By Jonathan Wojcik and Rev Storm

ENTRY 07: IMPS

Imps, as their names IMPly, are funny little bastard guys who will jump out and GET YOU if you do not WATCH OUT!!! But they're not just the usual bat-winged goblins; Elden Ring "imps" are magically animated stone constructs, what we would otherwise call "gargoyles," except "gargoyles" in Elden Ring are something else entirely. These stone imps are delightfully nasty, scrabbly creatures, with spindly limbs and humped backs and oversized carved stone heads, often wielding mean as hell weapons including a signature "forked hatchet," kind of like an axe if the blade head was replaced with two horrible bent spikes.

And, okay, I say they're "little guys," but it's only because of their terrible posture. They are, in fact, actually bigger and taller than a human if they stand upright on their long limbs.

Imps are also a reference to an enemy known as the "thrall" or "hollow slave" from Dark Souls 3; these have the same stance, animations and even sounds as the imps, except thralls are bony little humanis wearing spooky stitched-together black hoods with cute little ghostly eye holes. They're evidently remembered by many players as a huge pain in the ass, so it's very funny that Elden Ring not only reincarnated them into the imps, but made imps much, much more common than the thralls ever were.

Imps also come with six possible head designs, most of them like buggy eyed animals or horned demons, but one is also just a perfectly human-like head referred to as the "corpse" style head, which I don't think we ever actually saw during Rev's playthroughs, but it's sure disturbing! My personal favorite, I think, is the scaly looking one with the biggest, toothiest maw, big round eye sockets and a little piggy bat nose, which just has the most classic Gargoyle Demon feel to me.

...But what's even more interesting is how the imp bodies can vary, and this is something I've hardly seen discussed anywhere at all. While most have a single pair of bird-like stone wings, this one we ran into has four fairy-like ones, and there's another unique detail here that may be easy to miss, luckily we also took some close-ups of its corpse:

...Arthropod limbs! A very small, sharply hooked pair of chitinous, segmented appendages just under the imp's usual forearms. I actually can't find a single screenshot or video of this uploaded by anyone else, anywhere, so either everyone else missed the "bug body" imp variant or those who spotted it just didn't think it was noteworthy enough. DISAGREE. The fact that some of the imps are also bugs is easily the best thing about them, being the best thing about anything that is ever also a bug.

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