When the standard challenge of games like Dark Souls and Bloodborne becomes stale, some players find new ways to test themselves. A recently completed run of the game from Bloodborne player "Tolomeo" ramped up the difficulty with an interesting restriction: He didn't dodge or roll during any of the boss fights.
What's more, Tolomeo did his run on New Game+6 — meaning he was on his seventh consecutive playthrough, meaning the game was extra, extra hard — and never leveled up his character past level 4.
Dodging (and dodge-rolling) in Bloodborne is an important part of the player's defensive toolset; dodging makes your character effectively invincible for a certain number of animation frames. Tolomeo's run, which includes almost every boss from the main game and the even tougher bosses from The Old Hunters DLC, instead relies on patience, running away and near-perfect reads of Bloodborne's bosses.
According to Tolomeo's post on the Bloodborne subreddit, beating Ludwig the Accursed alone took him about nine hours. You can see that fight in the video above, which contains all sorts of salty language. A full playlist of the game's other bosses, beaten without dodging or rolling, is available on YouTube.
