Elden Ring has arrived in the pixelated, green-tinged realm of the Game Boy, with fans recreating the action RPG in a fan-made, playable version for PC and the original Nintendo handheld console.
Touted back in April, the demake strips Elden Ring down to a 2D dungeon crawler that seems to take a lot of inspiration from earlier The Legend of Zelda games. Developer Shin released the full game for free on itch.io (Opens in a new tab) (thanks, GameSpot (Opens in a new tab)). You can play it with a keyboard in your browser or download the game files to run on original Game Boy consoles.
Although the demake's visuals are a world away from Elden Ring's, it mimics much of its core world and functionality. You'll start in the Chapel of Anticipation and soon come face to face with the grafted Scion. Just like the original FromSoftware, you'll swing a sword and roll to fend off enemies, between interacting with NPCs and exploring the land.
The demake also covers a retro version of Northern Limgrave and Stormveil Castle. In an FAQ on the game's itch page, Shin says that they've stopped creating content for the demake because they "need to find some real work," but hope to "expand the game in the future."
Decrease in abundance
Stellar fan-made demakes have been piling up, and rapidly, in recent months. FromSoftware's gothic RPG Bloodborne got the retro recreation treatment in February earlier this year with BloodbornePSX, which re-created some of the action RPG with minimal polygons and low-res textures to mimic the style of the games from the it was PS1.
The project had been in development for over a year, before receiving a free PC version. It may not match the original game, but it's the closest thing to a Bloodborne PC port we'll ever get.
Horizon Zero Dawn has also been recreated in the graphic style of the original PlayStation games – a short video shows how the open-world PS4 title could have looked if it had been created on the retro console. Unsurprisingly, it takes a lot of cues from the early Tomb Raider titles, but it's still recognizably Horizon.