Content Warning for Attempted Suicide, Terminal Illness, Death, and Chronic Illness

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It’s September 2011 and I’m seventeen years old when I try to kill myself. There are two ponds near my parent’s house. It’s like 4 AM. I like to be out this early. Nobody else is awake, and they won’t be for a while. It’s like the whole world belongs to me. I wander around between the neighborhoods, along the roads, and in the fields. In ten years these will be fresh real estate properties but today they’re still farmland. This hour and a half is the only time the anxiety quells. The real world never knows peace. There’s a dread that accompanies every action and every moment; living in that house, going to school, hanging out with my friends (are they my friends? They are but I won’t be able to understand that until I’m healthier). I’ll always have to go back home. I’ll never be able to articulate what’s happening to me. The pressure is too intense. I don’t plan it, but, the pond is right there, and it’s deep enough, and early enough that no one will hear me. Not having a plan is what saves my life. Turns out impromptu self-drownings are difficult to pull off when the water is still and not THAT deep. So, it doesn’t work, and I’m soaked, and grateful to get home and hide the evidence before my parents wake up, but I don’t feel BETTER. I feel despair, still. There’s no way out. I wish I could just climb up the stairwell, out of this. I wish I had the clarity to understand what was wrong with me.

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What do you even say about Silent Hill 2? To say that it’s one of the best video games ever made feels simultaneously obvious and like I’m underselling it, right? Fuckin, uhhhh, Resident Evil 2 is one of the best video games ever made. Ace Attorney 3 is one of the best games ever made. Come on! When we see people talk about old games that they like they’ll so often say stuff like “it holds up really well for its age” or some similar comment that implies that progress is the same as quality. This is, of course, nonsense. I wouldn’t say video games are better as a medium in 2021 than they were in 2001; on the whole and in the mainstream I would say they’re demonstrably worse in almost every way – how they look, how they sound, how they feel. Silent Hill 2 was a AAA game. What do we get now instead? Far Cry 6? The fuckin, THE MEDIUM? We’ve lost everything in pursuit of bad lighting and looking like a mediocre episode of whatever was popular on HBO three years ago. Silent Hill 2 looks great and sounds great and fuck you it plays great too it feels good and even the puzzles are MOSTLY FINE. MOSTLY. Listen I’m saying this is the all time best video game I’m not saying it fuckin ended world hunger.

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It’s October 2012, I’m nineteen and I’m sitting in a business communications class when I get the text confirmation that Sam’s brain tumor is back, again. It’s not the first time, and I know that there’s nothing left to do, he’s going to die. It’s fast, untreated. He’s one of my best friends, and the only person I know from home who went to the same college as me, but we live really far apart on a big urban campus and I haven’t seen him as much as I’d have liked to. Now he’s gonna spend the rest of his time with his family back home. When I see him next it’s at a hometown charity event for his family in December. He’s unrecognizable physically, and he can’t speak. The event is at our old catholic elementary school, in the gym, where in the years since we graduated they’ve painted a giant tiger on the wall. It’s the school mascot. I feel incredibly awkward around him and spend most of the time away with our other friends. I only speak to him briefly, and when I do it’s a stupid joke about the tiger mural. These will be my last words to him. I do know this will be the case, I think. Later that month I’ll be one of his pallbearers. I spend a lot of time angry and ashamed of myself for not being better to him, not knowing how to act or what to say. I’m about to drop out of school for reasons financial and related to my mental health.

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So what DO you say about Silent Hill 2? That it’s a masterpiece? That it’s the most well-conceived and executed video game ever made? That every detail of it dovetails into every other in a legitimately perfect cocktail story, presentation, and play? That the performances, cinematography, soundscape, all of it are untouchably top of their class? That when Mary reads the letter at the end I WEEP because it’s one of the best pieces of acting I’ve ever heard? That if I ever meet Troy Baker it’s ON SIGHT? These things are all true. We all know it. Everybody knows this. It’s Silent Hill 2.

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It’s August 2019, I’m twenty-five and I’ve just managed to graduate college in time to move to a new city with my partner as she enters her third year of medical school. That’s the year they kick you out of the classroom and you start going to the hospitals to do your real hands-on training month to month. I’m job hunting unsuccessfully and we’re living exclusively off her loans, when what seems at first like a pulled lower back muscle becomes a fruitless early morning ER trip (five hours, no results, not seen by a doctor) becomes an inability to get out of bed becomes a forced leave of absence. Without a diagnosis she can’t get disability accommodations. While on a leave of absence we can’t have her loans, and in fact we have to pay them back. We’re getting desperate, thousands of dollars in debt, and I take the first soul sucking job I can find. It takes almost a full year of visits to increasingly specialized physicians but eventually my partner is diagnosed with non radiographic axial spondyloarthritis, an extremely rare condition that culminates in the fusion of the spinal column. We can treat the pain, sort of, but it’s only a matter of time until it’s likely to evolve into a more serious condition, she’ll never have the strength or stamina she had before, and the treatment options are expensive and difficult. Her diagnosis doesn’t even officially exist as a recognized condition that people can have until September 2020.

Suddenly I am a caretaker and everything is different now. Obviously our mood is stressed from the financial dangers, but she’s in pain, terrible pain, constantly for months. She can’t sleep, she can’t eat. There’s nothing I can do. It’s exhausting to live like that. She’s depressed. On good days we try to walk outside but good days are few and far between, and grow fewer over time, and her body makes her pay for the walks. She’s on drugs, a lot of them. Do they help? It’s unclear. They don’t make her feel BETTER. Nobody knows what’s wrong with her. Her school thinks she’s faking, they’re trying to concoct ways to get her kicked out. She wants to die. It breaks my heart. She’s everything to me, all that there is. She has literally saved my life. And I can’t help her. But it’s exhausting for me too. I don’t want to admit this, not even privately, to myself. It is hard to be the person who is leaned on, especially when the person you love can’t give anything back. I’m tired. I’m not angry, and I don’t think I’m resentful. But I’m tired. I feel shame for thinking about it, for acknowledging it. I know it’s silly to feel the shame but it’s there. I do find a job eventually, thankfully, but it’s still a long time before we get a diagnosis, much less an effective treatment. Even after things settle somewhat, it’s a hard year. And there are hard times to come.

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Ever since I first played it as a teen, Silent Hill 2 is a game that has haunted me through life, like a memory. It struck a deep chord with me when I was too young for that to be fair, too young to identify why I could relate to these people and their ghosts. I used to think this was a special relationship that I had with the game, the way you kind of want to think you have these when you’re younger, but the older I get the more I recognize this as part of growing up. Silent Hill 2 doesn’t resonate with me because I’ve encountered situations in life that closely mirror that of the protagonist. I mean, Angela’s story resonates deeply with me despite little overlap in the specifics of our family traumas. Silent Hill 2 touches me – and most of us – so deeply, because it has such a keen understanding of what it feels like to be Going Through It. It is a game that knows what it is to grieve, to despair, to soak in the fog, and also, maybe, to feel a catharsis, if you’re lucky, and you do the work.

I’ve been Angela, parts of her. I’ve been Laura too. I’ve had more James in me than I would prefer. I suspect all of us have these people, these feelings in us, to some degree or another. We collect them as we get older. That’s just part of it. Silent Hill 2 isn’t a happy game, but it’s one that Gets It, and lets us explore those spaces in a safe and cathartic way. It does this about as well as any piece of media I’ve encountered, on top of being so excellent at all the cinematic and video game stuff. But that’s really what makes it what it is. The empathy, and the honesty. I think it’s beautiful.

