According to Polygon, a player of the RPG Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 recently spent eight consecutive hours defeating a single endgame boss from the game’s free DLC. Reddit user Recordbreaks took on the “Duollistes” in the Endless Tower with a party around level 80, which is below the recommended max level. The marathon session involved dealing over 231 million damage to the boss and, most incredibly, landing 10,545 successful parries without a single dodge. The player’s final surviving character, Verso, was dealing about 200,000 damage per hit, which is considered low for optimized endgame builds. Recordbreaks completed this grueling fight before even attempting the boss many consider the game’s toughest, named Simon.
The anatomy of a marathon
Here’s the thing about modern RPGs with deep build-crafting: they often have a “break point.” Once you understand the systems, you can create builds that deal damage in the millions and trivialize even the hardest content. Recordbreaks explicitly hadn’t reached that point. They were playing the fight as intended—a brutal war of attrition where survival depended entirely on mechanical perfection. Calling the boss’s long combos “very easy to parry” is a wild statement that only makes sense after you’ve done it ten thousand times. It wasn’t about flashy, nuclear damage numbers. It was about patience, consistency, and a keyboard that could survive the abuse. Honestly, which is more impressive? A 30-second meltdown from a perfectly min-maxed team, or this eight-hour symphony of defensive precision?
What this says about difficulty
This feat highlights a fascinating design tension. The developers at Sandfall Interactive created these DLC bosses as pinnacle challenges, presumably expecting players to engage with the deep build mechanics to overcome them. But they also designed a combat system where pure skill—parrying—can theoretically carry you through anything, given enough time and stamina. So, which player “solved” the boss? The one who spent hours theory-crafting the perfect one-shot build, or the one who simply refused to fail at the parry mechanic for eight hours? Both are valid, but one is undeniably more hardcore. It proves that when a game’s core mechanics are solid enough, players will find their own extreme challenges within them, far beyond what devs might anticipate. I mean, a co-founder of the studio hasn’t even beaten the super-boss Simon yet. Where does that leave the rest of us?
gaming-endurance”>A new benchmark for gaming endurance
Look, we’ve seen long boss fights before. The infamous Monster Hunter 50-minute slogs, or classic MMO raid nights. But there’s something uniquely visceral about a single-player, action-focused fight stretching into a full workday. This isn’t a team effort with breaks for strategy talk. This is one person, one controller or keyboard, locked in a rhythmic battle of wills. The commitment is just staggering. And the player’s nonchalant reply about their hand just “a bit of twitching near the end”? Iconic. In an era where many games are designed for quick, digestible sessions, this is a throwback to a different kind of accomplishment. It’s not about efficiency. It’s about sheer, stubborn perseverance. You can’t help but respect it, even as you question the sanity behind it. Is this the future of challenge runs? Are we going to see speedruns replaced by… endurance runs?
