elden ring is from software arriving to save aaa gaming from itself yet again. as they did in the seventh gen with Dark Souls (to a lesser extent Demon's Souls as well but that game never reached the same status, but it does a lot of the same stuff. the gamble of console exclusives i suppose...), from has ripped away the comforts and the pablum from gaming at its most mainstream. this time focused with laser intent on stripping as much comfort from the open world action role playing computer games in many of the same ways that dark souls did the more linear action roleplaying game two generations before it. this is only barely exaggeration and the "new fromsoft game" jitters speaking here, i sincerely believe this game saved games from themselves once again.

open world games are in general excrutiatingly boring chore simulators that don't do much to excite any part of the brain besides the part that finds filling out lists fun. office drone twitter bluecheck freaks make these sorts of games for each other now game design's rules and laws are so firmly etched into our brains. hands must be held, stories must do thing a to subvert expectation b to reveal it's actually about (reader's choice: mental health, liberal politics, """""trauma""""). this isn't to say all open world games are this way, but one needs only look at what was supposed to be spring 22's big show pony horizon forbidden west to get a decent grip on what these games are. total ubisoftification to sell guaranteed x amount of copies to please y shareholders and guarantee z biyearly sequels that are each a little bit worse than the last one. (remember when far cry was good!?)

fromsoft has very little interest in doing anything related to that. there is no checklist of things to do, you either stumble onto the sidequests naturally or consult with the vast droves of online help and collaborate with others to solve these things. i don't want to get into spoilers but i'm glad from has continued the tradition of having a "true ending" that tells the journey you're player is going on to fuck off brought about by doing the absolute most to see how putrid the world the player inhabits is.

and this world is putrid. much like boletaria, lordran, drangleic, yharnam and sengoku(?) era japan before it, the world the player is given almost carte blanche to fuck about in is one just about nose-deep into the process of dying. whatever military or political powers inhabited it have no real control, they all seem to have fought every conceivable war they could come up with and have reached comfortably blocked-off stasis. in this state, the only thing left for anybody to do is die and then come back and then die and then come back until their killer loses interest. this is, as we all know, incredibly fucking raw. elden ring's world, the lands between, doubles down as the atmosphere and dread by pulling every one of fromsoft's trick and doing something new with it or iterating on it in a meaningful way.

to (lightly) spoil an early game area, the player is tasked with entering into and then killing the deity that ruled a school that sought forbidden knowledge regarding undeath where its scholars were driven mad or used for cruel experimentation (i think, item descriptions and reading the general air of the area as war machines and and mad sorcerers dot the area only tell me so much). this isn't really anything new for fromsoft, but it all still feels really fresh. partially because it's just a fucking raw idea and partially because it's paced pretty briskly, so you're only given the killer that might've ended up as filler if it were as long as a dark souls or sekiro stage is. ending with a puzzle boss was a no-brainer, but then turning that boss into a real fight that's pretty challenging and fun hits all the right notes here. it's nothing new, but it doesn't need to be when it's this good.

these legacy dungeons are amazing, but for the most part they are used to break up the exploration for the first two acts of the game. the real meat is the near infinite amount of things to find in the game. some of it doesn't add up to much, i've found abandoned fortresses that seemed to be going somewhere only to be quick excursions clocking in at under an hour. but some of it is huge. there are few moments in games that i can think of that took me by complete surprise as the underground portion of the map. at first it just seems to be a themed dungeon, but slowly it becomes almost an entire second open world, complete with its own subareas and dungeons. games rarely feel this deep, like you can kick over the cardboard standee and find something real behind it and not just dead air. i'm going to predict this moment is pivotal to a new generation of developer's understanding of world and level design, much like so much of dark souls was for its own generation (can't believe it's been 10 years...)

combat. it's good. souls combat rocks. i wish it was faster, as always. i liked how post-dark souls 2 a big goal for fromsoft seemed to be how fast they could pace the combat and have the player keep up. bloodborne and sekiro especially are constantly riding the edge of what is possibly too fast for the player to respond to, and elden ring follows a similar path. it's much closer to dark souls iii than sekiro or bloodborne, which i think everyone was expecting but maybe not everyone wanted. thankfully the game is firing on all cylinders and starts the boss difficulty around the prior game's midpoint and ratchets it up from there pretty quickly. while nothing quite hits the dizzying heights as clashing swords with isshin or nimbly moving through orphan of kos' infantile rage, a lot of bosses are on a similar level in their own ways. the final optional boss, one the game has used in a great deal of promotional material, feels like if artorias was upgraded and tweaked without feeling as masturbatory as gael was when it attempted similar things in the das3 dlc

it's nice that skills soft cap a little differently in this one, it was fun to have a melee oriented character that could dabble a little in faith and int with the freed up skill points. not much to add here but it also makes me excited to see the pvp meta even if i didnt touch it in this one.

most of the new stuff feels as tertiary as players want it to be. i didn't touch spirit ashes until endgame but when i did i liked what i saw. the one that just gives you a clone is sick, even if it's completely fucking broken. but breaking souls games is its own fun, so no harm done. can just not use it, obviously.

its crazy that fromsoft was able to move in a direction that feels appealing to diehard souls guys while still honestly feeling the most approachable a souls game has ever been. this whole game is the work of geniuses firing on all cylinders pumping out shit to put most everything released in the mainstream to shame, and i think it's going to be a pivotal moment in the whole history of gaming much like dark souls was. it's a panacea for the doldrums this gen is offering up so far, and it shows that games by committee aren't as infallible and foolproof as they'd like to think themselves as. this is going to sell 30 million copies, the tone is set. the stagnation is gone, the hollowing undone, the humanity restored and the grace returned.