Elden Ring is a very entertaining videogame.

The movement and combat is the most polished of any Souls style game developed by From Software to date (besides Bloodborne perhaps), there's a bunch of cool abilities and spells which the game does a good job at encouraging you to try out and experiment with even when playing non-magic builds, riding around on a horse is fun and feels surprisingly intuitive to Souls style gameplay, and you can enjoy all of this is in a truly massive and often times beautiful open world with Hundreds of Hours of Content™. This is "junk food gaming" at its absolute finest.

Elden Ring could have also been so, so much better.

When I first saw the announcement trailer for Elden Ring and subsequently heard that it was going to be a Souls style game, but with an open world, I was hoping for, if not outright anticipating a truly special take on the formula, which blends the weird and wonderful aspects of Souls style level design with open world progression.

I was imagining vast, non-euclidian labyrinths, dense fog-filled forests which warp the player's sense of perspective and scale, giant Shadow of the Colossus style bosses which traverse the world, some as passive wanderers and others as active pursuers. A game where the world itself is another enemy to defeat and puzzle to solve, but can also lend a helping hand to more observant players through a wealth of environmental interactions.

All of this in a setting which takes unique inspiration from traditional depictions of fairy tales alongside a helping of Celtic and Norse folklore to distinguish itself from Dark Souls, like how Bloodborne used the unique inspiration of Lovecraftian fiction to effectively distinguish itself from Dark Souls whilst having similar game mechanics.

What we ended up with is a bunch of generic swamps and fields dotted with ubisoft-style enemy camps and the occasional scripted encounter against a dragon or yet another big guy in armour wielding a large weapon. The lore of Elden Ring, while interesting and presented just as well as any other modern From Soft game, doesn't really do anything to make itself distinctive from Dark Souls.

I like to believe that the version of Elden Ring that is actually an industry-shaking masterpiece is out there somewhere, if even just in the heads of certain developers and fans, but the Elden Ring we're playing is a literal world of missed potential. Now I understand I am probably sounding contrarian, maybe even melodramatic here, and I admit that I'm not exactly the biggest fan of open world game design even at the best of times so I may be biased, as such I'll take some time to elaborate on my issues with Elden Ring's gameplay and setting:

It's no exaggeration to say that the open world is the main draw of Elden Ring, as evidenced by the fact that most of the game's content is in the huge world that is The Lands Between, and various standard Souls mechanics have been changed slightly to account for open world progression. To give credit where its due, the world in Elden Ring is massive and beautiful, at the same time it is capable of showing a restraint that feels refreshing compared to many other AAA games, with its comfortably minimalist UI and lack of annoying checklist side quest markers. Unfortunately, this is where my praises of Elden Ring's open world end.

Elden Ring's world feels like less of an actual, breathing world and more like a painting. It's pretty for sure, but it's next to completely static and falls into the tedious open world loop of move to new place, clear enemy camps, maybe fight a boss or two, pick up loot, rinse and repeat.

I've seen plenty of people compare Elden Ring's open world to Breath of the Wild, or even saying that Elden Ring surpasses BotW, but I just never saw this at any moment in my 55 hour playthrough. For all of BotW's many flaws, BotW excelled at making you feel like a guest of Hyrule. The world was rich with many different environmental interactions and you needed to respect the game's environment to survive. More skilled/knowledgeable players could take advantage of the interactions to perform tricks that allow them to traverse the world faster and more efficiently.

In comparison, Elden Ring feels like something more akin to Far Cry 3, where you can't do a whole lot besides move around and kill enemies. Hell, even Genshin fucking Impact has considerably more environmental interaction and variety in its open world compared to Elden Ring, since at least that game has scripted elemental reactions and environmental puzzles to solve. The only things that could even constitute as environmental interaction I found in my playthrough of Elden Ring were that non-threatening storms could appear in certain areas at night and very few special enemy types and bosses would appear only at night. There's also a surprising amount of invisible walls that railroad progression and in the worst cases, punish players for jumping across a gap to what they would reasonably think is a secret area. For the so-called "greatest open world of all time", this feels pathetic.

Others on this website have already talked plenty about the reuse of discoveries/boss fights in Elden Ring, so I won't elaborate much on that here, but it really can't be understated how much this further makes Elden Ring feel static. The aforementioned restraint goes out of the window when you keep seeing the giant walking cathedrals and erdtree avatars in each new area you get to. This feels like the most "AAA" FromSoft title to date, and you can tell that a lot of magic and soul has been sacrificed to the great altar of Content.

