A mediocre title that only rarely steps out from under the shadow of its predecessor. There isn't nearly enough depth to the new content for it to carry this absolute behemoth of a game, and I was bored to the point of not wanting to continue by the time I'd reached the halfway mark.

I remember playing BoTW and being shocked that someone had finally figured out the open world formula that Ubisoft had been trying to crack for over a decade. ToTK never had that moment for me. The opening few hours of the game range from interesting to absolutely awful - The new building system is at first intriguing, but also fiddly and painful to work with. Shrines are still here and still exactly the same, just with new puzzles and now there are more of them. The chasms lead to an exciting new area that held my interest for a very long time - Until I realized the resources you got there were only really useful there, and that you can easily clear the entire game without even noticing that area exists.

The story also deserves special mention. I was at first interested in this game having more of a story focus. It was obvious from the previews that there were more cutscenes, and it looked like some events might actually be happening as you played the game, rather than all the story having already happened. This is not the case. Once again you run around collecting memories of things that have already happened to learn what the story of the game is, and once again the final boss is content to sit in the middle of the map doing absolutely nothing until you go to fight it. The English voice cast is almost universally terrible. Ganondorf gets some room to have a character (His VA is actually doing a voice!) while everyone else badly fakes a British accent and just kind of talks at you conversationally no matter how dramatic their current circumstances might be. Much of the game's voiced dialogue also doesn't read well - It doesn't read naturally and the voiceover is frequently stilted. I'm not sure if this is the result of poor translation or if it's just being exacerbated by poor voice direction, but it's bizarre to see in a AAA title from a major studio.

Regarding the new mechanics: BoTW had a largely intuitive and quick-to-use set of abilities. It was easy to snap between whatever you might need, use it quickly, and get back to the game. ToTK has a couple abilities like this, but the main focus of the game is on Ultrahand, the ability that lets you pick up pieces of objects and glue them together. This power is basically the defining feature of the game - It's the only major change to Link's moveset from BoTW, its use is required to solve most of the game's puzzles, and nearly every shrine will somehow use Ultrahand.

Ultrahand is not quick and snappy to use. On its own that might be fine, I can understand wanting to slow the pace of the game down a little to make people really consider what they're doing. In practice, with the frequency Ultrahand needs to be used, it's a pace-murdering pain. Often I had figured out a puzzle, knew exactly what I needed to do, and then had to spend several minutes painstakingly assembling the solution one piece at a time. I think if the Ultrahand falls flat for you, there's very little in this game that will salvage your experience.

Regarding performance, the game being stuck on the Switch does it no favors. It's often hard to make out what an object is, with small objects turning into a smear of colored pixels you kind of just have to identify based off vibes. Panning your camera in a circle in almost any location will cause framerate drops. The game absolutely collapses when you have more than four or five enemies on-screen at once. Memories this time require you to find a small pool of water in a large area, something that would be manageable in any modern game, but which is made a challenge in ToTK due to the game's pitiful draw distance making the pool impossible to distinguish from the terrain if it's more than ten feet away. If I see a video of this game posted it's almost immediately obvious whether it's running on an emulator or if it's footage from the Switch, just because the PC can hold a stable framerate.

Overall, I would not recommend ToTK. It has a few standout moments, and I'm sure it's going to continue to top sales charts for many months, but to me the formula is now completely stale. It's a derivative experience that doesn't do enough to stand out from its predecessor.

First things first, I am an EXTREME Breath of the Wild hater. There was not a single thing about that game I liked other than its music. Unfortunately for me, this style is apparently what Zelda will be going forward so I will curse botw to my dying day. I'm gonna miss the traditional zelda formula. So why did I even play this one? My friend got sent two copies so he gave me one which means I didn't end up spending my money on this game thankfully.

