players in their tracks by taking hours to defeat, we've got to give Ellsworth a standing ovation. The best bit is it actually sounds pretty okay as she slices and dices Margit.
Redditors were equally impressed. One fan said, "Tfw when she plays the game better with a harp than most people in this sub with a controller," while another added, "Played margit like a goddamn fiddle. Harp. I mean harp." A third joked, "Next: Hornist beats Godfrey with a literal horn (not envoy's horn)." Playing a harp in itself looks like a skill most of us can only dream of, so combining that with something like Elden Ring and we've got to say, we're mightly impressed. We bow before this new Elden Lord.
