Elden Ring: Spiritcaller Snail (Road's End Catacombs) Boss Fight

As you probably know, bosses in Elden Ring are divided into three tiers. From lowest to highest: Field Bosses, Greater Enemy Bosses and finally Demigods and Legends.

Spiritcaller Snail is in the lowest tier, Field Bosses, and is found in the Road’s End Catacombs dungeon in the South-Western part of Liurnia of the Lakes, close to the Minor Erdtree. Like most lesser bosses in the game, this one is optional in the sense that you do not need to kill it in order to advance the main story.

This is one of the weirder bosses I have encountered so far. When I first entered the room and saw it spawn, I thought “What kind of weird-ass snail is that?”, but when I proceeded to fight it and noticed that the boss’s health wasn’t going down, I realized that I wasn’t fighting the boss itself, but rather the spirit of a knight it had summoned to do its bidding. No wonder I didn’t think it looked much like a snail. But its name suddenly made more sense.

Since I can certainly empathize with getting spirits to do one’s work, preferably without pay, I was not to be outdone by some snail, so I decided to call in some spirit help of my own, namely my favorite buddy, Banished Knight Engvall.

The spirits called by the snail appear to be Crucible Knights and those are always annoying to fight, but Engvall is great for soaking up some damage, sparing my own tender flesh. After each spirit is dead, the snail itself will appear for a few seconds, usually in one of the corners of the room. You have to be really quick to rush over to it and get a few hits in or it will disappear and spawn another spirit for you to fight.

The snail itself is very squishy and doesn’t take many hits to die, but because it’s only there so briefly, you will likely have to fight several of its spirit servants and that’s the real difficulty of the encounter. I’m not sure if there’s a reliable way to predict which corner it will appear in or if it’s completely random, so it’s probably best to try to stay near the center of the room until you spot it.

By the way, did you know that the difference between a snail and slug is that snails have an external shell or house that protects them, among other things from drying out? I would say that the life choices this particular snail has made make it run a much higher risk of dying from a sword-spear to the face than dry weather though ;-)