With that out of the way, I did actually have some positives coming away from Tears of the Kingdom. At the end of the day I did have more fun with this game over its predecessor though thats not a hard thing to do. It kept my attention for easily double if not triple my playtime with botw. Link with his hair grown out and down is hot and it almost made me consider not wearing headgear like a massive idiot. I corrected that real quick. Stats > Fashion, Set Bonuses > Aesthetic, keep the hylian hood up at all times. Fashion first folks have no rights and don't talk to me if you are one of them.

When Link cooks he also hums music from the previous games which I think was a very nice touch. I could only place a couple since some are pretty hard to hear and real short and what I think I heard might not be correct but I'm certain I heard Saria's Song, the Main Theme and The Ballad of the Wind Fish.

The map seemed to have more going on this time and I enjoyed that cuz going around the first game's map was so goddamn boring. Make no mistake this one is still boring to traverse as its always the worst part of any game with a big map but it took like 10 hours for that boredom to come in instead of 1. Being able to make vehicles to speed up traversal, even if its limited by your batteries and they will disappear after a certain amount of time depending on how you built them, is generally a good thing. The increased enemy variety also helped with that but you're still fighting the bokoblins and moblins 75% of the time.

I still hate the weapon durability on a fundamental level and its not inherently better in this game compared to botw. The weapons are still made of wet tissue paper, however the fusion system makes it a bit more bearable. One of the largest issues with botw's durability was that fighting lower tiered enemies with anything but early game weapons was a net loss. They'd break after a couple swings and you'd get a stick or club in return. Now those awful weapons that they drop can be fused with their own monster parts or ones from your inventory, other weapons on the ground or assorted items. Now you can get something comparable to an unfused mid tier weapons with that stick. Breaking something like a silver lynel weapon on a red bokoblin is still a net loss however and I found myself not fusing weapons to each other past the early game. Just using monster parts and other materials seemed better all around.

There were a couple, what this game would call, dungeons. Keeping with the trend that the water temple is the worst of the bunch. In my opinion they are a large step up from the divine beasts of old but are still not as interesting as actual full length dungeons as they are quite short and are just "open x amount of locks". When you boil it down older zelda dungeon were "get keys to open doors to find the boss key to open the boss door" but there was a lot more stuff you had to do in between those as opposed to here where its one central gimmick in a handful of rooms/floors. A real shame that shrines are just dungeon rooms plopped on the map cuz these could have used a couple.

I thought its performance wasn't bad most of the time but when I activated the ultrahand in areas like the wetlands I had some pretty bad drops. There was also times where the game froze when I dove into the depths cuz it was loading it in. Like Link was just motionless in the air while all the effects from diving were still going. This was on a launch switch that never leaves the superior docked mode. Most of you are just a bunch of overreacting pc gaming babies who bleach your eyes when a game drops to 59.99 frames to justify your overpriced machines.

Music is still great but its a Zelda game and thats a requirement.

This is where my positives about the game end.

I don't know how anyone can spend 100+ hours on this game without being bored to tears of the kingdom. Once I got to 50 hours I was hoping my remaining main story quests were the last of it and thankfully they were. Its the definition of repetitive trying desperately to distract you with other repetitive tasks that by comparison to what you were just doing for the 30th time that hour as you go across this map, make it seem like its an oasis in the desert. At the end of the day I guess thats my fault for doing as much side stuff I did. The difference between a game like totk vs other games I like who also suffer from large map disease is the other aspects of them have main, progression related aspects I enjoy wholeheartedly and look forward to interacting with unlike here.

I still think you have way too many abilities out of the gate. I like unlocking things, I like the progression that comes with that. Theres like 4 or 5 unlockables (half of which are just your tablet features) here depending on if you count an upgrade of a specific other ability as a whole new thing. Don't know if some of those are technically missable or not as I just stumbled upon them as side quests and the game kind of pushes you in the direction to follow one. The main progression once again is just your hearts, stamina and the enemy scaling.