While exploring the world of Elden Ring, it's inevitable that you will come across dungeons pretty regularly which serve as both a break and distinction from the open world. These come in two main varieties: optional underground dungeons, and what the community has come to call Legacy Dungeons (some of which are also optional).

To avoid dancing around the issue, the underground dungeons are bad. They take the form of either mines, caverns or crypts, and most of the dungeons in these three archetypes repeat the same ideas and enemy types constantly even in Limgrave - the game's first region. At the end you get a boss that typically represents the bottom tier of Elden Ring's many boss fights. There's not much else to say other than that these dungeons are trash and I stopped bothering with them after the first 10 or so hours of my playthrough. Some of them are so badly designed that I refuse to believe that they weren't procedurally generated in some way.

The Legacy Dungeons can be described as areas in the style of previous modern FromSoft titles scattered across the open world of Elden Ring. Each of these dungeons are an oasis in the proverbial desert of the static open world. Once I was in the middle of Stormveil Castle, I had already decided to myself that the legacy dungeons were my favourite areas in Elden Ring and this impression lasted all the way to the end of my first playthrough.

At the same time however, these Legacy Dungeons aren't anything amazing. While they are as well designed as Dark Souls 3's areas, they also suffer from the same issue as Dark Souls 3's areas that they feel iterative at this point. Exploring a large castle with cleverly-placed shortcuts that loop around in satisfying ways is still fun, but it also evokes feelings of "been there, done that". It also doesn't help that most of the Legacy Dungeons in Elden Ring are castles of some kind.

The only Legacy Dungeons that felt like something new were the locations in the underground section of the world (not to be confused with the aforementioned crappy underground dungeons), and it's a good thing that best girl Ranni's side quest has you exploring most of these areas.

This game has a ton of boss fights to find and overcome. I glanced on the wiki that including repeated battles, there are at least 120 (!!) boss fights in Elden Ring. This is a massive step up from previous FromSoft titles (and most other games in existence). Players who are just looking for a completionist challenge will have a field day here.

However, you can tell that quantity over quality was the focus with the boss design in Elden Ring, and in a general sense the bosses in Elden Ring feel like the strongest culmination yet of the misguided design priorities at FromSoft ever since Dark Souls 2.

Gone are the interesting, puzzling encounters of Demon's Souls and Dark Souls 1, all bosses must be homogenised into being flashy, fast, high execution skill tests, with an increasing presence of annoying tricks such as attack animations that are delayed to the point of being unintuitive and unfun to dodge that are only there to keep veterans from getting too complacent.

These games are action RPGs, so of course there's nothing wrong with boss fights including an element of testing mechanical skill, but the simple matter of fact is that while Souls style games are certainly challenging, the combat systems themselves lack depth. As such, there's not really any mechanical skills that can be tested in these fights outside of dodge roll timings and capitalising on punish windows. There are still some bosses that I greatly enjoyed in Elden Ring, such as Radahn (who is closest to what I was hoping boss fights in this game would be like), Rennala and the second phase of Maleketh, but the idea of going through over 120 fights that ultimately boil down to testing the same couple of skills is one that will inevitably become a tedious slog towards the end.

There are plenty of other, more nitpicky issues I have with Elden Ring that I could talk about, including but not limited to not being able to talk to NPCs while on horseback, the lock-on system still failing to focus on the enemy that's closest to you when there's many enemies charging at you from different distances, and FromSoft's previous title: Sekiro, actually having better QoL than Elden Ring in various ways, but this review is already long enough.

Elden Ring is a good timesink while it lasts, and part of me respects it for just how ambitious FromSoft were with the scope of this game, but at the same time, it misses the mark in so many ways and tries to hide these ways with the smoke and mirrors that are the size and beauty of its game world. Once you look past that, Elden Ring feels like an iterative game, which has a lot of good ideas but fails to fully commit to any of them out of a desire to be as "AAA" as possible.

I know my more critical take on Elden Ring probably feels contrarian as of the time of writing this review, but once the hype fully wears off a year or two from now, I'm confident that the community consensus regarding this game will be much closer to my outlook.

Once you've played one of these kinds of games you've played them all.

Of the "bullet heavens" or "surivorslikes" or whatever you want to call them I've played, Vampire Survivors and Magic Survival are the two that I look upon with utter contempt, while Boneraiser Minions, SNKRX, 20 Minutes Till Dawn, and this I actually enjoy a bit. They're mostly all the same game though, so I can't really give an actual recommendation here.