Metal Gear Solid showed that when given the chance, the powers that be will prefer to keep you as a pawn until you outstrip your usefulness. It was a story where the main character found himself manipulated by all sides, fighting for no cause whatsoever, and he ultimately reached the other side a liberated man.

So, Metal Gear Solid 2 starts us with a man being blatantly manipulated from all sides, who is sick of the vagueness of his orders from the very early phases of the mission, and only receives orders that parrot the people he was told "Aren't part of the simulation" or ones that feel a little too NWO for Jack's tastes.

The ultimate reveal of Metal Gear Solid 2 is not that you were being manipulated again- that much is obvious. Everyone in the story acknowledges it, and it's never raised as a point against Jack. The reveal is that the antagonists were being manipulated as well, and the true antagonists were never there in the first place.

The elusive Patriots, controlling all aspects of the mission and dictating how the mission will go through various men on the inside are just a phantom. The post-credits codec call isn't a hook, it's the answer. The Patriots were dead, what is left is what they passed on, their memetic legacy that formed in the White House since its inception. All they are is a series of AIs that send out orders, ensuring an automated system of constant control is maintained, but the cracks are even starting to show here.

In the final confrontation between Jack and Solidus, a confrontation of two men molded by the Patriots AI (as a point of contrast to the "embarrassment from the 70s" that were Solid and Liquid), the AI is almost desperate in its attempts to appeal to Jack's pathos. Reminding him of Rose, who it has also tried to convince him is fake, destroying his life and trying to build it back up with ideas of saving Olga's child, they create a complete mess of Jack's mind in a way similar to what the player will feel when watching their 15 minute long spiel of contradictory information repeated ad nauseum.

Jack throwing his identity away at the end is a sign of throwing away that control that the Patriots had. He was molded by artificial values and made to feel ashamed of a past he never tries to remember, so his solution is to walk a different path from Snake. While Snake took his experiences and went on to form Philanthropy, an attempt to find meaning for himself, Jack throws away those experiences and personality. Upon meeting with Rose in the finale, his actions aren't to dodge her romantic pursuits like in the codec calls throughout the game, but to instead confront the looming issue of marriage, and how his former self, how "Raiden", could never imagine that idea.

The conclusion of the game is only the tip though. A lot of the ideas I mentioned are the base text, told to you by the characters or the Patriots AI. A few things to clear up would be that everything that happened was real though. There was no VR simulation, we just see a cleanup crew pop in to assess Arsenal's damage to New York while people go on with their day. It's cheap, but that's because the original ending was scrapped late into development due to the incident that happened earlier in the year.

To move on from that though, the game raises some interesting ideas. The parallels to MGS1 are this very clear surface level text, but the point of the game is not to show us the similarities, but instead for the player to notice the differences. Shadow Moses was an isolated island, a piece of land created by nature, with a facility that nature is constantly reclaiming through the snow or that forces the player to wander through nature's hallways, caves. Compare to the Plant, a completely man made "island", one that is almost entirely this sterile orange colour, an "island" where you'll never encounter rain or snow, let alone vegetation growing out of the floor. Where Metal Gear Solid was the "Gene", the natural idea of passing the torch, 2 is the "Meme", the uniquely human way of passing it down, and this contrast is shown in the environments.

How about the mysterious ninja? In the original Japanese, he uses Grey Fox voice clips instead of just Olga's voice through a modifier, using a "Meme" of the Deepthroat of Shadow Moses. The opening of Metal Gear Solid 2, the self-indulgent Tanker chapter, also cashes in on this meme idea. Lines from the first game will repeat themselves, Ocelot repeating Liquid regarding how much he cares for Russia, and Ocelot (fully as Liquid) repeats a line from Grey Fox, "You haven't aged well?"

Nuances like these, which add to a full reading of the duology that is Metal Gear Solid 1 and 2 are lost with a dub only localization, that also has two different translators (and a second one that is significantly less likely to be fluent). Metal Gear Solid 2 actively preys on familiarity with 1, expecting the average player to immediately catch onto what's going on, before pulling the rug out from under them with the game itself breaking down under the tremendous weight of recreating Shadow Moses.

To end another rather rambly series of notes, I'd like to highlight the 3 novellas you receive in the game, which convey the information age ideas of the title. You essentially read an interpretation of an interpretation of an interpretation, to unlock an interpretation of an interpretation. Even the original file itself is just Nastasha interpreting (sick of this word yet?) the events of Shadow Moses and her relationship with Richard Ames, and this document highlights how flimsy loyalty to the Patriots really is for a lot of these people.

At the end of the game, I found myself seeing the Patriots as a washed up group, desperately clinging to some semblance of control that they were losing as the game kept going. Everyone in their employ appears to be there unwillingly or due to their own lack of knowledge, and the sole committed member, Revolver Ocelot, has been compromised. It's a rather optimistic note to end on, that these people controlling society can't wrestle their hands around the throat of an information age much longer. They've resorted to their own subjects, trying to influence them to filter the information and only accept the Patriot approved truths, but Snake gives Raiden the words needed to see past that.

"Find the meaning behind the words, then decide."

Oddly, this game doesn't follow on from 1's anti-nuke critique with a similar series of endcards. Perhaps the information age itself is the "nuke" of this new and unfolding world, and we should be wary of the consequences of letting people decide what information is important for us.

today marks the 20th anniversary of metal gear solid 2's release, and hideo kojima tweeted a bit in memory of developing the game so long ago. one tweet in particular stuck out to me though:

"LIBERTY and FREEDOM have different meanings, and MGS2 is not about singularity, but about the 'norms' of society having a will of their own."

the year before the release of mgs2, the norms that maintain the social fabric of the United States briefly reared their head to the public. the 2000 presidential election resulted in a contested florida count; a week-long war where the soldiers were lawyers and county election officials. the supreme court eventually stepped in and settled the matter out of the hands of the voters who supposedly drove the process in the first place, and the culture managed to digest this aberration of electoral procedure cleanly. when a much sillier repeat of this strategy took place 20 years later, there was little discourse about its relation to a time when a party actually did manage to steal an election openly with no consequence.

the point of the above is not to bemoan the "unfairness" of the situation (the choice did not really matter to the american people) but to observe how the american ideological ship rights itself even when it openly contradicts itself. much of our "freedom" yields from america's supposedly democratic structure allowing citizens to exert themselves politically, even as voting is shown to be vapid ritual and direct action is suppressed at every opportunity. yet even when these truths are so plainly evident, the shadow of american capital obscures or supplants the truth as necessary to keep the citizenry proud of the "liberty" they hold. kojima rationalizes this the work of artificial intelligence; a neural network kept fat off of the endless drip of online content, and trained to filter information for the benefit for international capitalist hegemony. the economic engine of the west's security far exceeds the abilities of any group of humans to protect, and must be handled by some sort of higher power; an omniscient american consciousness whether as a group of AIs inside an underwater fortress or a commmon understanding woven into us by the superstructure we exist in.

of course, I don't want to imply that all of the above came directly out of kojima's mind onto the page, especially since I find praises of games such as these to be inherently "anti-capitalist" to be cope in a lot of ways; the text simply does not have any coherent critique of capitalism itself. kojima has stated (paraphrased by tim rogers) that the plot here is "merely a jumble of things inspired by current events," and not a "postmodern literary statement." the thematic undercurrent of this game sometimes struggles to poke its head through all of the mess of plot elements at play: otacon cuckolding his father, the peter stillman false injury subplot, rose's desperate attempts to crack raiden's hardened exterior, the vampire who is lovers with a marine commander and then moves on his daughter who may or may not be able to deflect bullets, and revolver ocelot having liquid snake's personality inside his arm for some reason. what's unquestionable though is that kojima has a keen mind for rooting out legitimately disturbing facets of US hegemony and exposing them within his work both narratively and through the game mechanics.