Exploration is still just as unrewarding. Chests are mostly just arrows or shields and weapons that will break during your next fight that most of the time I just left in the chests or rupees though I found those to be very rare by comparison. Once again nothing makes me want to spend that time getting to the top of a cliff instead of just ignoring it on my way to my objective. They game could also use more weapon variety. You have the one handed moveset, the two handed move set, the spear moveset, the magic scepter versions of the 3 above types where the largest difference is you don't throw the weapon but shoot magic, and boomerangs where its the one handed weapon unless you throw it. Fusing doesn't change its moveset but it does increase durability and changes its look, reach, elemental attribute and damage depending on what you use.

I am not a creative person when it comes to what a video game's systems allow you to do, as they are themselves limited by the developers code and its not feasible to program for every conceivable thing a player could want to do. Being plopped in a map and being told to "do whatever you want" doesn't do it for me. I like structure, I like linearity. When I play stuff like Minecraft, my house is a basic large square or rectangle with maybe a second floor or basement if I'm feeling adventurous and I've never fucked with redstone. The building in this game was not something I enjoyed but only did it for its convenience or necessity to progress. I do not play Zelda to get my Garry's mod fix. I found it rather cumbersome to get things lined up the way I want since stuff moves only in 45 degree angles. My auto build was only full of contraptions to help with traversal since I hate how the horses control in this duology even at full bond. I made vehicles for land, water, air, the desert and some stuff to help with climbing like hot air balloons. I've seen the Metal Gears people build but I don't care about doing cool things for the sake of it and I can't be bothered to put in that time when my sword and bow are more than enough.

The shrine and Korok problems persist. The shrines lack variety despite the garry's mod gimmick and somehow I kept getting repeat gimmicks back to back at times. I'll ignore that a lot of them can be outright skipped with rocket shields as you can't use zonai items from your inventory so its your deliberate choice to go that route. However when you have some that just are a treasure chest rooms without being tied to quests to get them open then I think you could have cut some out. As for Kokoks, most of their minigames I remember from botw were here and some new ones but they are still just as repetitive. There was also this rather frequent one (mostly cuz they are visible in the overworld) that is made to get you interact with the building system where you gotta move this stupid lazy korok who got separated from his friend. More than half the time I could just grab him with the ultrahand and walk him there instead of wasting my resources building something to get over there. The sheer amount of both of them makes me never want to get them all.

I find the action of upgrading your batteries, which powers your builds that use zonai parts, to be super tedious and gave off the feeling of padding. The ore itself is easy to get and it respawns like everything else, its getting the condensed charges that takes time. If you want charges outright you either convert the ore at forges and then wait for them to restock either by just doing something else or leaving the depths, going to sleep to get past midnight in game and coming back or go around the depths and fight the bosses down there that like everything else respawn during a blood moon. These bosses drop like 20-30 condensed charges except for special cases that I won't spoil here but are a one time reward. It takes 100 charges per individual charge of a battery so you need 300 for a full one.

The depths mentioned above I hated. I hate everything about its existence. Its dark as all sin down there until you activate lightroots. Its like those shitty horror games that think "you can't see" or "your light source is limited" is scary when its just annoying. I'm just firing arrows fused with my hundreds of stockpiled brightbloom seeds almost every 5 seconds to light it up so I don't step in "the gloom" which reduces your maximum hearts until you either get to a lightroot, get to the surface or eat a meal made with sundelions. Most of the the enemies down here also inflict you with gloom on hit. There is a set or armor that can give you some bonus hearts to take the gloom hits but its also inherently tedious due to it taking place in the depths which requires you to collect hundreds of poe souls to get it all (which are found in clumps of varying amounts with their values being 1, 10 or 20 and yes respawn).

I didn't care for the story just like in botw and I just really don't like this iteration of Zelda as a character. Then again I am comparing her to one with such a great relationship with Link as Skyward Sword's, nevermind the fact she is the best iteration of Zelda, then botw/totk zelda has no chance. I don't care what a diary says, I WANT TO SEE IT HAPPENING not read about it. The story is mostly told through flashbacks again. Can we stop doing this? Whats wrong with having it be done the normal way? The almost all post dungeon cutscenes are like 80-90% the same between them with some dialogue being outright repeated. Solving puzzles, I guess you could call the geoglyphs that, for these breadcrumbing flashbacks also aren't a worthwhile reward nor do they fill the void of an engaging story.

