You can beat Shadow of The Erdtree’s final boss in 13 seconds using perfume and lightning apparently

The human body is a wonderfully complex organism, and it’s well worth trusting your instincts when it comes to feeling repulsed by certain things. We know that if the milk looks bad and smells bad, it is bad. Do not taste the forbidden yogurt, as much as it calls to you. How, then, to interpret my visceral repulsion to the most disgusting Shadow Of The Erdtree build yet seen? So gross, in fact, that YouTuber SYROBE has managed to beat the Elden Ring DLC’s infamously ridiculous final boss in a mere 13 seconds. Here’s the video. Massive spoilers, obviously.

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Shadow Of The Erdtree mod resets the difficulty to Elden Ring levels and gets rid of Scadutree fragments

Elden Ring‘s Shadow Of The Erdtree DLC yet hovers at Mixed in the blood-encrusted annals of the Steam user review consensus. As Nic wrote earlier in the week, a portion of the negative feedback is aimed at the expansion’s difficulty, which is certainly a Thing To Hear after years of being told by kindly gamers that I only hand out low review scores because I can’t press the buttons in the right order.

As publishers Bandai Namco have sweetly observed, struggling players are perhaps forgetting that you can raise your overall power level by gathering Scadutree Fragments, a system of collectibles designed to ensure a tough challenge even for endgame players, while giving you the option of effectively rebalancing the expansion through exploration. The downside there, as a few people have pointed out, is that some players don’t want to hunt for collectibles before they can topple the bosses.

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Broke Signal Badlands is a pocket Fallout RPG for weird western dice-addled mystics

It’s hotter than the inside of a horse here, so what better time to play an RPG about driving randomly through the desert in search of enlightenment. The RPG in question is Broke Signal Badlands: A World of Desert Adventure, and yes, that’s a very upbeat subtitle for a game in which you can perish after getting your hand stuck in the door of an abandoned Fonts Museum, or while yanking cacti out of your foot. There are gunfights, too, with dice serving as bullets, but so far, I’ve only managed to die of pathetic human error and clumsiness. Consider me unenlightened, but enthused.

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Riven’s remake is out today and makes me feel weird – there’s still a demo, if you’re quick

Cyan Worlds’ remake of their 1997-released Myst sequel Riven launches today on Steam. Word on the reviewvine is that it’s jolly decent, offering free movement around a real-time 3D reinvention of the original point-and-clicker’s shimmering archipelago, with its many murals of crushed and scattered civilisations. There’s still a demo on Steam at the time of writing, a relic of long-ago Next Fest 2024. Demos tend to be removed once the game hits shelves, so I thought I’d rush you a quick post based on 30 minutes with the remake over lunch.

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Today’s Total War Warhammer 3 patch has that large red Khorne dog you ordered, plus a new competitive multiplayer mode

A corn dog is something I’ve never eaten, because they’re not really a thing in UK. I am morbidly curious about them, although I cannot ascertain their texture just by looking, which worries me. A Khorne dog, however, is a texturally simpler proposition. You can tell just by looking at today’s new legendary hero for strategy game Total War Warhammer 3 that he’d be quite difficult to chew, should you get to that point. Either way, the price is definitely easy to swallow – he’s completely free as part of today’s patch 5.1.0, which also brings substantial changes to multiplayer.

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Parry like you’re Sekiro with this one weird trick that Shadow Of The Erdtree bosses hate

Aside from its naturally satisfying rhythm and the cool audio dings of success that usually accompany it, I find something innately hilarious about parrying. Yes, yes, it’s a deeply skilled expression of martial prowess that turns your enemy’s aggression back at them. But it’s also a pleasingly low-effort method to make your opponent look very silly – the combat equivalent of waving your outstretched hand and shaking your head in unison. I assume so from videogames, anyway. In reality, I could not parry a nerf dart with a metal bin lid.

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Diablo 4’s Season 5 will add a roguelike horde mode

Roguelikes! They’re all the rage lately, whether it’s a pure run-based game like Hades 2, a devilish combination with something like the settlement-management of Cult of the Lamb or the application of the genre’s live-die-live-again loop to add a new bit of spice to a familiar series like The Rogue Prince of Persia. Into that last category comes a new contender: Diablo 4, which will soon introduce a new wave-based roguelike mode in its next season.

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