much of this relies on raiden, or jack, the hapless operator commanded to infilitrate the big shell and rescue the president. his mission: to play in a role in a cataclysmic test that will prove that the patriots (the aforementioned norms, the ideological backbone of america) can organically influence the actions of people via tight control of the information given to them. part of this game's infamous obtuseness revolves around the fact that not only has raiden been misled by his supervisors, but the people he interacts with friend or foe also are acting on false information different than what raiden has. there are instances where raiden will parrot off the plot up to a given point and will be met with incredulous looks by whoever he's talking to that never remotely get resolved, and piecing together the real plot from this can be difficult. his main enemy: solidus snake, a man who has upheld the status quo of america both abroad in brutal secret military actions in africa as well as domestically as president of the united states. this is a man who has seen the superstructure and seeks to gain true liberty in transcending it; he's a man who has seen the true face of God and must be killed. even as raiden struggles to sort through his thoughts regarding all of this, he's pushed to duel solidus to the death to fulfill the patriots orders, and he has no choice in the matter. the patriots have organized the game for him and he (as the player's proxy) must participate. raiden has no alternate options, as his future is bound to the player's performance within the scope of the game, and he cannot disobey his direct inputs.

perhaps the best illustration of raiden's construction of consciousness over the course of the game is in the arsenal gear section. raiden up to now has been chasing the identity of snake for some time, both literally as he trails behind snake's actions within the game and conceptually as the patriots program the environment around him to resemble the shadow moses incident. after being tortured within the bowels of arsenal gear, raiden is released fully nude and must evade capture as he undergoes a sort of peristalis within AG's intestines. as he proves himself competent after shedding his loadout (mechanically inherited from snake), the real snake bestows upon him an identity of his own: a katana that becomes raiden's primary combat weapon for the final sections of the game. raiden's literal play mechanics develop beyond the idea of snake in this moment thanks to a clever design choice by the developers: the katana uses the previously unused right stick to control its slashes and actions. up to now players are unconsciously playing as snake to some extent, as raiden's control layout has matched snake's MGS1 layout. it is now that players learn how to play as raiden and how he functions as a character beyond the shadow of snake, as he self-actualizes both narratively and within the scope of the game's mechanics.

I don't know if the critical gaming institution was ready to accept the confidence mgs2 brought when it came out, however. obviously the character bait-and-switch turned off those who played solely to become snake; perhaps raiden was an ugly reflection in some ways, as an awkward and lithe protagonist with only virtual combat experience to speak of. the sheer complexity and inexplicable loose ends of the story turned off many more who were willing to explore what kojima has created, including the translator herself: Agness Kaku. even though I disagree with her critique of the script, I do not envy the draconian word count requirements that konami held her to or the strict 1:1 localization requirements kojima enforced after jeremy blaustein's creative liberties in the excellent translation of the first game. the result here is a script that is stilted and cumbersome compared to the snappy script of the original, which I'm sure turned off even more people than mentioned before. it's taken many years to truly cleanse mgs2's mixed reputation for those who originally experienced it: as an example, while I tend to like jeremy parish's work, his writing on mgs2 captures a snide attitude towards this game that has not aged well, whereas his more recent analysis of the game on retronauts has begun praising its prescience of modern american political life as he's reexamined the game, a move I applaud him for as a prominent games critic and historian.

in fact, it's parish's criticism of mgs2's gameplay that I want to use as a launching point to discuss the game's amazing stealth action, which really cements this title as one of the best games ever made in my eyes. mgs2 falls in a difficult spot between mgs1, arguably the first modern AAA game, and mgs3, a game with remarkably few restraints on player expression and another GOAT contender. it's hard for me to argue that mgs2 is better than mgs3; mgs2 is a leaner experience while mgs3 is a much more convoluted web of systems to memorize and clunky controls, but mgs3 is a pure stealth experience in terms of environment and scenario design in a way that mgs2 cannot approach. what mgs2 is not, however, is a rehash of mgs1, as parish's writing (linked below) accuses it of. while there are certainly similar aspects between events in mgs2 and mgs1, mgs2 builds upon these ideas to present something completely new for the genre. mechanically mgs2 is a perfect midpoint between 1 and 3 that rewards player ingenuity and quick decision-making within the bounds of the top-down format and segmented area structure of the original title.

mgs2 brings two major innovations to the series: first-person aiming and the AI squad system. guns in mgs1 are functionally useless outside of the many annoying action setpieces throughout the game, as the aiming is non-existent and there's no way to quickly take down guards with weapons. in that game this flaw is papered over by the fact that guards lack much any critical thinking beyond looking at anything directly within their cone of vision, and thus the game encourages sneaking behind enemies. in mgs2, you now have the ability to headshot or crotchshot enemies for quick takedowns, and with this power comes a slew of challenges that force the player to use this tool effectively. the game stations guards in locations that often actively keep you from slipping past them as a casual player, either from having other guards watch their back, or from patrolling areas that make your footsteps clearly audible, or by putting mission objectives in positions where guards block you at every turn from accessing them. to make matters more complicated, tranquilizing or killing a soldier leaves their body behind, which if seen by another soldier can quickly reveal your presence even if you are on the other end of the map. body disposal becomes an essential and nerve-racking endeavor that is further exacerbated by the fact that dragging bodies is slow, and stunned enemies will eventually wake again. rooms become a matter of determining which soldiers risk mission integrity the most when active, how to best deal with them, and how to hide them in such a way that you have just enough time to achieve your objective before the body is found.

further complicating matters, the squad in each room now does routine check-ups on one another to ensure the team has not been comprimised, as well as calling into HQ regularly to provide status updates. making an incorrect decision can have an extremely costly result if the squad becomes suspicious and calls in a search team to sniff you out; the most frightening parts of this game come from hiding in lockers or under cabinets praying that a search team will get lazy when they reach your location and leave you be. this also implements a hidden timer after you eliminate a guard, where your next objective must be finished before the rest of the squad catches wind of the fact that one of their own is missing. even worse is eliminating a squad leader, which could result in HQ realizing that no regular status report was radioed in and thus sending in a team to determine the status in person. it's a delicate interplay between all these mechanics, as any advantage you can gain over the forces against you can be lost just as quickly if you have not planned further movements in advance. taking out guards one by one linearly is simply not an option: you must consider the totality of your environment, plan accordingly, and then execute said plan correctly, often with elements you didn't consider interfering and forcing you into hiding mere meters away from your objective. it is endlessly claustrophobic on first attempts of this game, and truly imposes a sense of dread upon being discovered that I don't think other entries in this series ever capitalized on in the same way. of course, as you grow more experienced, you begin to find ways to push against these restrictions, and to the game's credit it offers a bounty of built-in ways to exploit the guards. shooting a soldier's radio or throwing a chaff grenade jams their tether to HQ and keeps them from calling for reinforcements even in the event that they encounter you, for instance, and you can hold up guards for free takedowns and to lead them away from other guards in the vicinity. steam pipes can be broken to scald guards, cameras can be shot to free up your traversal options, fire extinguishers can serve as makeshift smoke grenades, and you can even drop onto unsuspecting soldiers from a ledge in order to get an instant knockout. what makes this game different is no matter how far you push, the game will still find ways to punish you if you choose to lollygag given the ever-watchful eye of HQ upon you. your job is to catalog your available tools in your mind, use them when appropriate, and plan out your goals in advance as to avoid wasting time once you've begun interacting with the environment.