I almost forgot to write about the sky islands cuz they are just nothing. They are Tiny, tiny, tiny, chunks of land in the sky outside of the one large one thats tutorial island. Maybe there will be a shrine there or an enemy or its just a prebuild contraption to get you to the other islands. If you're lucky you'll find a minigame or a literal gacha machine (capsules and all) for zonai parts for your machines. I think that for two of the dungeons the act of getting around the sky islands is supposed to be considered as part of the dungeon cuz of how small it is (yes one of those is the water temple). If you removed the sky islands or just had a few larger ones as opposed to the splattering approach I don't think you'd be missing out on anything. More isn't always best but thats something this industry has forgotten, among so many other things.

TLDR: If I gave botw a 3/10 then this is a 5/10. I enjoyed the game more than the first one but thats not a hard thing to do. Link with long hair is great and the music is as always, beautiful. Unfortunately most of my problems were not fixed and and those that were are nothing more than band aids on broken arms. I found its new systems such as building jank machines and doubling down on the whole "player freedom" angle to be uninteresting. The weapon durability will never not be ass even with the fusion mechanics. Theres still too many shrines and koroks with too many repeats of gimmicks and too many abilities given on tutorial island. The story being told mostly though sometimes repetitive flashbacks is a narrative killer and the story wasn't good at all. Exploration was still unrewarding. This is not even a contender for my goty and I don't see what the "masterpiece" claims stand on.

My (18F) SO (47M) won't stop shouting BRAVO NINTENDO every time he is able to climb something, AITA for accidentally calling his videogame "Tears of the Child"?

I feel like I'm going insane seeing people everywhere go "WOW ITS ACTUALLY SO GOOD ITS ACTUALLY BETTER" while never pointing out why, as if you're just supposed to accept that "you can do many things = good videogame"

This was never gonna hit very hard for me unless they changed the format from BotW significantly, and lord knows they didn't have the balls to nudge even a single system from that game. For the record I don't have even a single problem with the bricklayers, the carpenters or the painters of this house, I'd just like a word with the architect. What has been crafted within the format and beyond the systems is pretty nuts - plenty of great quests and open world storytelling, great environmental puzzles (outside of shrines - which are a mixed bag), and a much better presentation than before.

There's still very little point in interacting with much of the world, combat - being mostly centered on physics cheese - still feels like a round of TABS, Link still has to run around grinding for food like he's in an early access survival sim, clothes and temperature are still non-systems that basically just make you menu a whole lot more and your path still consists of 80% completely forgettable, mind numbing gliding/climbing from point A to point B.

This time however, you're much less interrupted by discovery and exploration, as you already know what's beyond the horizon, seeing as a large majority of the game takes places on more or less the same map. This was a dumb decision taken by an idiot. There are very little soyface moments to be had if you already played the previous game, and you're also supposed to believe that the new stuff they did add (both world and story) was just uh.. it was just hiding last time okay!! Stop thinking about it!!!

I actually really like the final act or so of the story, at least presentation wise, but the substance of the whole thing is extremely lacking and you can pretty much figure out the entire plot in broad strokes from seeing maybe 10% of it.

Temples are much better looking now and a little bit better gameplay wise - but shrines? Flip a coin man. Sometimes they're way better than anything in BotW and sometimes it's like "hurr duur here is a big stick and a lever with no big stick on it, wonder what to do man haha". Thanks Dora, I'll bring out the notebook see if we can't crack this conumdrum. A lot of the shrine puzzles are solved upon a single glance and then take significant time and fiddling to actually execute, which just feels like you're jerking off with the HL2 gravity gun for several minutes trying to make a plate balance on a stick, and fast solve + long execute = YAWN. In BotW some shrines had "alternative" solutions where you could solve the shrine in other ways than intended - I thought this was neat. In TotK, most shrines can be skipped entirely if you strap a single rocket to any of your backup shields. For a while I tested the limits of this by simply strapping every rocket I found to a shield and skipping around 4-6 shrines in a row by simply flying over the content after doing the solve in my head in 5 seconds and not wanting to bother with the execute. I don't think this is neat.

