Surprising Elden Ring DLC monster has been killing players

The Elden Ring fanbase is no stranger to being obliterated by horrible monsters, but it turns out that one of the (relatively) nicest creatures in the game is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths.

The FromSoftware games have a handful of nice NPCs you can interact with outside of any safe hub area, but they are very much the exception to the rule. The second you enter most zones, you’re going to get aggroed by everything in sight and forced on the defensive.

Some monsters are just trying to live their best life, hanging out in the Realm of Shadow. These include the Spirit Eel, which looks like a horrifying mummified snake, but the vast majority of them will leave you alone so long as you back off and don’t attack it.

It seems a lot of Elden Ring players didn’t get the memo. According to an anniversary post released by Bandai Namco, the Spirit Eel enemies have killed players over a quarter of a million times.

What’s surprising is that some fans didn’t even know you could fall in combat against the big blue sausages, as pointed out by users of the Elden Ring Reddit.

“Didn’t even know you can die from these nerds lol. RIP The Fallen Tarnished,” one user wrote, while another said, “Why on earth would you antagonize the Ghibli Wigglies?”

I must admit, to my eternal shame, that I also fell to the Spirit Eels. Why did I attack it? Why not? Everything in Elden Ring and the DLC attacks you first, so I figured the big blue monster sticking out of the ground was just taking a while to aggro, so I thought I’d get the first shot in.

Then, it turned red, and I became another statistic for the devs to laugh at. Well played, FromSoftware — the real Elden Ring monsters are all of you.