Elden Ring has come to the pixelated, green-tinted realm of the Game Boy, with a fan recreating the action RPG in a playable fan-made demake for PC and Nintendo’s original handheld console.
Teased back in April, the demake scales Elden Ring down to a 2D dungeon-crawler that looks to draw heavily from early The Legend of Zelda games. Developer Shin has released the game in full for free on itch.io (thanks, GameSpot). You can play it with a keyboard in your browser, or download the game files to run through original Game Boy consoles.
Although the demake’s visuals are a world away from Elden Ring’s, it apes much of its world and basic functionality. You’ll start in the Chapel of Anticipation, and soon come face to face with the Grafted Scion. As in FromSoftware’s original release, you’ll be swinging a sword and rolling about to fend off enemies, in between interacting with NPCs and exploring the land.
The demake also spans a retro interpretation of Northern Limgrave and Stormveil Castle. In a FAQ on the game’s itch page, Shin says they stopped making content for the demake because they “need to find an actual job” but hope to “expand the game in the future”.
Demakes galore
Stellar fan-made demakes have come thick and fast over the last few months. FromSoftware’s gothic RPG Bloodborne received the retro recreation treatment in February earlier this year with BloodbornePSX, which recreated a portion of the action RPG with minimal polygons and low-resolution textures to imitate the style of PS1-era games.
The project was in development for over a year, before receiving a free release on PC. It might not match the original game, but it’s about as close to a PC port of Bloodborne as we’re ever likely to get.
Horizon Zero Dawn has also been recreated in the graphical style of original PlayStation games – a short video shows what the open-world PS4 title might have looked like if it had been made on the retro console. As you’d expect, it takes a lot of cues from the early Tomb Raider titles, but it’s still recognizably Horizon.
