Pennek, a prominent YouTube content creator, earned global recognition by completing Elden Ring blindfolded, demonstrating an extraordinary level of focus and memory recall. This remarkable feat drew wide attention to the channel and helped spotlight the broader world of speedrunning and challenge playthroughs within modern gaming culture.
The athlete behind the stunt mapped out a route that would sustain safe navigation for a blind run, a planning achievement revealed to have been refined in late 2022. By early the next year, the process had evolved into a highly polished sequence of moves, with Pennek dedicating intense practice to lock in each action and respond to in-game cues without relying on sight.
In total, the preparation drew on roughly five hundred hours of dedicated rehearsal. Before the successful attempt, there were thirty-three unsuccessful trials, each one contributing to a deeper understanding of the game’s layout, enemy patterns, and critical timing windows. This perseverance culminated in a breakthrough that finally allowed the blind run to progress beyond the earlier stumbling blocks.
When the moment arrived, Pennek completed Elden Ring’s journey and reached the final credits with eyes closed, achieving the feat in just over two hours and seven minutes. The accomplishment leveraged subtle errors and widely discussed tactics popular among top speedrunners, illustrating how collective knowledge within a gaming community can empower individual breakthroughs without sacrificing the integrity of the challenge.
Elden Ring, released in 2022, is a dark fantasy title developed by FromSoftware, a studio renowned for shaping influential action RPGs like the Dark Souls series. The game emphasizes atmospheric world-building, dense environments, and a system that rewards deep memorization and strategic planning, especially in high-stakes combat scenarios where timing and route optimization matter most.
Initial reports and chatter surrounding the project pointed to a new release from the same team behind Dark Souls, with industry observers noting that the broader catalog and expertise of FromSoftware could fuel another ambitious project. The notion of a new title circulated online after clues surfaced in the portfolio of one of the company’s developers, fueling anticipation while underscoring how studios often tease upcoming work through subtle, behind-the-scenes signals rather than formal announcements.