Every once in a while, a game emerges that seamlessly blends flawless gameplay, a wondrous world, incredible signature music, and unparalleled artistic direction. That game is From Software’s Elden Ring, an action role-playing game that combines the best aspects of the studio’s work over the past decade into one massive package. This absurdly ambitious open world captivated my curiosity, enticed me with riddles, secrets, and mysteries, and provided incredibly satisfying moments as I lived one of the most extraordinary adventures of all time. From my first foray into the world to the final moments, every step of the journey is a note in a personalized epic that kept me coming back for more. This journey through dark and twisted fantasies is an endless exploration, constantly offering sensational sights that only become more captivating and fantastic as the journey progresses.
The Lands Between is a world of discovery, and while there is a clear path forward for those seeking guidance, roaming the lands freely with no specific destination often brings surprises. I’d often marked a spot on my map to explore and ended up going astray, sometimes leading to entirely new feature-rich areas and zones. Elden Ring isn’t a theme park-style open world where each ride is boosted with breadcrumbs so they don’t go unnoticed – there are significant areas, bosses, dungeons, and other big reveals to walk past, making these finds even more so makes wonderful. Even after more than 55 hours I know that I missed a lot. Rather than yearning for what I haven’t found, I’m inspired to keep exploring. The grandiose world is packed with characters, quests and various dungeon crawls ranging from tiny catacombs to huge multi-layered tombs. As the journey begins with small caves, mines, and other dungeons, these experiences become more complex. Two-room affairs eventually turn into complicated teleport puzzles or scenarios where you discover unusual ways to interact with the environment, like learning to use traps to traverse or sniffing out secret walls.
Even the simplest overworld dungeons harbor hidden boss rooms and treasure in addition to their standard rewards, rewarding the most inquisitive adventurer. Finding creative ways to travel to places that don’t seem accessible before the standard path takes you there feels remarkably refreshing, and more than one area offers scenic vistas upon arrival. Looking across a new territory for the first time and realizing that you can go anywhere is breathtaking and overwhelming. Some open-world locals, like churches, ruins, and earth trees, feel a little familiar from realm to realm, but make no mistake, there are numerous and unique points to explore and lose hours of. From mysterious castles to haunted magical locations, the world is filled with exciting distractions.
Her character is incredibly customizable, which I found very rewarding. You can attach different abilities and scaling mechanisms across the board, allowing you to truly create your own vision of a traveling hero. Respecialization and modifications allow you to fine-tune your creation without worrying too much about experimentation, while arming yourself with everything from explosive pots to potent perfumes to add to your ever-expanding arsenal. Combat will vary greatly from player to player and build to build, but the precise dance of melee combat is more refined and diverse than ever. With a behind-the-scenes stagger system that rewards players for taking risks with the right timing, the flow of combat makes the unique Spam Strike a lesser choice in the face of a daunting enemy.
The open world is majestic, full of flavor and atmosphere, and full of fabulous finds. However, the legacy dungeons are legendary and often connected to the outside world from multiple points. Dissecting these curated sprawls is a dream, and Elden Ring often offers a variety of ways to maneuver through these areas. For example, in one of those massive dungeons, I discovered a completely different way to “solve” the path to the final boss – and then went back and found a deviant path through a different environment that led to a plethora of fights, bosses, and more Prey. Sometimes access to certain areas is the last place you look, but the path to discovering them is full of even more attractive paths to follow.
While some monster and boss designs are reused, the scale and scope of Elden Ring is massive, making the repetition easy to ignore. I feel like I encountered about a hundred bosses in my playthrough. I’m not exaggerating. Some of these can feel mundane and uninteresting at the end of a small dungeon, like a returning cave troll or a magma dragon, but the general variety of encounters meant I never knew exactly what I was faced with at the end of each expedition. I could face a knight with a new skin, but I could also face something really astronomical.
The big bosses that are generally found at the end of legacy dungeons feel like wonderful wars against demigods. Exciting exclamation points for an outrageous odyssey, these brilliant set-piece matches are absolute spectacle and masterful combinations of excitement and triumph. Elden Ring has the distinction of having the best and most challenging boss fight of any From Software game to date. Hidden and optional, this encounter had me waking up in the middle of the night to come back and crash into its beautiful and horrifying destruction over and over again. After finally defeating that opponent, I let out a triumphant shout of victory there while sitting in the dark in my pajamas, wanting nothing more than to relive the encounter. This example shows how incredibly compelling and compelling Elden Ring is; I regularly put it down with the intention of doing something else and found myself back within minutes. There’s always another nagging mystery to solve, another boss to defeat, and another hidden route to find.
The Elden Ring challenged me, captivated me, and enchanted me, a relentless tide of discovery and unbound artistic vision. Elden Ring represents a truly amazing combination of different game elements, all coming together to create something fascinating, special and unforgettable. Elden Ring isn’t just the best game this year; It’s one of the best games ever made.
