Will forever be a sucker for people doing the Toy Story thing but with video game characters, so this was, in the main, a massive treat of a treatise on shareholder sequels and time's flow that successfully emulates each of the genres it explores for just the right length of time.

The FGC-focused chapter is the obvious standout: playing a character's nerfing/buffing/banning in real-time while contending with both their inner monologue and a variety of opponents has a real pathos to it that I wasn't expecting from a game that opens with Sonic and Terra smoking cloves... Makes me wish someone would tell the MetaNarrative of Super Smash Bros. Brawl from MetaKnight's perspective or add a stage to Street Fighter 6 that pipes in live vitriol from the EventHubs comment section.

When the video game stops being about video game characters, though, things take a tediously sharp nosedive (at one point, the game offers you an early out - TAKE IT!!!). Mullins is certainly good at making video games, but at some point a hex convinced him he isn't - as a result. he has been compelled to pad every one of his games out with godawful game-about-game-making stuff that no one needs or wants - playing this after Inscryption makes the decision-making around that game's latter thirds all the more frustrating; if he already said all that here, why did he feel the need to do it again in 2021?

This is the third game of his that has an "I know how to use Scratch" section coupled with a grating "game-making is psychologically taxing!" commentary track. Dude, can you imagine if every restaurant meal ended with the chef forcing you into the kitchen to explain how hard it is to sautee beef? Has a tax accountant ever sent out a spreadsheet with a nihilistic essay on capital gains buried in cell D5? Fuck's sake, get a grip man! You're drawing pictures of a dragon's sweaty ballsack and connecting 𝚜𝚑𝚘𝚘𝚝_𝚐𝚞𝚗() boxes together for a living!! Self-aware or not, some of this editorial makes Van Gogh read like a stoic in comparison.

"When a man is just born, he is weak and flexible. When he dies, he is hard and insensitive. When a tree is growing, it’s tender and pliant. But when it’s dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are death’s companions. Pliancy and weakness are expressions of the freshness of being. Because what has hardened will never win." - Stalker

CHAPTER 1

In the late summer of that year I played a game in a house that looked across the road and the river to the nuclear base. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and grey by the cloud, and the water was gone, swiftly moving and away from the channels. Stalkers went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the branches of the dead trees. The trunks of the trees were rotting and the leaves fell early that year and I saw the stalkers marching along the road and the dust rising and leaving, stirred by the fallout's falling and the stalkers marching, and afterward the road bare and grey except for the bodies.

The Zone was poor for crops; there were few loaves of bread, and beyond the Zone the hills were brown and bare. There was fighting in the hills at night. I could see the flashes from the guns. In the dark it was like summer lightning - the nights were hot and there was the feeling of a storm coming.

Sometimes in the dark of the house, I heard the troops marching under the broken window and cars going past. There was much traffic at night, and many stalkers on the roads with boxes of ammunition, and helicopters carried men, and tanks with guns were rusted by rain.

To the northwest I could look across a valley and see a dead forest of trees, and behind it a laboratory on this side of the river. There was fighting for that lab too, but it was not successful, and in the night when the mutants came, the leaves all fell from the trees and the branches were bare and the trunks black with rain. The animals were thin and bare-branched too, and all the country wet and brown and dead with the apocalypse. There were mists over the river and clouds on the mountain and the stalkers splashed blood on the roads and they were muddy and wet in their suits; their rifles were wet and under their suits the ammunition bulged forward under the suits so that the stalkers, passing on the road, walked as though they were six months encumbered with child.

Usually there was a player in the seat with the stalker, and a small black cat often passed him going very fast. The cat made more noise than the mutants even, and when he attacked, things went very badly.

At the end of the game came the permanent rain, and with the rain came the end.

But the game was saved, and in the end only I died of it.

[Load last save]

Call me Tarnished. Some years ago — never mind how long precisely — having little or no money in my Steam wallet, and nothing particular to interest me at work, I thought I would muck about a little and visit a virtual world. It is a way I have of driving off the need to jerk off and regulate the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before tweets, and bringing up the rear of every movie I embark upon; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking their phones from their hands, I account it high time to get to my PC as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pill and pistol. With a philosophical flourish Sir Alonne throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the Xbox. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards video games as me.

There now is your insular Land of the Shadows, belted round by dungeons as isles by redflesh reefs — challenge surrounds us with her surf. Right and left, the paths take you towards battle. Its extreme downtown is battery, where that noble soul is washed by knights, and flamed by dragons, which a few hours previous were out of sight and mind. Look at the crowds that summon there.

Circumambulate the painted city of a dreamy sabbath afternoon. Go from Gravesite Plain to Belurat Gaol, and from thence, by Castle Ensis, northward. What do you see? — Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of immortal men fixed in digital reveries. Some leaning against the spikes; some seated upon the god-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from the Cerulean Coast; some high aloft in the mountains, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all players; of week's days pent up in lath and hand-tied to consoles, nailed to gaming chairs, clinched to standing desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone? What do they here?

