Streamer Pointcrow has invented the most ridiculous way to play "The Elden Ring" and won the gold award. FromSoft's epic open world of unparalleled scale and grandeur is an imposing feat in the fantasy genre and won the PCG Annual Game of the Year Award for 2022. Point Crow devised a setting where this feat of human imagination and engineering could be played by goldfish (first discovered by GamesRadar+).

This is Pointclaw's own pet goldfish, named Tortellini. Before we talk about the fish, let me address the elephant in the room: we obviously cannot say that Tortellini "plays" Elden Ring. Unfortunately, the goldfish's brains, personality, memory, and reflexes are not worth mentioning.

Instead, consider Tortellini something of an accidental conductor. By temporarily removing unnecessary visual clutter from the aquarium, the point-crow ties the tortellini's movements to a grid, maps it, and triggers a control input or series of control inputs depending on the fish's position in the aquarium. In other words, the tortellini swim and the tarnish swings.

Paa, what can a goldfish do against a Marenia, I hear you scoff. Well, better than most of us. Point Crow has done several streams over the past few days showcasing the growth of this goldfish.

In other words, this fish did better than I did. The big question here is how automated the whole setup is, and whether what we are seeing is really the random movements of the fish translated into on-screen actions, or whether there is a whole other layer of automation that ties the prompts together into a convenient pre-defined command set Pointcrow's own explanation is a bit vague, but he promises to release a video soon explaining the setup.

Defeating the Elden Ring in a bizarre way has almost become a meta-game. A woman who beat Elden Ring with her mind, a man who beat a demigod via Bop-It, a man who beat Margit to death with an acoustic guitar, and a man who beat Soul Level 1's Marenia with a dance pad have all added goldfish to the long list of bonkers challenges. What's next, fleas?