in terms of macro-design mgs2 also leapfrogs mgs1 to provide area layouts that take advantage of the new tools as well as encourage more exploration. mgs1 lays out its areas in straight lines in both discs of the game, making backtracking a bore, especially during sections such as retrieving the sniper rifle or using the temperature-controlled key cards. mgs2 areas are still heavily enclosed, but feature a greater amount of interconnectivity that allows the player to choose their routes, or for different difficulties to change which routes are accessible to the player when. in the two main open hubs in the game - the tanker area as well as Strut A of big shell - the player can freely travel between areas for the most part while still being naturally led to the next objectives. it helps that each area is roughly symmetrical, and as such the player need not struggle with understanding a complicated interconnected map. after the harrier fight, the game linearizes and begins focusing on more setpieces rather than full stealth sections, but after a more freeform first ~60% of the game this doesn't bother me much.

the environments themselves strike a radically different vibe than mgs1, which focused on snake clawing through the darkness of alaska juxtaposed against the glittering snow blanketing the island of shadow moses. big shell instead feels sterile, with its position far out into the hudson bay removing it from any spatial context as it sits above the water surrounded by mist. I sympathize with those who don't like this setting and its palette, as shadow moses is unquestionably the more memorable area. my interpretation of big shell is that its built purposefully as a "game-y," flat area; a training ground of sorts for raiden. the interiors ignore the oppressive chill of shadow moses in order to present an lifeless area that illustrates the banality of the villainy involved, and the clean order that the patriots impose. it's only as the game continues and the pageant the patriots have created begins to decompose that the aseptic facade collapses and raiden must overcome flooded hallways full of bloated bodies, flaming remannts of catwalks, and the blaring sirens of arsenal gear as he cleaves bodies in two and struggles against the framework imposed upon him.

one aspect where mgs2 is notably rushed is the boss selection: the main enemy organization Dead Cell has multiple members that evidently were cut in development even though they get brief mentions in the lore. unlike mgs1 where many of the fights are based in specific gimmicks, the bosses in mgs2 are spaced out much more and generally have multiple methods for how to take them down. the fatman fight always sticks out to me, both in sheer ridiculousness and in how it balances defusing the bombs fatman puts down with actually damaging him. balancing those two mechanics makes the fight more than just dodge-and-shoot, which is a fine design for a mgs fight but not always the most interesting. other fights such as olga and vamp sort of fall into the latter category, and then the rest feel a bit more gimmicky, generally leaning on some sort of non-standard weaponry. they're all good, but I wouldn't call them as memorable as the two games that sandwich it in the series, especially mgs3.

of course, there is much I haven't touched on in this review that I could continue to offer my thoughts on, such as the way the game begins violently rejecting the player from even playing it as they attempt to bend against the will of the patriots, or the way the game uses parallel events between mgs2 and mgs1 to confuse the player rather than give them some cynical "I get the reference" moment. perhaps this game's status as a "postmodern" masterpiece is simply because no other game has ever achieved this level of ludonarrative coherence, where the act of playing the game itself is relevant to the plot and subtextually reinforces the themes presented in the text. it's one thing to have fourth wall breaks, especially after the twists in this game were subsumed by gaming mass media and diluted into sillier configurations, but this game refuses to use them only as parlor tricks and instead weaves them into a broader narrative about the control of information and individual agency that resonates at a time when people are hyperaware of the context of their era and yet absolutely powerless to influence it. it's a game where even multiple legendary soldiers are unable to buck machinations of a country that are entirely beyond them, and where they must live with this doomed knowledge whether they choose to feebly resist it or not. in many ways, this is a game that was far ahead of its time and lacks an inheritor of its legacy as both one of the most fantastic action games ever created and one of the few titles that capitalizes on video game's unique traits as an equal form of art and sport.

The ancient Egyptians postulated seven souls.

The top soul, and the first to leave at the moment of death, is Ren - the secret name. This corresponds to the director, who directs the game of your life from conception to death. The secret name is the title of your game. When you died, that's where Ren came in.

The second soul off the sinking ship is Sekem - energy, power, and light. The director gives the orders, Sekem presses the right buttons.

Number three is Khu, the guardian angel, depicted as flying away across a full moon. A bird with luminous wings and head of light. The sort of thing you might see on a screen in a video game from your Xbox. The Khu is responsible for the subject and can be injured in his defence - but not permanently, since the first three souls are eternal. They go back to heaven for another vessel. The four remaining souls must take their chances with the subject in the Land of the Dead.

Number four is Ba, the heart - often treacherous. This is a hawk's body with your face on it, shrunk down to the size of a fist. Many a hero has been brought down like Samson by a perfidious Ba.

Number five is Ka - the double. Most closely associated with the subject. The Ka, which usually reaches adolescence at the time of bodily death, is the only reliable guide through the Land of the Dead to the Western Sands.

Number six is Khaibit, the shadow memory. Your whole past conditioning from this and other lives.

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In the autumn of 2011, I got my first ‘real’ job, leaving behind the hell of zero-hour retail and office temp work to become an IT repairman at a big library. Finally, I could provide myself with food, clothing, shelter and, most importantly, video games. I loved problem-solving, working with tools and being on the computer so much already, and now had a professional outlet for all of those things that I enjoyed. It was the best job I’d ever had, but there was one weird snag - the librarians really didn’t like the cleaning and repair staff.

I’m not sure what makes librarians think that alphabetising Anne Rice novels is a more noble profession than networking 500 computers together or replacing tungsten filaments in industrial lighting systems, but nonetheless, they felt justified in keeping the workies out of every kitchen and staff lounge in the building. Mugs, coffee grounds, tea bags, milk, plates and microwaves were all kept in locked cupboards that only “academic” staff could access. Fresh out of retail hell, I just accepted this as a natural law of the universe (of course I was unworthy of a plastic cup for some water!), but in retrospect, it was a little fucked up. My “non-academic” colleagues responded to this in kind by hiding kettles, instant coffee and tin cups in electrical cupboards and storerooms, an essential act of survival misconstrued as spiteful by the microwave-havers. Without anywhere to store fridges in a stock cupboard, there was no milk to be had. Black tea or black coffee were our only options at break-time in the library.

This is how I learned to love black coffee. I had been a white-and-sugars type guy until this point in my personal hot-drink history, treating coffee more as a vehicle for warm milk then an experience in and about itself. Thirsty as hell from running around physically installing Microsoft Excel patches on computers still running Windows 98 in 2011, I had no choice but to forgo my preference for milk and just get used to gulping hot acidic bean water day in, day out when I needed to restore my hit-points. At first I didn’t enjoy it all, but like everything else in life, cultivating patience of habit can allow you to accept and adapt to almost any situation you find yourself in. 11 years later, I now drink nothing but black coffee. I could, probably, somehow - like those wine wankers you see in movies - even tell you the difference between different blends of the hot acid gloop that is burning my insides. Such is my passion for #coffee.

In the autumn of 2011, something else happened. A video game called Dark Souls launched on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, to some degree of fanfare that is still up for debate to this day. Video game historians like to mythologise the rise of the Souls series, and often claim Dark Souls launched to very little acclaim - but from my own historical perspective, I contest this claim. My memory leads me to believe the contrary - that Dark Souls had an exciting buzz about it right out of the gate - for game-fans and game-readers, at least. I was mostly a Halo and Street Fighter IV player at the time, and even I’d felt the urge to buy it on opening week. For some reason... I can’t remember why... That was over a decade ago. An age past. I don’t remember my motivation for every video game I’ve ever bought.