The Ascend ability in particular legitimately has like one puzzle you can make with it - you go up through roof. Is there a roof? If yes, use ability menu. It sometimes feels like it was made entirely so designers could spend less time making sure every cave had an exit. Rewind is not much better - it's impressive technologically but as an actual level design tool it's insanely one dimensional and when they try to make it not one dimensional by making shit that flips and turns so you can't "just" rewind it in the same angle, it becomes extremely finicky and feels like physics cheese again.

Closing rant:
Little Big Planet cars have zero place in Zelda and I'll never be convinced otherwise. I have been completely unimmersed since the second I saw rockets lying around for no reason. Oh and while I'm at it fuck your Purah pad bullshit ass in-universe Switch too. It's not cute Nintendo!!! It just looks fucking weird!!! No one else has one! Those fantasy creatures would freak the fuck out if they saw a handheld tablet!!! Fuck you!!!!!

Final score: Why is it so empty in the basement

I didn't like BOTW so I don't know why I thought this would be any different, grabbed by the hype once again! I just never learn!

Nothing about these games gives me that revolutionize of the open world genre buzz that they're praised for and honestly, it pisses me off that I don't get it. It makes me feel INSANE when I see the praise, but it's just not clicking.

The new building mechanics feel clunky to me, but I do see the vision. It's a toybox with more toys to fool around with. For me though, the thought of doing shrines again, especially with these mechanics, just makes me want to turn off.

For positives, I do enjoy the visuals. I think the art direction and presentation are gorgeous. It's got that Nintendo charm that always appeals to me, which further makes it sadder that it doesn't hit for me.

I've put in around 10 hours and I've had my fill. Overall, it's my own fault. I knew I wouldn't like it, but a mixture of FOMO and hope that something would grab me took hold. It has put me in that Zelda mood though, I'll probably replay one of the older ones soon.

This fucking game, man.

Here I sit in front of the dim glow of a computer monitor, inebriated, ready to spill my guts over a video game. I will just embrace the cringe and do as the Elden Ring meta dictates and smash that L2 Seppuku.

Playing through the Souls games was a sort-of gaming evolution for me - a transition away from Bioware and Bethesda RPG dominance into widening my perspective. I talked about that in my Dark Souls Remastered review, so if you're interested in more saccharine reflection, it's there. So when Elden Ring was announced and trailers debuted, I thought "holy shit. This is going to be my favorite game of all time."

It's this expectation that has killed me over and over again. I have thought so many times that I loved open world games. I probably put over a thousand hours each into Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim. I also love Souls, with over a thousand hours in Dark Souls 3, let alone the series, so it should be the marriage of both things into an epic triumph of everything that I want from a video game. Yet, I remember after finishing Elden Ring for the first time, where this intense excitement and longing had been burning, the shadow of disappointment set in instead. Then followed the guilt.

What a stupid thing to feel - guilt over not liking a video game as much as I expected, and yet it destroyed me all the same. So I parsed out my feelings into a review and then guarded them by joking Elden Ring was a "bad game," because you can't critique me if I'm just being funny! It, obviously, is not a bad game.

And then, I played Elden Ring for about 700 more hours, battling with other Tarnished, and helping others overcome Malenia and her incessant need to remind us of who she is.

Here's the deal: I still mostly feel and believe the same things I did about Elden Ring as I did in my first review, however what has left is the guilt and frustration over those opinions. I still dislike several of the end-game bosses. I still think after the first playthrough the world feels lonely and lacking. I still prefer the more closed structure in these types of games. I still feel like some of the balance is lazy. I still think the multi-player in this game is a big step back.