But look! Here come more crowds, pacing straight for the fog door, and seemingly bound for death. Strange! Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the Lands Between; loitering under the shady lee of yonder Erdtree will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the end as they possibly can without failing. And there they stand — miles of them — leagues. Invaders all, they come from lanes and alleys, streets and avenues — north, east, south, and west. Yet here they all unite. Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of Miquella's Cross attract them thither?

Once more. Say you are in the country; in some high land between. Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries —stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as everyone knows, meditation and games are wedded forever.

But here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest, quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the franchise. What is the chief element he employs? There stands a tree, a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a cross were within; and here sleeps his meadow, and there sleep his sheep; and up from yonder keep goes a sleepy light. Deep into Abysall Woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to overlapping spurs of mountains bathed in their hell-side red. But though the picture lies thus tranced, and though this Erdtree shakes down its sighs like golden leaves upon this shepherd’s head, yet all were vain, unless the shepherd’s eye were fixed upon the magic stream before him. Go visit the Elder's Hovel in June, when for scores on scores of miles you wade knee-deep among poisonous damages - what is the one talisman wanting? Water — there is not a drop of water there! Were the Siofra River but a cataract of sand, would you travel your six feet below to see it? Why did the poor poet of Leyendell, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls of rune, deliberate whether to buy strength, which he sadly needed, or invest his time in a pedestrian trip to the hinterlands? Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to play this game? Why upon your first voyage as a player, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you were now out of sight of home? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper is the meaning of that story of Miquella, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the shadow, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans of darkness. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.

Now, when I say that I am in the habit of playing games whenever I begin to grow hazy about the eyes, and begin to be over-conscious of my hands, I do not mean to have it inferred that I ever play games as a gamer. For to go as a gamer you must needs have no brain; a brain is but a rag unless you have something in it. Besides, gamers get motion-sick — grow quarrelsome — don’t sleep of nights — do not enjoy themselves much, as a general thing;— no, I never go as a gamer; nor, though I am something of a salt, do I ever go as a streamer, or a journalist, or a writer. I abandon the glory and distinction of such offices to those who like them.

No, when I go to play, I go as a single player, right before the screen, plumb down into the big castle, aloft there to the royal capital. True, they rather order me about some, and make me jump from stone to stone, like a spirit steed in a fell meadow. And at first, this sort of thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one’s sense of honor, particularly if you come of an old established family in the realm, the Ninja Gaidens, or Super Meat Boys, or Dark Souls. And more than all, if just previous to putting your hand into the rot-pot, you have been lording it as an HR 999, making the tallest boys stand in awe of you. The transition is a keen one, I assure you, from a master to a player, and requires a strong decoction of rolling and guarding to enable you to grin and bear it. But even this wears off in time.

What of it, if some new hunk of video game orders me to get a broom and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount to, weighed, I mean, in the scales of the Golden Order? Do you think Queen Marika the Eternal thinks anything the less of me, because I promptly and respectfully obey that hunk in that particular instance? Who ain’t a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the games may order me about - however they may thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way — either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is, and so the universal thump is summoned round, and all hands should rub each other’s shoulder-blades, and be content.

Again, I always go to games as a player, because I make a point of paying them for my trouble, whereas games never pay gamers a single penny that I ever heard of. On the contrary, gamers themselves must pay. And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the God-Queen entailed upon us. But being paid,— what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man receives runes is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe it to be the root of all ills, and that on no account can a runed man enter the Ring. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!

Finally, I always go to games as a player, because of the wholesome exercise and pure joy of the venture. For as in this world, headwinds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim), so for the most part the gamer on the quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second hand from the players on the forecastle. He thinks he breathes it first; but not so. In much the same way do the commonalty lead gamers in many other things, at the same time that the gamers little suspect it. But wherefore it was that after having repeatedly smelt the game as a merchant player, I should now take it into my head to go on a soul-borne voyage; this the invisible moderator of the Golden Order, who has the constant surveillance of me, and secretly dogs me, and influences me in some unaccountable way — he can better answer than any one else. And, doubtless, my going on this voyage, formed part of the grand programme that the Two Fingers drew up a long time ago. It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances. I take it that this part of the bill must have run something like this:

“Witness the birth of a God. The coming of a Lord.
And follies better left forgotten.
In that forsaken place, blood must spill.

#ELDENRING Shadow of the Erdtree launches June 21, 2024.

Pre-order ELDEN RING Shadow of the Erdtree: https://bnent.eu/EldenRing-SOTE”

Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the Fingers, put me down for this shabby part of a voyage, when others were set down for magnificent parts in high fantasies, and short and easy parts in genteel JRPGs, and jolly parts in roguelikes — though I cannot tell why this was exactly; yet, now that I recall all the circumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment.

Chief among these motives was the overwhelming idea of the great game itself. Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all my curiosity. Then the wild and distant world where it rolled its continental bulk; the undeliverable, nameless perils of the game; these, with all the attending marvels of a thousand sights and sounds, helped to sway me to my grace. With other men, perhaps, such things would not have been inducements; but as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote and difficult. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts. Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social with it — would they let me — since it is but well to be on friendly terms with all tarnished of the land one journeys in.

By reason of these things, then, Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree was welcome; the great fog-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of the tree, and, midmost of them all, one grand phantom, like a jagged peak in the air.