Friends of mine who’d foolishly bought PlayStation 3s to play Metal Gear Solid 4 derisively informed me that Dark Souls was the sequel to Demon’s Souls: their painful memories told mine that Demon’s Souls was a “stupid” and “unfair” game that treated its players with contempt and that I should consider getting Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2 instead because this one was gonna have all-new ways for 12-year-olds to militarily abuse me through the internet. I wasn’t the type of person to listen to my friends, though - I preferred to listen to anonymous message board posters and professional video game journalists. With one of my first paycheques as a fully-fledged computer janitor, I purchased a Cafe AeroPress coffee maker and a copy of Dark Souls.

... And I hated it. As my friends had prophesied, Dark Souls was relentlessly unfair. Enemies came back to life and stabbed me in the back; pathways crumbled and sent me tumbling to my doom; evil knights shrugged off my attacks and responded in kind with bigger and badder swords of their own. The infamous curse status - an affliction that permanently halves your health and prevents you from becoming human - was my final straw. I recognised the gauntlet that was being laid before me in the Undead Depths and chose to reject the challenge. I found solace in the darkness of my coffee maker and put the game away forever.

A few months later, while trying to avoid studying for the most important exams of my life, I picked the game up again. I had decided that wading around damp dark sewers as a cursed little half-health freak up to his knees in rat shit was less daunting than preparing for my final exams before my adulthood-proper. I persevered, #coffee in one hand and a Wiki in the other, learning the ins and outs of the game’s mechanics in far greater depth than any of the Relational Database Management Systems textbooks on my study desk. I would rather prepare to die than prepare to pass.

Like many rookie Dark Souls players, parrying was my Everest - though perhaps over-emphasised by the playerbase as an essential skill for completing the game, it was certainly a far more important mechanic back then than that it is today. I spent many hours in the Undead Parish practicing my defence; learning the intricacies and timings of the mechanic and its follow-ups with my undead knight partners until the synapses solidified and I could pull a parry out of my reflexes without much mental effort. It was the key I needed to unlock my progress through the game, and I proudly rode my parrying prowess to the Kiln of the First Flame, linking the fire in ignorance of an unintended side-effect this new reflex had developed in me in the new ages to come.

Years later, I got the chance to play the now-infamous Dark Souls 2 demo at a video game expo and felt compelled to put my parry skills to the test once more. Despite the fact a coked-out Bandai Namco Games employee was offering free t-shirts to anyone who could beat the Mirror Knight in their allotted 15-minute slot, I persevered in the starting area until I could get my timings down once more. After a few whiffs and some off-colour comments from our jaw-clicking host, I finally managed to bat back a shadowy blade. It was at that moment that I discovered that Dark Souls 2 had a brand new feature - the parries smelt and tasted of black coffee. Despite all the gamer sweat and farts and poorly-ventilated electronics in my environment, I could sense coffee inside my brain. Hours of parry practice while sipping black coffee in my bedroom had built a permanent association between parrying and coffee in my mind. A soul memory.

I’m sure you’re familiar with the concept of soul memory, even if you know it by another name (Mikhail Bakhtin calls it the chronotope, for instance). The taste of spaghetti bolognese reminds you of a good day at your friend’s house in 2002. The fresh scent of factory plastic that emanates from a new video game takes you back to the summer holiday when your mum finally bought you Timesplitters 2 despite it being rated a 15+. Perhaps a particularly bad hangover from a night of drinking rum and coke has forever ruined the taste of Pepsi for you. Petrol makes you think about the forest, for some reason you don’t remember. And so on. You’ve all seen Ratatouille, I guess. I don’t need to labour at this point.

Soul memory is the currency of the sequel and the franchise, and in our current era, soul memory is undergoing hyperinflation - Star Wars: The Force Awakens; Spider-Man: No Way Home; Ghostbusters: Afterlife - filmmakers are eagerly trying to collect soul memories so they can take them to the bureau de change and cash out in dollars. You might baulk at this suggestion that the scent of your grandmother’s baked potatoes can be commodified, but I think there’s ample evidence to suggest that no link in your mind is safe from capital’s claws.

Video games are perhaps the most egregious traders of soul memory. Video games, even the best ones, are standing tall on the shoulders upon shoulders of prior moments in space-time - real and imagined - all the way back down to Donkey Kong. Re-releases and remakes and remasters and retro collections are nostalgia-primers for experiences you might not even have been alive for - we all love Pac-Man, even though we may not have met him in an 80s arcade hall; you and I replicated those experiences instead with a movie) or a PlayStation 3 Arcade Archive or a Pac-Man music video on MTV; phenomena best exemplified by the teenagers I saw on Twitter who are collecting Sonic the Hedgehog 3 & Knuckles promotional Happy Meal toys from 1993 to bring their souls closer to their blue-haired messiah. By letting you collect and play your figurative Rainbow Roads again and again and again in generation after generation after generation of product, video games explore the loss of a childhood place, and our attempts to recreate it.

And so what if the place that we are in the midst of is different from the physical space that we currently inhabit? What if the things we yearn for are located elsewhere, in another place or a falsely-remembered past, and all we now carry within us is an image of this place. We may remember only elements or impressions of it: there may be certain objects, sounds, a level, a character, special moves, cutscenes, or online battles; all of which come out in a manner that we cannot control or understand. Yet any of these elements or impressions make us feel at home in a way that we cannot find in the physical space where we are now stuck. Being displaced and yet capable of remembering the particularity of place: it is the state of being dislocated yet able to discern what it is that locates us. We have a great yearning, but we often cannot fulfil it with anything but memories from our soul.

In my review of Halo Infinite at the end of last year, I suggested the possibility that game developers are attempting to harness soul memory in new and exciting ways, the limits between your imagination and theirs almost fully removed in this gilded age of RTX and NGX and Speed Tree and shader-caching and other computer stuff I don’t understand; the world expanding ever-wider as we slot in more and more chips, spreading the channels between CPU and memory (both silicon and cerebellum) ever-wider. The end-state, no doubt, is a game that never ends, expanding outwards like our universe, all contained in the heart of an eternally-burning electric star on the platter of your hard drive. But how do you fuel a world-game of such approaching-infinite size? With the dependable financial and artistic mainstays of gaming, of course - the memory of/reverie in/nostalgia for/ known experiences, known systems, known self. Which makes Halo - a DirectX-based comfort food of the 18-35 crowd - an ideal candidate for colonisation via constant computer creation.

With Halo Infinite, it’s hard to gauge the intentionality of the author (and the multi-billion dollar corporation employing the author). By all accounts, Infinite was a scrap-piece, a million shattered pieces of contractor work and discarded concepts fused into a Holiday Product - something that, at least initially, presents itself as a never-ending ring-world: Zeta Halo could not be more apt as a setting for the beyond-open world template that’s come into vogue this generation (see also: Microsoft’s other tentpole, Forza Horizon). But was this product forged with any purpose greater than a shareholder deadline, a gilded-gold ring that can’t sustain itself beyond a financial quarter (never mind an eternal age!)? Fields upon fields of the same retrofuturistic alien base and knowing remarks about crunch and copy-pasted environments from your maiden, Cortana Weapon, imply that Halo Infinite was an illusion produced by profit - a defective ring-world, nothing more; but there are, at the very least, implications that game developers know what they create. In this new Halo instalment, Master Chief, regretting his transition out of cryostasis, is the only character in the game who opposes the rebuilding of the Halo installations. Too bad, John - you’re going for another last-minute warthog ride to the sounds of early-2000s progressive hard rock.

