Elden Ring gets caught into the trap of the open-world design: bigger always means better.

There is a sense of discovery in the first 20 hours or so, where you slowly uncover the elements that form the world (characters, enemies, levels, systems...). Many of them are well-known by now, as everyone has pointed out, given their iterative nature. But it's in how is iterated that I think lies the magic of those first 20 hours. The caves, dungeons and mines are my favourite part, having to keep your lantern with you at all times, not knowing where those little assholes will come you from. Little passages, some secrets, a nice boss battle at the end and out. A little adventure in the midst of all that grandiosity.

Sadly, those 20 hours of discoveries and secrets comes to an end rather abruptly, when the iterative becomes repetitive. The same locations, the same enemies, the same bosses, the same items, the same strategy, the same vistas. A boring mosaic. All the magic got swept away for the sake of squeezing all those hours that become junk.

There is much more than just small dungeons, of course. The rest is an extension of dark souls 3, not dark souls 1, with very big and intricate castles, and at the end a stupidly giant mega boss awaiting to be slayed and make a fucking super epic moment, which in many cases read as very similar encounters. I would lie if I'd say that i didn't enjoy (very much enjoy) some of those battles, mainly Radahn and Rennala. They offered something more varied and interesting than just battle, and very refreshing.

Dark souls games have been compered to Berserk ad nauseam, pointing at all the homages and references to Miura's biggest work. It is considered that Dark Souls 3, even this one, kept some of the spirit of the manga faithfully. Recently, I was once again listening to Susumu Hirasawa's ost for the anime while re-reading the manga, and when this song started https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZa0Yh6e7dw, I realised that we view Berserk through different lenses, because there is no moment in all Elden Ring that even resembles this.

If that wasn't enough, I've also been replaying Dark Souls 1 at the same time, and it's really jarring the comparison. People destroyed Dark Souls 2 for not capturing the essence of the first one, but I now think they only meant the world wasn't fully interconnected, because Elden Ring is nothing like the first one in the worst ways! DS1 gets much better the spirit of Berserk, the melancholy of a dark and twisted world, full of violence but with traces of hope to continue. Some of the characters you meet along the journey are too cynical to keep going, some of them still hold the will to go forward, many will fall into despair, madness and death, but every single one of them are bound to the strength needed to dream a different future. The idea that the world is not going to die this time. Some still believe it, some stopped believing a long time ago. You yourself keep persevering in a world that has died so many times that it doesn't make sense anymore. Buildings are not going down, but the concept of architecture itself is fading. Ugliness can be felt in the colors of the walls, in the faraway trees and landmasses. Elden Ring is too concrete and clean to show that ugliness, and is too convoluted with power plays to make character interactions tragic or memorable (also, maybe having much more characters doesn't help). The only exception is the woman's hug in The Round Table, something that could perfectly have been in DS1.

I read someone explaining the game as "imagine the moment in DS3 when you saw Irithyll for the first time. That's Elden Ring all the time", implying that it was something great. For me, it's not. I got saturated of so much "beauty", so much brightness, so much clarity, so many perfect compositions that it didn't strike me anymore. Since you are going to be traversing a world for a long time, they decided to make STUNNING VISTAS all the time, every time. An attempt to naturalistic open-worlds. In Spanish, there is a word that perfectly describes my sensations: relamido.

Yes, the gameplay is obviously good. Its the previous games with more weapons, which translates in fun ways to approach fights. But I find pretty underwhelming that the thing this game has going for is what people criticise constantly: polish. A bigger and uniform forest with polished trees.

Maybe I'm being more harsh with this game than with any other, but seeing the comparisons with previous games and Berserk, and spending maybe 70 hours with no moving or alienating experiences unlike the previous ones, has made me more bitter towards this spouting of thoughts. Beware games, don't make me play for that long.

✅Open world
✅Abyssmal collect-a-thon of plants and animal stuff
✅Shitty crafting system completely tacked on
✅"Stealth" mechanics revolving around hiding in bushes and takedowns
✅Enemy campaments with useless rewards
✅ Annoying npcs

Far Cry haters are awfully quiet today

An amalgamation of micro-worlds, bound together by human connections and pain, in order to escape the homogeneous void and uniformity of the world. The system won't give you resolution, only a small comfort until your demise. A 32-bit/16-bit/8-bit adaptation of Neon Genesis Evangelion.

The smaller you go, the more concrete these worlds seem, but also more constraining. They might also hide bigger possibilities, new ways of rethinking live and community.

At times, this feels like a search for limitations, instead of actually being limited by software/hardware/manpower. That's why the little card-hunting there is didn't bother me, it went as far and wide as it wanted to.

Today is the 20th of January 2022. I finished this game on the 26th of November last year. Every day since then I have woke up thinking about this game.

When characters in a movie are playing a game on the TV with a PS2 controller, this is the game on the TV. Cruelty Squad was made by a man who has heard of the concept of a game but doesn't have the facilities to actually play one. This game is the opposite of a novelist living in a cave for 20 years to write his magnum opus. This is a man who has plugged his brain into the mainframe. It isn't that Cruelty Squad is post-post-post-modernist - Cruelty Squad is post-criticism, it is caveman art drawn with faeces, it is a sociological phenomenon.

A QWERTY keyboard will wash up on a beach 1000 years from now and anthropologists will use it as proof that we had 100 fingers. They will play Cruelty Squad and say we were blind and deaf.

The levels in Cruelty Squad are impossibilities. Ever since Adventure was released in 1980 we have been hurtling down a predetermined path laid out by God and level designers, alternating between vast open spaces and linear corridors forever, like a fractal. With every game released, the remaining pool of possible games that are left to be created shrinks, not just because one more was just made, but also that the existence of art will influence the existence of other art. There isn't an anti-Mario-64. No one would make an anti-Mario-64. Their brain is permanently cursed with the knowledge that Mario 64 exists and all future decisions will be affected by that.

That isn't to say anything about the quality of Mario 64. The trajectory of video games has been altered by lesser and worse games, but alas. Cruelty Squad is the product of a person with no brain to curse, a spotless mind. Every single level I played surprised me with its ingenuity. I often found myself laughing out loud, not at the non-sequitur or clever jokes, but at how ridiculous and funny the level design is.