I don't really care anymore though. The art direction is incredible from the just horrific nightmare that is Caelid to staring down giant arrow-shooting golems in Limgrave in the face of a thunderstorm. The framing of events is spectacular, and I get to be the camera man. There is a ton of customization and build-crafting that can be done, a thousand different ways to overcome obstacles, and despite the irritation I have with some of the end-game bosses, I still look forward to running through the game and fighting everything, as I find something new each time. Sure, some of this transformation does stem from "mad because bad," but so much of it is a result of eschewing expectations.

I have managed to make some amazing memories in the Lands Between, and will continue to find more. I hereby change my disappointed 9/10 review to a 10/10. Please, cringe at me. I invite it - I know the Vow of the Indomitable.

This is one of the best games I have ever played, and while I know that it is universally considered a masterpiece my reasons for it being one of the best of all time is completely personal, and may not be completely understandable to someone else.
I bought this game a couple of days before one of the biggest losses in my life, and while I tried to live with the grief of losing a loved one this game accompanied me through it all. The loneliness of it all, the sounds and ambience, the almost lack of spoken dialogue, it felt like being thrown into an unknown world, and while I'm not the type of player to read every item description and piece together the lore in these games, the feeling of exploring this world, with all of its hidden dangers and story has got to be one of the best feelings I have ever experienced in any game.
I don't know how common it is for people to associate this game with grief and the experience of living it, but for me it's almost a perfect match. The loneliness of the world of Elden Ring, how your journey is (mostly) done completely alone, just you, Torrent and a mysterious world open to be explored and lived by those who want to.
The journey of Elden Ring feels like what grief feels to me, being thrust into this unknown, dangerous world, having no idea what anything means, or where to go, alone most of the time but in a sense accompanied by the many NPCs that are in the game. They never directly join you, but they are in a sense with you through your journey, just outside your field of view, they tell you vaguely where to go and what to do, but in the end you decide what to do and how to play and live this world, you make your own choices and you live with their consequences.
Elden Ring is without a doubt one of the best games of all time, but for me it will always have a special place in my heart, and it will always represent what living through grief feels, and I don't think anything I say can communicate effectively how I feel about this game.

"Cringey dialogue". "Unlikeable protagonist". "Woke trash". Jeez, the hatred spouting from keyboard warriors for this open-world adventure is, quite frankly, overblown to a ridiculous degree. To the point where it's now commonplace to follow the mass in their loathing without actually giving the game a chance. Could it be because the central protagonist is a strong and assertive female who speaks her mind? Knowing today's toxic environment, I wouldn't be surprised. Yes, Frey and Cuff talk to each other non-stop with limited variance in dialogue exchanges, but it's fairly easy to block out and is no where near as relentless as people would lead you to believe.

The game itself is actually very good, in my opinion. And the main reason for its greatness is Frey's fluid traversal. Gliding, sprinting, rushing and generally performing parkour to get from side of the map to the other. It's just damn fun and suits Luminous' engine (FFXV players will know...). Then an experimental element-based combat system (equipped with a temperamental lock-on system) adds more oomph to the...fray. The story itself is fairly grounded with a decent character arc for Frey, abandoned at birth with a huge resentment towards everyone (naturally...) and then magically transported to Athia where she learns to become altruistic for the fate of a civilisation. The lore is imaginative and welcomed compared to the usual open-world copy-and-pasted ventures...

...and speaking of 'Ubisoft' open-world design, that's Forspoken's weakest area. There's just no real incentive and want to explore every landmark and hidden treasures tucked away in Athia's expansive landscapes. You can literally complete the main campaign easily without having to visit a single side location, which defeats the point of the open-world. It's beautiful no doubt, it just needed to be implemented in a way that incentivises exploration. It's also "empty", but it doesn't present itself as an issue due to Frey's rapid-paced parkour. Fields populated with enemies can be blitzed through in seconds, in comparison to over favoured open-world bores like 'Assassin's Creed Valhalla'.

Basically, ignore the haters, give it a go with an open-mind and I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

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.

𓂀

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.

☸

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.