Plenty of games are challenging enough, but that hasn’t stopped people from trying to make them even more challenging via unconventional means. We’ve seen Dark Souls 2 beaten by someone using a guitar controller, a streamer reach level 100 in World of Warcraft using a dancepad, and many other hard game/weird controller combos. Just recently, the YouTube and Twitch streamer Dr. Doot beat Hollow Knight: Silksong using an electric saxophone.
Dr. Doot uses an “electronic wind instrument with the same key layout as a saxophone” for his saxophone runs, as he explained to Polygon over email. That “Dr.” in his online handle isn’t just for fun as he’s earned the title; Dr. Doot holds three music degrees, one being a doctorate in music composition. He started playing the electric sax during COVID quarantines, when getting together with other musicians in-person to collaborate became a challenge. He also started to get into streaming around this time, and quickly incorporated his new instrument into his streams.
He uses a thumbstick-like “mod wheel” on the back of the electric saxophone for character movements, and a Bome MIDI Translator software that “converts the MIDI signals sent from the instrument to the PC into Mouse + Keyboard Inputs” for everything else. When starting out, Doc then realized it “would let you play games by playing notes on the instrument.” He tested it out with The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and the famously difficult Cuphead, “realized it actually kind of worked, and then did an All Bosses Playthrough of Dark Souls 3 as my first proper sax-controlled challenge.”
Dr. Doot has tackled other Soulslikes on the electric sax, like Elden Ring, and his latest achievement is finishing Silksong with 100% completion. Though, his early playthrough went like so many others’: “White-knuckling through Hunter’s March on release day. I spent HOURS trying to beat Savage Beastfly essentially without upgrades — it was absolute hell.”
Part of the reason it was “absolute hell” — aside from Silksong already being a testing experience — is because the software Dr. Doot uses “knows *exactly* how sloppy my playing is” and a missed note may spell doom. Still, though, Dr. Doot says “it’s shocking how little latency there is between the aerophone and the game, which is what allows me to do all the things that other challenge runners can do with a normal controller.”
It’s not perfect, however, as “false or missed inputs” are something he has to deal with, and the air-pressure sensor in the instrument is so sensitive “moderately loud sounds (like laughing/yelling/talking/etc) can actually trigger the mechanism and play notes without my mouth actually on the instrument.” Dr. Doot says those false inputs have made him “accidentally fall off of a cliff or attack an NPC on accident.”
Running other programs at the same time as the Bome MIDI Translator can cause it to get “temperamental,” causing issues with inputs while playing. Aside from that, Dr. Doot’s biggest challenges are the same as “any challenge runner would face when learning a speedrun/hitless run/etc, which is just learning the game on a very deep level.”
Dr. Doot notes playing through Lies of P on the sax was his toughest challenge yet, while “Sax Solo Nightreign runs were super exhausting.” He’s done no-hit runs for Dark Souls 2 and Dark Souls 3 and was in the process of a no-hit run for the first in the trilogy before Silksong came out, which he’ll be going back to now that he’s completed Hornet’s journey.
While he’s sunk dozens of hours into Silksong, the “absolute masterpiece” Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is still his favorite game of the year so far. Though, don’t expect him to tackle it on the sax, as its control scheme doesn’t lend itself to saxophone playing; it would be “kind of a drag to doot.”
