Streamer’s five-game, no-hit ‘Soulsborne’ run foiled by Demon’s Souls tutorial boss

Twitch streamer The Happy Hob has been attempting a feat he calls The God Run: a back-to-back playthrough of FromSoftware’s four Souls games and Bloodborne without taking a single hit in any of them. Under his self-imposed rules, if he does take a hit, he starts the whole five-game run over again from scratch. The Happy Hob came closer than ever to achieving that goal today, but his streak was ruined by an unexpected challenger — Demon’s Souls’ tutorial boss.

The Happy Hob was well on his way to achieving The God Run. He’d completed Bloodborne, Dark Souls 2, Dark Souls, and Dark Souls 3 — in that order — without being hit by a single enemy. But after about 12 hours of streaming those games, it took less than five minutes for the fifth game on The God Run list, Demon’s Souls, to ruin The Happy Hob’s day.

It was Vanguard, the boss of Demon’s Souls’ tutorial that was The God Run’s undoing. Now, Vanguard certainly isn’t the toughest boss in FromSoftware’s games. Far from it. It’s a slow-moving demon with only a few attacks, but the rubble that rains down as Vanguard swings its ax can be unpredictable. (Vanguard is also a completely optional boss, but it puts The Happy Hob’s God Run total boss count at 69, a funny number.) Vanguard is intended to be challenging to new players, but can be dispatched fairly easily by the likes of The Happy Hob.

Anyway, here’s The Happy Hob’s reaction to watching a dozen hours of near-perfect “Soulsborne” play go down the drain and realizing that he’d have to start the whole run over again (Note: You may want to turn your volume down a bit):

To his credit, he quickly restarted the five-game, no-hit run over and burned right through Bloodborne in just a couple hours. He also shifted his play order, putting Demon’s Souls second, where he handily beat Vanguard and then ... died to a low-level undead soldier a few minutes later. The Happy Hob is currently in the process of yet another God Run attempt, which he’s restarting with Demon’s Souls as the first of his five-game, no-hit run. (He’s experimented with a variety of play orders, including attempting The God Run in order of release.)

Beating Dark Souls games without getting hit has been The Happy Hob’s area of expertise for a few years now. Back in 2016, when he was going by The Happy Hobbit, he beat the original Dark Souls without taking a single hit. He then took on the challenge of beating the entire Dark Souls trilogy without being hit, a feat he overcame in March 2018 in a 10-hour, back-to-back game run.

The Happy Hob has since achieved no-hit runs in Bloodborne and Demon’s Souls, all of which has led to his five-game God Run attempt. You can catch up on his months-long attempts at The God Run via his Twitch video archive.

The masochistic Twitch streamer has a little over a month to finally complete The God Run before FromSoftware’s next game, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, comes to PlayStation 4, Windows PC, and Xbox One.