Elden Ring Gameplay Funny Moments Blind Playthrough

What a blind playthrough actually looks like when you are not a speedrunner

People post these videos expecting chaos. They want to see someone get absolutely wrecked by a random boss on day one of Elden Ring. The algorithm rewards that. Reality is slower and usually more boring. A blind playthrough is just someone playing without spoilers, without a guide, without any idea what the next area holds. That is fine. It is also not the same as a \"no hit\" run or a challenge mode. It is just a person experiencing the game for the first time, probably dying a lot, probably missing obvious things. The most common thread in these videos is not skill. It is the moment when a player walks into Limgrave for the first time and has no idea why there is a horse lying dead in the dirt. Or when they try to talk to an NPC who is clearly trying to help them and accidentally backpedal into a wall. Or when they fight a tree sentinel with a rusty sword and lose three times before realizing they can just run past it. Those are the moments people clip. I have watched enough of these to know the pattern. The first hour is always exploration confusion. The second hour is where the humor peaks because the player is still trying to understand combat timing. After that it gets repetitive unless the run is actually well-edited. Most are not.

How to record a blind playthrough without making it unwatchable

Record on PC with simple capture software. Use OBS if you already know how to configure it, otherwise use whatever your graphics card software provides. Set it to 1080p at 60 frames. Audio should be clear voice over the gameplay. No music unless you add it later. Keep the raw footage. Play the game in a way that lets mistakes show. Do not pause constantly. Do not look up builds. Do not skip cutscenes if you can avoid it, because some players find the cutscenes funnier than the combat. Let the silences happen. Let the deaths stack up. The editing job is to make those deaths look like a sequence rather than thirty identical failures. One practical problem I ran into early on was audio sync drift when recording long sessions on a certain capture card. The video would lag behind my mic by about two seconds after two hours of footage. This made commentary almost useless in post. The workaround was simple: record mic through the game's internal voice channel instead of using a separate mic input, and keep one test recording at the start and one at the end to check drift. If the drift exceeds a half second, drop that segment.

Editing for the format, not for yourself

The hardest part is cutting. A single boss fight can take an hour in real time. Nobody wants to watch an hour. Find the moments where the player reacts genuinely. Confusion. Frustration. Laughter. Relief when they finally figure something out. Cut everything else. Avoid starting a clip mid-action. Viewers do not know what is happening. Start a beat before the weird thing so the context is clear. For example, show the player looking at the item description instead of jumping straight into them clicking the wrong option. Context is everything in these edits. Use text overlays sparingly. One line explaining what is happening is enough. Do not explain jokes. Do not label every mistake. Let the viewer get it.

Common failures in blind playthrough videos

The biggest mistake is editing out all the death timers. When a player dies in four seconds, it is funny once. When they die in forty seconds because they refuse to learn the attack pattern, it is still funny, but you need to make that clear. Trimming too aggressively makes the edit feel fake. Trimming too little makes it boring. Find the middle ground where the struggle is visible but not exhausting. Another failure is over-relying on sound effects. Adding a boop or a crash on every mistake makes it feel like a YouTube short from 2018. Let the gameplay sound carry the humor. Only add audio when it enhances a specific moment, like when an NPC says something completely irrelevant right before the player gets hit by a giant arrow. A counter-intuitive tip: the funniest moments often come from the player NOT failing. They accidentally stumble into a hidden area. They press a button they did not mean to press and trigger a rare dialogue. They find a secret path by accident. These beats are gold. Capture them. Do not cut them for being too quiet.

What not to include

No introductions. No \"hey guys welcome back.\" No disclaimer about being new to the game. The title does that. No ending summary either. Just stop when the last funny clip lands. Do not add voiceover narration explaining what happened. The footage should speak for itself. If a viewer needs a paragraph to understand why something is funny, the edit is already too long.

Thumbnail and title

Use a frame from the video where the player is clearly confused or in a weird situation. A boss looming over them, a character doing nothing, a glitchy collision. Keep the thumbnail free of text except maybe three words max. Something like \"I Did Not See That Coming\" works better than clickbait labels. The title should mention it is a blind playthrough or first playthrough. That sets the right expectation. Viewers watching a blind run want to share the discovery, not watch a tutorial.

When this format does not work

If the player has no personality, no reactions, no audible commentary, the video will fail regardless of editing quality. Humor comes from the player's genuine responses. If they play silently and mechanically, even the funniest clips will feel flat. You can sometimes compensate with fast cuts and text, but it is much harder than just picking a player who talks while they play. The other case is when the player is already familiar with the genre. If they grew up with Souls games, they will not react to things like trap doors or poison swamps the same way. The novelty is lower. The resulting footage tends to be less funny because their expectations are higher and their reactions more measured.

Where to post

YouTube is the main home for this content. Twitch clips work too but they do not compound the same way. Clips are hard to find later and the algorithm does not push them as aggressively. If the goal is to reach people who are not already in the community, YouTube remains the better option. The upload length, retention analytics, and recommended feed still favor longer-form compilations over short form in this niche. Do not expect the video to perform well on day one. These tend to surface slowly as people search for Elden Ring funny moments or first playthrough content. The search volume is decent and the competition is high but not insurmountable if the editing is tight.

A few technical notes that matter more than people think

Record at the native resolution of your monitor, not a downscaled version. If you run the game at 4K, record at 4K. Scaling down in post introduces artifacts that show up in the wrong places, especially during fast camera movements in combat. It is a small detail but it makes the difference between a clean edit and one that looks sloppy after compression. Keep a backup of the raw footage in a separate location from the edited project. I lost an entire session once because the project file corrupted and I had never saved the raw output anywhere else. It took three hours to redo the edits from memory. Never assume your editing software is trustworthy with large files. Check your footage for stream snippets or NPC dialogue that might be copyrighted. Elden Ring uses original music, but some NPC dialogue can reference other media. In practice this is rarely an issue, but it is worth a quick scan if you plan to monetize the video later.

The whole process from raw recording to final export usually takes between four and eight hours for a twenty-minute video, depending on how much material you have. If you record three hours of gameplay and only need twenty minutes of output, you are already in good shape. More footage gives you more options in the edit.

Final word

There is no secret formula for funny moments. They happen when a player encounters something the game does not explain clearly. Your job is to find those encounters, trim the fat, and let the reaction stand on its own. Record honestly, edit cleanly, and do not overthink the rest.