Play this. Or not. I don't know.

That's also barely even a potato. Looks more like an egg to me.

Whatever.

Edmund McMillen-lookin' ass.

Newgrounds.com.

I picked up Brotato during the Winter Steam Sale because A. it was cheap, B. it was nominated for best Steam Deck game, where I play 90% of my games now anyways, and C. I really enjoyed HoloCure in the past, which is also similar to Brotato. So, it was a match made in heaven, right?


Eh. It's fine. I like a lot of what it does, but the gameplay fell flat for me personally. As I alluded to in the intro, Brotato is an arena roguelike where you star as a “potato” (did they even try here? it looks like an egg) and you walk around killing things. Brotato is very easy to pick up and understand, but has shockingly deep gameplay. You collect materials on the map which you level up with, and it doubles as a currency for items. Leveling up gives a simple stat up, and occasionally on the map you can find crates, which contain items. Brotato is one of the few roguelites that I've seen that fully embrace character builds, rather than just rolling with what the game gives you. First off, the locking system is absolutely genius. It prevents items from being rerolled,which is good enough on it's own, but it has the additional benefit of keeping the item into the next wave. This means that if you're short on cash, you can just reroll and lock in the item you want, then buy it in the next wave, a solid, fun system overall. You can also merge guns and weapons, making them do more damage overall. The overall character building is pretty fun but the rest of the game unfortunately didn't follow suit. Brotato is just way too easy for my liking. It just feels mindless and repetitive to me, and unfortunately I don't really enjoy the game. The auto-aim feels somewhat unnecessary here; it makes the game too trivial. I also almost never died here. Only past Wave 10 did things get actually challenging, and out of the couple runs I did, I won about 75% of them. The win rate I was getting was just too high, and overall the game feels like busywork to me. Brotato kind of disappointed me; the game is highly rated but to me it was just kinda okay. Not terrible, not great, just there. I can't see myself coming back to this one much, and that makes me sad, because it has great ideas. But it's just not that intresting to me overall.

Its got great pacing, art, and music, but the combat is really shallow with little moment to moment choice, the fixed encounters make exploration a huge chore, and the story and characters are a little too stock to find personality in. It's got heart in a lot of places, but like the most polished, studio-made work, despite being so handcrafted, it's kind of a vapid blockbuster. Not trite, but vapid. You could say it was too many cooks. Too many hands building towards a really general, mass appeal vision.

I often hear this game lauded as the best of both worlds with regards to the creators of Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy coming together, but it would honestly feel like the weakest entry in either series if put side by side to them. I don't like this frame of looking at it.

Dragon quest games use simple plotlines to convey often extremely subtle and sometimes very complex themes. They feel timeless because of that. The combat systems are made from really simply conveyed choices that feel really weighty; even simple attacks feel intentional, and have the ability to perform unexpectedly to lots of random factors like enemy stat variations, class stats, and flat fractional critical rates. Its combat is like a wizardry 2.0. The best dragon quests have a random encounter rate just low enough to make the player think they can get away with peering just around the corner, while dreading every step in case they run into something truly devastating. Every treasure nets a huge boon, but each one may be your last, with penalties for death being very real. Exploration is the method, and adventure is the dream. To reiterate, complex themes, simple plots, simplified combat terms, devestating and exciting blows with real choice that furthers the desire for more exploration and adventure.

Final fantasy has often really complex plots that have simple themes guiding them. They feel personal and grandiose at the same time. The characters are often commentaries on the tropes they wear on their sleeves, with a lot of hidden depth and backstories to chew at for miles. Exploration is there, but it's in favor of highly scripted and exciting setpieces. Like those setpieces, the combat favors theatricality and performance that heightens the player-character relationship, and the product of that relationship guides the player to navigate the often complex character-building systems of those games. The combat then has complex terms and systems although streamlined for a mass audience to operate on a base level, and play the entire game that way if they so choose. Rather than having a combat around survival and risk/reward, between loot/exploration/death, final fantasy combat is about giving the player a language to understand the world and personality of its inhabitants. It is communication serving the themes of the story (DQ does this too, but in very different ways). To reiterate, complex systems made feasible guided by complex characters, in a complex plot guided by simple themes.

Chrono trigger has simple characters, a pretty simple plot, simple themes, and a simple combat system.

