Probably my most impressive single achievement in videogames is, hm, platinum’ing Spelunky, maybe? Which isn’t very impressive, the observant among you may note, and feels all the more unremarkable now people are out here 100% beating Hollow Knight: Silksong on a saxophone.
By “people,” I meant “Dr Doot—the guy famous for beating hard videogames with a saxophone,” so I guess I shouldn’t feel too bad about the whole thing. Indeed, we’ve met Doot MD before: that time he beat Elden Ring on his sax and that time he beat Shadow of the Erdtree on it. Plus, he regularly dips into games like Dark Souls and (the original) Hollow Knight to keep himself sharp.
So I suppose I’m not too surprised, but I am impressed. Silksong hasn’t even been out for a full month yet, and here this guy is literally freestyling his way through it in its entirety, on his first playthrough of the game.
In a chat with Polygon, he explained how it all works. First up, I guess that thing isn’t technically a sax, but rather an “electronic wind instrument with the same key layout as a saxophone.” On its back sits a “mod wheel” that controls movement, and there’s a bit of translation software that acts to convert his doots into, you know, actual KBAM inputs. Oh, and if you’re wondering—it’s not the hardest game he’s done this with. He says that honour goes to Lies of P.
It is not, you might be shocked to hear, a perfect system, and the sax can sometimes miss inputs or mistake things which shouldn’t be inputs for commands. Which, you know, good. Otherwise, beating FromSoft games and Silksong on a wind instrument would be too easy.
It’s quite the achievement, and it means only one thing: we are surely just days or weeks away from someone beating this thing with their brain.
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