Does Halo Infinite sound familiar? Well, you might have played Dark Souls 3 and its downloadable follow-up: The Ringed City. Hidetaka Miyazaki's Souls series homecoming may have been hailed as a "return to form" for the franchise after the polarising reception to Dark Souls 2, but this oft-quoted games-journalist soundbite has a double-edge to it - namely, that it quite literally returned Dark Souls to its original form, repurposing locations, bosses, and emotional beats from the games that came before it. Lothric isn't a million lightyears away from Zeta Halo - it forges a similarly flimsy ring of questionable geography and architecture, a Dark Souls Disneyland built from item and character references that no longer mean anything beyond commercialised self-sabotage, names and item descriptions appearing only for the purposes of cynical, cyclical continuity with its predecessors. The game knew what it was creating with itself in its Bandai-Namco-hued orange-yellow wasteland - an idea perhaps best exemplified in the Abyss Watchers, a gang of frenzied Artorias fanboys from the Firelink Shrine who serve no literary purpose beyond infighting among themselves about the ways Artorias of the Abyss was like, really, really cool. (For some reason, I am now recalling the fact my PlayStation 4 copy of Dark Souls 3 came with a mail-order slip for a £344.99 statue of Artorias from the Bandai-Namco Official European Store...) These references without continuity, these connections without purpose... all they do is ring a Pavlovian spirit bell of soul memory in your brain for a fleeting moment. Nothing more. And Dark Souls 3 didn't just know this - it made it a central tenet of its thematics, even building its last-ever DLC around the concept of painting a forever-world made of the Dark Soul itself. Known experiences, known systems, known self, known forever. Consuming the Gods without question, like Gael, until the coming Age of Dark.

[[LAUNCH DEADLINE REACHED - BACKLOGGD SHAREHOLDERS ARE DEMANDING A Q2 LAUNCH OF THIS REVIEW ]]
// TODO: placeholder for another 9 paragraphs discussing the cyclical ages of fire depicted in the Dark Souls trilogy here and how the idea can be metatextually applied to the development cycles of each Souls game and their growing commercial impact vs. receding artistic impact. This part will be included in a post-launch patch to this review at an undetermined date. Hopefully never.

In Buddhism, the Four Noble Truths are the truths of the “Noble Ones”: those who are deemed “spiritually worthy". These truths are:

- Dukkha (suffering, incapable of satisfying, painful) is an innate characteristic of existence in the realm of samsara, the world-cycle of death and rebirth we all live through. Existence is pain, to some degree.

- Samudaya (origin, arising, combination; 'cause'): together with dukkha arises taṇhā ("craving, desire or attachment, lit. "thirst”). While tanha is traditionally interpreted in western languages as the 'cause' of dukkha, tanha can also be seen as the factor tying us to dukkha, or as a response to dukkha, trying to escape it; a suffering often understood to be a combination of a consumptive desire for fleeting things, destructive hatefulness, and ignorance of the world as it truly is.

- Nirodha (cessation, ending, confinement) dukkha can be ended or contained by the renouncement or letting go of this taṇhā; the confinement of tanha releases the excessive bind of dukkha; the end of suffering. We are finite flawed creatures with only two ways out: either cyclical death, or transcendence through enlightenment.

- Magga (the path, the Noble Eightfold Path) is the path leading to the confinement of tanha and dukkha. The next path in the teachings; Buddhism’s sequel, post-launch DLC or content update.

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Elden Ring is an action role-playing game developed by FromSoftware and published by Bandai Namco Entertainment. The game was directed by Hidetaka Miyazaki and made in collaboration with fantasy novelist George R. R. Martin, who provided material for the game's setting. It was released for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S on February 25, 2022.

Elden Ring is presented through a third-person perspective, with players freely roaming its interactive open world. Gameplay elements include combat featuring several types of weapons and magic spells, horseback riding, summons, and crafting. Elden Ring received critical acclaim, with praise for its open-world gameplay, fantasy setting, and evolution of the Souls formula. The game sold 12 million copies within three weeks of its release.

Elden Ring is From Software's first game of a new decade that follows an Age of Dark.

The exciting thing about a long voyage like Elden Ring is that it can inhabit so many spaces and times within your life, entwining its soul memories with your own in so many more ways than just an association between coffee and parrying. Due to its epic scale, brutal difficulty and my desire to travel through it as un-aided as possible, it took me four months to beat the game. Looking back from the now, the distance from February until May feels, as it often does in modern times, like a lifetime and a moment. Nothing and everything happened within the standard cycles of my life. I got up and went to work every day, playing through Elden Ring in spare moments and evenings. A war broke out while I was playing Elden Ring. I finished all six seasons of The Sopranos and four seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the time period I existed within while attempting to beat Elden Ring for the first time, and I noted that Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleed for the PlayStation 2 plays surprisingly similarly to Elden Ring. I went abroad for the first time in over two years, often thinking about Elden Ring while looking at the cathedrals and sweeping vistas of Barcelona. I saw a bunch of my friends in person for the first time in years while playing Elden Ring, and we discussed what builds were cool and which characters were cool. When I started Elden Ring, social distancing and facemasks were still mandatory in many places; when I finished Elden Ring, they were not.

So how do these new memories of mine intermingle with those presented in Elden Ring? Does Hoarfrost Stomp taste like marzipan? Is the Altus Plateau a portal to the golden fields of childhood freedom? Have I come to understand Godfrey as a Tony Soprano-like patriarchal figure in relation to Godrick's AJ? Perhaps nothing as crass or immediately interdependent as that. Has playing Elden Ring while existing in 2022 caused me to draw personal and societal parallels between my different lives? I'm tempted to say yes. I'm tempted to take apart Elden Ring's Elden Ring piece-by-piece and point at its golden roots and talk about the scarlet rot and the human ashes that drown the golden skyscrapers of Leyendell and all the ways in which this tale of souls and swords can be applied to someone who travels in the world of our present. But I'd be here even longer than I already am, hanging onto the dying embers of a rambling essay that has gone on too long. In a sense, choosing what aspect of Elden Ring to unpack and explore is exactly how the game makes you feel when you're contemplating which path to take at a crossroads in the Lands Between - whether to explore a cave, a castle, a peninsula, a continent, a realm, a galaxy, an age, a concept of the afterlife turned into a video game level. Naturally, you have to let go of possibility and walk down a single path in order to move forward.

This painful push and pull between potential possibility and your (perhaps pre-determined) path is what makes Elden Ring so compelling. Of course games like Breath of the Wild have already explored this concept of 'go-anywhere', but not in an artistic sense that exists beyond the controller and the things that are happening literally on the screen. In Breath of the Wild, going up a hill will get you into a fight with a bird and you will do a puzzle and you will get a cool sword and you will have a lot of fun - but experiences begin to entwine and overlap, memories becoming overwritten and jumbled in endless plains of rolling green and goblin. Memories require delineation if they are to be stored within containers of consciousness, and in Elden Ring, going up a hill can turn into a 20-hour odyssey through the ashes of time to explore an all-out conquest that was once fought over the very nature of Godhood, where you will meet and contemplate primordial, psychological and philosophical concepts in the form of a dude with a wolf head who reads Berserk. Or maybe you will explore the entirety of a lost kingdom on the edge of the afterlife's cosmos and wonder why it exists or even existed at all, all while the ghost of a forgotten world-serpent caves your skull in. And you will get a cool sword and you will have a lot of fun and those unique, memorable moments will bond with a greater space and time in your head.

