Obnoxiously beautiful piece of maximalist insanity. Land of Shadow is already my favorite game world ever by virtue of aesthetic sensibilities and navigational passages so profound that I feel genuinely stupid trying to verbalize how emotional they make me. There isn't any combination of words that would do justice the experience of trekking from The Shadow Keep to The Abyss, you just have to experience it yourself.

I left Elden Ring satisfied; feeling like they didn’t have much more to say with this format. I leave Shadow of the Erdtree hungry and not giving a shit. Why be so precious about how long a studio is allowed to iterate on their design concepts for? If FromSoftware's recent surge in popularity is responsible for the overrepresentation of the annoying, elitest "git gud" crowd, it's also responsible for creating a wave of uncritical lambasting towards the studio who made 100 armored core games now making 100 of this type of game because they are clearly into it. Could have all gotten off this train at DS3, but no one did because these games are cool and getting freakier by the minute.