You don't have much say over how you build the characters, the combat doesn't serve as a language, its a bit too easy with penalties too light to serve a vehicle for adventure, not to mention most battles playing out the same way, with a generally unchanging player psychology (tactics are simple, rules generally stay the same, even the introduction of magic mostly keeps characters fighting the same way as before). It's just kinda alright. I play it when I want a simple linear game. (But tbh even ff4 is kinda better at that)

In recent memory this is the most positive I've felt overall about a game where I strongly dislike the core gameplay. The stealth and combat are incredibly basic and feel forced in, and I'm sure they were used as selling points for the game back when it came out.

This could be the poster child for bad stealth segments. Basic enemy patrol patterns, vision cones that feel very inconsistent in when they catch you, very basic and boring stealth gadgets, and the game's already poor camera controls become so much worse in stealth sections for whatever reason. The worst are rooms that feel like you have to stealth kill your way through but there's basically no way to kill without alerting everyone, setting off the alarm, hiding, and waiting for the rest of the enemies to give up on searching for you 5 seconds later and reset. The stealth really doesn't make up that much of the game, fortunately, but as a big selling point for the game or a genre it tries to be defined by it fails miserably.

The on-foot combat is used even less, and it's less annoying because you can mostly just mash through it, but it's very shallow. This isn't helped by health and healing consumables being meaningless and just resetting at the start of a room whenever you die. It might be annoying if that wasn't the case and the rest stayed the same, but it's still pretty weak. The ship combat and boss fights are a bit better, but still nothing to write home about.

Before I get to more positive things to say, I want to note that the level design is really lacking here. They're clearly trying to mimic Zelda dungeons (among other inspirations from that series), but the level design felt notably bad at many points. I'd like to think I notice when level design excels more than most, but I rarely complain about it when it meets the baseline for good of feeling "invisible". That feeling was broken a lot here, with backtracking through empty zones with nothing to do where other games would loop around to the start, and very poor signposting of where to go with splitting paths where there's really nothing to do in all but one direction most of the time. The levels are also inscrutable to get around during some of those backtracking segments, there's a map that's usually available pretty early on in each "dungeon" and your main path through is pretty linear, but something about them just feels difficult and maze-like to navigate. I'd find myself checking the map far too often, and still being kind of confused on where to go.

All of the above complains largely just apply to the game's dungeons, and despite all of that I sort of wish there were more of them, because the game feels over a little too soon. There's only four main dungeons, with one of them being essentially a tutorial, although the last one is pretty great to end on. Almost everything around those is really cool, and even if there's some other small problems as well the game is overflowing with charm and original designs that make the world feel alive. I'm positive that kid-me would have fallen in love with this game if I'd played it back then, because it does such an excellent job of making the world feel bigger and more alive than it actually is. The characters feel cool and interesting even if their writing is pretty flat, the areas feel like a huge open world with a lot of possibilities even if it doesn't actually take that much time to explore everything, and the side content is impressively varied and fun.

The minigames were more fun to me than the core gameplay, many of them revolving around your hovercraft. There's races that are surprisingly fun, as well as chase sequences. In addition to a couple of other games you can play with side characters, and some secret mini-dungeons in the city, it's really not that impressive of a list writing it out but it feels fun and varied, and a nice break from the core content of the game. Exploring to find this side content is a lot of what makes it enjoyable. Even if both the on-foot section of the main city and the overworld are fairly small, they tie into that feeling I talked about of a big and living world, and they open up over the course of the game in a fun way. I also quite enjoyed the camera aspect of the game, which I don't really know where I should mention. Recognizing if you'd seen a creature before, and finding a good angle to snap a pic of it stayed fun throughout the game. It also ties into the missions pretty well at points where you have to sneak around guards to take pictures of what the baddies are up to, which I wish there was a bit more of compared to the traditional stealth.

The story really isn't anything special, but I cared enough to see it through just on the basis of how cool the characters and world are (with the exception of Double H, fuck that guy). Seeing the citizens not-so-slowly join your cause was a really neat idea, even if the pacing of it is a bit abrupt. The ending was a little out of nowhere but was executed fairly well overall, it was definitely setting up for a sequel we all know at this point is never coming unfortunately. I also still have no idea what the title is supposed to be talking about, there's really no moral ambiguity to be found here.

Despite a lot of shortcomings and rough edges in the individual parts, I think Beyond Good & Evil really succeeded overall at what it set out to do. It failed at a lot of the smaller gameplay things that Zelda games do well, but it succeeded in making a compelling world that players want to explore, similar to those games but also completely in its own way. This should have led to a full series of games that could further explore the parts of this that work well and polish up the rest, but sadly we don't live in that world.