Exploration of space beyond the time is a fundamental element of Elden Ring and the Elden Ring. From Software understand that space-time extends with video games, through video games, in video games - that old cliche of a gamer living a thousand lives. In much the same way that it can be confusing to refer to Elden Ring as both a video game product and a concept within the world of Elden Ring itself (it is amusing to note how difficult it is to get the wiki page for the Elden Ring on the Elden Ring Wiki), so too can it be confusing to separate memory and space-time as they exist within and outwith ourselves, our Golden Orders of subjective fact and fiction; moments and how we place ourselves inside them, the near-infinite subjectivity of experience that so often causes people to argue with each other over matters that are ultimately our inner order of perception and recollection. Was Radahn right? Was Malenia right? Sound off in the comments below.

For a long time, one of my most-visited YouTube videos was this performance of Dragon Quest V’s music by the NHK Symphony Orchestra. The music is a fantastic soundtrack to a comments section full of positive nostalgia in a foreign language. Google Translate doesn’t get the full meaning across, but you can feel all that’s being said despite the barriers between people on opposite sides of the internet's round table. This is the comment that always stands out to me when I scroll down:

“This was a game of my dad’s era, but it makes me nostalgic for that time all the same.”

I only beat Dragon Quest V in 2019, but I feel this same nostalgia, these same memories, this same realisation of a video game world as a portal through soul memory. I beat the iOS port of the DS port of the original Super Famicom version while sitting on the toilet at work, but my shared DQV reality with that kid, and his father before him, who played the game on different hardware in a different space in a different time, allows me to understand them. We saved the world and that adventure will stay with us all for a lifetime. Bur this feeling isn't anything unique - throw a dart at the board of YouTube's video game soundtracks and you'll find this phenomenon replicated for pretty much every video game ever made. Queen Rennala stands in a Grand Library and offers you endless rebirth.

The beauty of Elden Ring's length, scale and scope is that it's also capable of playing with this concept of chronotope from within. Whereas Dark Souls 3 relied on imagery and ideology from previous entries to invoke soul memory with (intentionally) cheap referentiality, Elden Ring instead chooses to loop over itself many times over in order to play new games with your mind. There are many ways in which the game achieves this, and if you've ever griped about "reused content", you probably know the kind of thing I mean - fortresses reappearing in different states of decay and ruin; enemies returning again and again as if pursuing you through the Lands Between; the souls of wolves and trees and tree-avatars haunt the earth; the same dungeons and dragons in different locations, sometimes appearing as battlefields of the present, sometimes appearing as sites of historical importance - Great War memorials on a school field trip. The game even deigns to reference the wider From Software cosmology (I am using every word in my vocabulary to avoid typing the term "Soulsborne"), but interestingly chooses to place a lot of these capricious callbacks in dank, dirty, decaying swamps - they are deemed to be hollow, undead references. In a sense, it's a game so vast that it's able to create nostalgia for itself.

For me, the most interesting way the game exemplifies soul memory is in its boss battles. In our realm, the bosses of Elden Ring are something of a contentious topic - out of some 150+ battles that put grand old names above life-bars, only five in the whole game are wholly unique. "How could the developers be so lazy as to do this?!" is the rallying cry of the passionate masses who are seemingly unwilling to afford From Software any artistic agency or intentionality of design. In a series/franchise/whateverthisis like the Souls games, isn't the whole point that you're prepared to die, over and over again, in the same battles, just like the demigods that you seek to surpass? You're in battle against spiritual and physical elements of the universe itself! The Fallingstar Beast appears twice in the game, but you didn't fight him twice, did you? I'm willing to wager you fought him five times, ten times, twenty times, maybe many times more. Why delineate by encounters in space when you can just as easily use time? Was each death and rebirth just "reused content", or was it an intentional part of an experience that the game's developers wanted you to live through? The game's named after a big old circle, for crying out loud!

This isn't an attempt by me to reframe the reuse of content as a purely artistic choice - of course it was done to gild the game's vast size and ensure every crevice of the world map had some experience of some form for the player, but practical compromises made within the constraints of development can be moulded, with appropriate care, into art. We can challenge From's tendency to rework frameworks, but aren't they trapped in their own never-ending cycle by capital, working to the drumbeat of 100 million sales? You may rankle when yet another boss pulls off the iconic Scarlet Aeonia (itself a reference/homage/repetition of a Magic the Gathering card ), but it's all in aid of your personal character development and the development of the game's characters and their relationships in the Lands Between. While I certainly wouldn't call any of my many, many, many battles with Malenia and her acolytes art in and of themselves, my memories of these multi-faceted repetitions tie back to an essential theme of the Souls series - overcoming the greatest boss of all: yourself.

It would be trite of me to spend a ton of time telling everyone about a universal human experience and how it applies to a series of video games that have sold enough copies to make them almost universal gamer experiences, so instead I'll just share a soul memory of Elden Ring that I think embodies this value of repetition and self-mastery. The Subterranean Shunning-Grounds (the names in this game rock lol) is essentially the final dungeon of the game, a terrible theme park of sewer content that long-time fans of these games will immediately recognise - pipes, poison, basilisks, curses, rats, little fucked up gargoyle dudes. It's essentially all the most annoying things about playing a Souls game in a single package, ramped up to 11 by twisted virtue of the fact this is the final area in a 100-hour game that stands at the end of a path of six other 100-hour games with similarly wicked ideas. 11 years after giving up on Dark Souls, I was once again a half-health freak up to his knees in rat shit. Indeed, it is a punishingly difficult experience to be a half-health freak up to his knees in rat shit - even with a high-defense build, certain enemies can take you out in a hit or two. And if they aren't capable of taking you out in a hit or two, they have almost certainly been carefully positioned next to a giant pit that can take you out in a single hit. It's an infuriating area, yet entirely optional. You don't have to do it to yourself, but at this point, it just feels right that you should pursue whatever nebulous reward that the Shunning-Grounds harbour. And what is the final test at the end of this dungeon? A dragon? An army of the undead? Another cosmic deity? No! It's a jumping puzzle in a tomb of skeletons and corpses piled to the ceiling - an incredibly tricky test of wits that combines your physical dexterity with an eye for problem-solving. It took me dozens of tries to master, and memories of the hallways leading from the bonfire to the puzzle chamber have now been seared into my mind. A video game challenge that made me scream out in pain for the first time in years... Fuck that bullshit!!! And at the end of it all, what is your reward for completing this task? No runes or swords or armor. Just a spell called Inescapable Frenzy, an incantation that sends the minds of humans towards madness. Let it never be said that From Software do not have a sense of humour! No wonder some players choose to enter into a covenant with Chaos a few moments later...

"try jumping" is a message you see a lot in Elden Ring. One of the oldest pranks in the Souls fan playbook, it's a nasty little trick that encourages the freshly chosen undead to leap from high places with promise of some unknowable reward. Inevitably, it always leads to one thing - a painful, costly death. Why do players take the time to encourage people they'll never meet to commit suicide, and why do so many people mark these messages as helpful to others? Probably for the same unknowable reason that people tell each other to kill themselves via other mediums of the internet. Ugly as "try jumping" may be, it has always fit comfortably with the artistic notions of Dark Souls as an analog for the neverending battle against depression and misery, the difficulty that comes with suppressing one's urge to die, to give up, to leave it all behind. One of Elden Ring's first concessions to new players is to finally explain this meta-mechanic - if you fall for the very first "try jumping" message that the game places before you, you end up in a tutorial area. Hopefully you won't make the same mistake twice now. From Software know that the Internet-at-large is one of the most lethal enemies their games have to offer, and I fought against that wicked foe by making a point of putting down some "no jumping ahead" messages while on my journey.

