Initially I’d planned to play an hour of Elden Ring, whip up a mini-review and be done with everything. But it turns out that Elden Ring isn’t the kind of game you can stop playing after the first hour. Elden Ring is the kind of game you play for an hour and don’t put down until you start getting emails reminding you that lecture attendance is monitored.
Before we get into the recap, I just want to say this: if you like the Soulsborne games then don’t read on – you’ve already heard everyone else sing this game’s praises – just go and buy this game. You will not regret paying full price.
Okay, so for those of you who don’t know, Elden Ring is the newest game by FromSoftware, the developers behind Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. It takes the ultra-difficult combat-focussed gameplay of those titles and throws it into a beautiful dark-fantasy open world overflowing with wonder, terror, and adventure.
If that has sparked your interest, stop reading.
The incredible thing about Elden Ring, and perhaps why it is scoring 10/10s and “masterpiece[s]” everywhere, is that its open-world feels real, it feels fresh; it feels like a place I actually want to explore. Too often is the colossal map of an open-world game an excuse for leagues of repetitive, derivative side content, but that isn’t the case here.
Every ruin has a different story to tell and the enemies and treasures within communicate those stories with marvellous grace. There’s never a need for boring text logs or books to sift through like your Skyrims or your Witchers, it is assumed the player is intelligent enough to put together the pieces and fill in the blanks with their own imagination.
Despite this storytelling finesse, Elden Ring never forgets that it’s a video game and maintains that everything you do is at least a little bit fun – even when that activity is dying – due to the game’s scope. The move to an open world from the previously linear format could have been disastrous but alas FromSoftware once again show off their game-making prowess, polishing up systems that are present in all open world games.
Picking up items is instant and satisfying, riding Torrent, your horse, is simple and majestic, and exploring the nooks and crannies of cliffsides and caves always provides a worthwhile reward. Elden Ring just gets so many things right where so many games go wrong.
My only critique is that the overworld environments have all looked fairly samey so far, though I am only 8 hours deep into this 80 hour epic.
BUT don’t let that be your lasting impression. Elden Ring is a genre-defining milestone of a game that deserves every ounce of celebration it has received and I can’t wait to stop writing this so I can get right back to it.
5/5 stars.