Elden Ring streamer who beat Shadow of the Erdtree with her mind is already preparing to annihilate Nightreign in the most sci-fi way possible: "I haven’t touched a controller in ages"

Elden Ring streamer and queen of the electroencephalogram (EEG) Perrikaryal is ready to play FromSoftware's moody co-op adventure Nightreign, out on May 30, like true royalty – by barely using her hands.

"I've started playing games with just mind control and nothing else," Perri tells 12DOVE. "We're totally hands-free – I haven't touched a controller in ages."

For years, as her many viral Twitch clips demonstrate, Perri has used the EEG's ability to measure brain activity changes to her advantage. She imagines things with vivid detail, and the neural spikes these visualizations produce are specific enough to create commands.

So, "I've got my dodge in Dark Souls games, which is pushing a cube slowly and calmly," Perri tells us. To use her skill or "something," she says, she forgets, Perri pictures herself spinning a plate to the song "You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)." She attacks whimsically, by visualizing a "little cricket hopping" while she pulses her inner ear muscles, and, finally, she heals by imagining intense anger, the kind that turns your face into a tomato.

"With Dark Souls games, it's a lot of manipulating the mechanics," Perri says. "So, the leveling, and the equipment, and finding the right build that really, really matches the mind control. Using swords instead of magic, for example, so that I don't have to use all these different potions."

Nightreign, however, might require a fresh strategy.

At the moment, Perri treats co-op scenarios as a "sort of 'protect the princess' kind of thing," she says. She plays with friends who can either defend her in-game, or who naturally play at the "complete noob" level that being strapped to an EEG forces her into.

With Nightreign, borne from FromSoftware's masochism, Perri predicts that "I'll need a lot of defense, and I'll need a lot of cooperation from my team."

But Nightreign's roguelike and battle royale elements, which, we note in our Nightreign preview, make it feel like a modded bloodbath, mean that "I also wouldn't have the time to over-level," Perri continues. "Something I usually do is level just loads to make up for the fact that [mind control] timing isn't always key. So I have a bit of an advantage in that sense, but there's no time to do that in Nightreign, because everything just keeps changing. I'm so stressed out!"

There's always hope, of course – Perri continues to expand her reign over brain gaming with increasingly sophisticated planning and technology. Her mind control setup previously necessitated PC gaming, but recently, she "managed to get around this by piggybacking off of the authentication chip on an Xbox controller."

"By doing that," she continues, "it basically means that now I have [...] a game controller that can work on any single console ever," she adds, even VR and mobile.

Next, Perri wants to bring "mind control" to more practical real life contexts, such as building a cockroach army.

"It's kind of gross, but I'm really excited for it," she tells us. Curious if cockroaches would make a good Nightreign squadron, I ask her what she'll use her cockroach army for.

"I have this image in my head," she says, "of a cockroach at the front with a little red flag, and it's surrounded by an entire army of [cockroaches]. And then they just march through a park and scare the children."

"They are dead already, by the way," she adds hastily. "We're not going to kill any cockroaches." Elden Ring bosses, though, are fair game.

Playing Elden Ring Nightreign solo sounds like a bad idea to me, but the director says "you don't have to babysit one another" and "you can all go your different ways."