The online component of these games has always existed, but has never really been explicitly acknowledged within the game-world beyond a few experimental instances like The Ringed City's Spear of the Church. As the ostensible herald of a new age Elden Ring takes the first steps toward acknowledging ours, supplementing a mechanism with a metaphor. To avoid beating around the bush - I think the Roundtable Hold is the Internet. A realm inaccessible by horse nor foot, where the people of the world meet up to sell shit, trade stories, gossip and fuck around, all under an oath of no physical contact. Per Varre's comment, the Roundtable is "a place for has-beens trying to look important but unable or unwilling to actually take any action". Sound familiar? There is a place in Leyndell Royal Capital that looks exactly like the Roundtable Hold, but no one is there - the Hold is, in effect, a virtual, imagined space; a simulation in parallel existence to reality. It's a trick that From has pulled before, but characters and their occupation of parallel space-times with differing persona spells out that this is, in some classic weird-ass cosmic FromSoft way, a digiverse within a digiverse.

Ensha, Dung Eater and D are the most vivid exemplars of this idea. Three masked edge, lords who spend their time in the Roundtable acting aloof and cool and above it all; their corporeal forms lashing out with hatred against women in the meatspace of the Lands Between, giving away their Inner Order to pursue violence against Malenia, Fia and - in the Loathsome Dung Eater's case - every woman and child in the known universe. (See also: Gideon/Seluvis and their relationship to the class-conscious Nepheli Loux: Gideon as a gatekeeper who encourages you to overcome your Maidenless status and venerate yourself in the eyes of the Roundtable's men ("the road of champions"); Seluvis as a PUA who tries to involve you in a date-rape scheme.) In the case of D, the game implies the existence of a "twin brother" - an alternate persona - who behaves differently depending on the space-time he inhabits. We see him in reality, unreality and Nokron's post-reality afterlife, behaving more aggressively in each plane until he loses bravado when faced with with the bare-faced truth of inescapable Death itself. The player has the option of giving him back his mask and suit of armour, which ultimately leads to a violent death for "that bitch" Fia, a woman who recognises men possessing a warmth that has nowhere to go. In the case of the Dung Eater, whose mortal form is trapped within the aforementioned ur-Souls palace of the Shunning-Grounds, the connection to our ugly internet personalities is a little more explicit, a seeming admission by From Software of all the ugliness that arises from building one's personality around a nexus of digital souls and swords. If From are shackled on some level to this medium of expression, the least they have done here is develop some self-awareness and critique. At the game's climax, the Roundtable burns out, telling us more or less everything we need to know about the developer's feelings on the Web Between Worlds that we inhabit and the paths we choose to walk in each realm of spirit. Will this Roundtable fall to the mortal ashes of Leydendell too, or is there potential for All to achieve Magga, the enlightened transcendence of Buddhist teaching?

The natural follow-on from this topic is an exploration of the golden Grace, the "maidenless" concept and its real-world implications, but I feel the paragraph above demonstrates why it's unwise to provoke red phantoms in the hold through discussion of certain topics and experiences. Elden Ring is a game where not every path should be taken, and, as I already said like three times before (lol), the same holds true of a review; I'm not sure I have the experience or incantations necessary to step into that toxic swamp, lest I provoke an invasion. Instead, I choose to focus on the light that casts this darkness: Friendship. The golden light of the summon sign is the natural enemy of the blood-red invader, and Elden Ring makes this relationship more explicit than its predecessors by mandating that human invaders can only go after parties of two or more players - the eternal war between the "git gud" and the "git help" is now more aggressive than ever before. By changing the mechanics of the franchise's online component, From Software have peppered their latest instalment with challenges to the sensibilities of try-hard players that remind me most of Sakurai's implementation of the anti-competitive tripping mechanic in Super Smash Bros. Brawl. While I think the omnipotent anger and cultural overpowerment of the "git gud" crowd is perhaps overstated by the fans at large, it's an unfortunate signifier of their ever-presence that after seven of these games I still get second thoughts about asking for help when I need it.

The kindness of strangers is an enduring motif of Elden Ring, a natural tonic to the toxic anger that permeates every environment you journey across. Melina, the thematic emodiment of this kindness, turns your experience and soul memory into strength, a companion who appears to those at risk of stoking personal flames of frenzy as a guide who leads you towards the Erdtree and the Elden Ring. I don't think it's a coincidence that the game gets inordinately tougher to handle by yourself in the wake of her ultimate sacrifice; investments in endgame Rune Levels feel less substantial, less meaningful, than those conversions of experience made while travelling with Melina at RL100 and below. (The Ranni questline, with its literal idolation of a young girl as a peculiar doll the player can contemplate in silence by the fire, dovetails nicely with Melina's death and serves as an interesting pair of endgame decisions the player can take, further compounded by the Roundtable stuff discussed above) The final stretch of the game demands, almost explicitly, that the player look beyond themselves and extend a hand of need to those around them in much the same way one should following a deeply personal loss.

If you did not touch a summon sign or ring a spirit bell or read a fan-wiki after Leyendell, know that I know you are a liar and a punk and you will be judged far more harshly by my council than the guys who spent six hours outside Maliketh trying to bring in a sorcerer called Pigf#cker or whatever other desperate means they chose to undertake in order to realise their ambitions. Everyone needed help to finish Elden Ring; everyone needed help to stave off the Frenzied Flame that the Elden Ring's Golden Order was trying to stoke from within you on your personal path to enlightenment. Fought the Godskin Duo by yourself, did you bro? Well, the Godskin Apostle didn't. He brought in someone to help him. Are you really that stupid? The legend of Let Me Solo Her didn't develop from the tremendous feat of beating Malenia solo - was this noble pothead the first person to ever beat her by himself? Of course not. The legend developed as a veneration of kindness, a manifestation of will and memory and dreams of ambitions, a symbol of those Tarnished who offer their help to those who need it most: Let Me Solo Her is our idealised savior, a breakup bro for the maidenless, a hero who will help you fight your hardest battles and overcome your most painful soul memories. Stay isolated and lost in your past, or find your friends on the path and start living your life.

Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well.

Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really.

How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that.

How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty.

And yet it all seems limitless.

So what of soul memory, the idea I spent so long talking about at the start of this review? Well, that's another thing that's beautiful about Elden Ring - I'm not done playing it yet. Much in the same way I wasn't done playing Dark Souls after I'd put down the pad, Elden Ring has manifested itself in my everyday life and my relationships with the souls and space-time and coffee granules around me. It's difficult to write a conclusive conclusion for an Elden Ring review because it doesn't feel like the game is over yet. I fought the Elden Beast, I saw an ending, I saw the credits, but evidently I can't stop thinking about the game and the ideas and memories and experience it imbued me with. I'm walking on an invisible path in a consecrated snowfield of boundless white, trying to find my noble truth and inner order and greater will by constantly making sense of everything I've seen, heard and felt through, with and in my lives lived, tilting at windmills in the gardens of madness within this life and beyond. You are too. Let's face it together.

𓂀

The seventh soul is Sekhu. The remains.