There are challenge runs, and then there’s “I’m playing Sekiro by hitting the Rock Band drums with my feet” -style absurdity. HandowShandowed on YouTube is indulging in the latter, with multiple video uploads showing them playing Hollow Knight and Silksong at the same time, synced to one controller.
My inherent distrust after years of being lied to by the internet urged caution at first, but HandowShandowed looks legit. For one, they have a library of Hollow Knight challenge videos going back years, and while they never explicitly lay out the setup they use or show real world footage of their inputs, their gameplay footage across the two Hollow Knights is synced perfectly.
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I suppose a TAS-style tool might be able to replicate the effect, but HandowShandowed’s play has the believable messiness and flow of a human at the controls—at a certain point, this would be harder to fake than just do.
Their first upload in the series on September 17 started slow, but with an impressive showing against the first boss of each game: The Moss Mother in Silksong, and the False Knight in Hollow Knight. You can observe them shifting focus between the games in real time, maneuvering the Knight to a safe spot to get some DPS in as Hornet and vice versa. It’s understandably awkward gameplay, but they did the damn thing.
“This is how videogames are meant to be played,” HandowShandowed declared in the video description. “Testing to see how doable this is and, not so unexpectedly, it would clearly take a long time to actually get used to it.
And, honestly, even if I did, I’m not confident on how far I would be able to push this sort of thing. Guess it’s something to find out whenever I stop skill issuing in Silksong.”
Their next effort immediately floored it, taking on the Radiance final boss of Hollow Knight and [REDACTED] in Silksong—watch the video, simply titled “pain,” at your own spoiler peril.
It understandably doesn’t go as well as the first showcase, but it’s impressive they were even able to last the minute and a half they did with split focus against Hollow Knight’s infamous bullet hell final boss.
HandowShandowed has since taken on the pairs of Hornet/Lace and the Massive Moss Charger/Bell Beast, but they may be slowing down, at least for a time. “I think it probably just gets harder from here on out, so I’d do well to actually get good at Silksong’s bosses before I venture into anything crazy like Trobbio + Grimm,” they wrote in the description of the most recent video.
Still, what they’ve accomplished already is exactly the kind of audacious challenge gameplay I like to see, and you can subscribe to HandowShandowed on YouTube to keep abreast of their progress.
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