Days before Shadow of the Erdtree, Elden Ring players are still finding new ways to die thanks to this brain-eating snail

There’s just over a week to go now before Elden Ring’s highly anticipated DLC expansion, Shadow of the Erdtree, is here, and many brave Tarnished have been diving back into the Lands Between to get themselves prepared for their next adventure. Doing so has brought with it surprising discoveries for some, including the fact that the weak Lesser Spirit-Caller Snail enemies are hiding a seriously deadly grab attack.

The snails in question can be found in a handful of areas around Elden Ring’s map, including Miquella’s Haligtree and the Leyndell Catacombs, and generally speaking, don’t pose an enormous threat. Their whole gimmick, as their name suggests, is that they can summon spirits to fight on their behalf, but if you just make a beeline for the snails themselves rather than focusing on their buddies, you can kill them and the spirits in one fell swoop, very easily. 

However, what you might not have known is that the slimy fellas aren’t exactly harmless without their spirits to help them. In fact, if you get too close, they can launch a surprise grab attack, attaching themselves to your poor Tarnished’s head, and swiftly draining the life out of them. 

“Someone posted a video that the snails in Elden Ring have a grab attack and I’ve never seen it in all my hours. It’s *brutal* lmao,” Twitter user and game dev Dillon Rogers writes, sharing the clip in question. 

Plenty of other Elden Ring veterans have been left baffled, unsure as to how they’ve never stumbled across the attack in all their hours playing. “I’ve got almost 1,000 hours in this game and I have never seen this before in my life,” one player replies. “I have nearly 2000 hours logged in Elden Ring and I have NEVER seen this holy moly,” says another. 

To be fair, it’s understandable if you’ve never seen this happen before, as the attack seems rather situational – the snails are so frail that they don’t normally stay around next to you for long enough to choose violence. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that even the enemies you’d consider to be less threatening can decide to ruin our days just as easily as anything else in the action RPG, though.

There’s also a larger boss version of this same snail, simply called the Spirit-Caller Snail, that actually has the same move, but it seems more understandable that the big bad version of the enemy could pull out such a deadly move than the random field foes. Needless to say, do watch your back around these things, and please don’t get too close. 

Ahead of its launch, be sure to check up on how to start the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC in Elden Ring.