Elden Ring

I have played about 3,000 games over twenty years, and I have watched three separate console generations decide that open worlds were the future. Most of what came out of that decision was the same map with a different skin: a grid of icons, a checklist of towers, and a world built to be cleared rather than explored. So I went into Elden Ring expecting FromSoftware to lose the thing that made its games work. The tension in a Dark Souls level comes from not being able to leave. Give a player somewhere else to go and you have handed them a pressure valve.

That is exactly what Elden Ring does, and it is the reason it works. Being able to walk away is not a concession here, it is the central mechanic. Every wall you cannot get past is a suggestion rather than a verdict. You go somewhere else, you come back stronger or you come back knowing something, and the wall falls over. The game is built on the assumption that you will do this, which is why it can afford to be harder at the top end than anything the studio has made.

This is the most forgiving game FromSoftware has produced, and it did not lower a single ceiling to get there.

I want to be precise about that, because the word forgiving does a lot of misleading work in games writing. Malenia is not forgiving. The late action RPG bosses are not forgiving. What is forgiving is the structure around them: you can meet any of it on your own schedule, at your own level, with a build you chose rather than a build the game assigned you at hour three. That is a different kind of generosity and it is worth more than a difficulty slider.

Who this is actually for

If you have bounced off a Souls game before, this is the one to try. Not because it is easier moment to moment, but because the specific thing that made you quit, being stuck with no way forward, has been designed out. I have handed this game to people who gave up on Bloodborne in the first hour and watched them put sixty hours into it.

If you have never played one at all, you should know what you are signing up for. The game explains almost nothing. There is no quest log worth the name, no map marker telling you where to go, and no difficulty setting. What it gives you instead is a horse, a very large map, and the assumption that you are an adult who can find your own entertainment. Some people find that liberating and some find it exhausting, and there is no shame in the second.

If you have played every FromSoftware game since Demon's Souls, you already know whether you want this. What I can tell you is that it is the best of them, and that the ceiling on build variety is higher than it has ever been.

The Lands Between is presented the way FromSoftware always presents a setting: obliquely, and mostly through objects. You are a Tarnished, the Elden Ring is shattered, and the demigods holding its shards are all ruined in their own specific ways. Nothing is explained to you directly. Almost everything is explained eventually, through item descriptions, environmental staging and a small number of characters who tell you the truth in fragments and then leave.

I have seen this described as bad storytelling and I think that is a category error. It is not a story told badly, it is a story told archaeologically. You are not following a plot, you are excavating one, and the game is confident enough to let you leave most of it buried. I finished my first run at ninety-six hours with a rough understanding of maybe sixty percent of what had happened, and that felt correct rather than frustrating.

What the Martin collaboration actually did

George R. R. Martin's involvement was the headline at announcement and it is the most misunderstood thing about the game. He did not write the script. What he wrote is the backstory, the generation before the one you are playing in, and the effect of that is structural rather than textual.

It gives the world a legible family tree of grievances. Every demigod you fight is somebody's child, sibling or betrayer, and once you understand two or three of those relationships the rest of the map starts to make sense. That is what stops the Lands Between feeling like a set of themed zones. It feels like somewhere that had a history and then had a catastrophe, and you arrived afterwards.

The characters worth caring about

Ranni gets most of the attention and deserves it, mostly because her questline is the one piece of the game that behaves like a conventional narrative: you meet people, you do things for them, consequences follow. But the writing I remember is smaller. Blaidd, and what happens to him. Millicent, and the way her questline quietly asks you a question about mercy that the game never answers. Boc, who wants one thing, and whose entire arc is about whether you will give it to him.

None of those are told to you. All of them are missable. That is the trade Elden Ring makes, and whether it is a good one depends entirely on whether you are the kind of player who talks to everybody twice.

Combat keeps the stamina-based fundamentals the studio has used since Demon's Souls, and if you have played any of them your hands already know what to do. Roll, punish, watch the stamina bar, learn the tell. What has changed is everything around that loop.

Ashes of War, and why they matter more than they look

This is the single most important system in the game and it is easy to miss. An Ash of War lets you rewrite a weapon's special attack and, crucially, its damage scaling. That second part is what changes the game.

In every previous FromSoftware game, choosing a weapon at hour five was a commitment. If you invested forty levels into strength and then found a katana you loved, you were forty levels into the wrong stat. That fear shaped how people played: they looked up a build before starting, they stuck to it, and they experienced one version of a game that had many.

Ashes of War remove that fear entirely. You can take almost any weapon and make it scale off whatever you have levelled. I finished my first run having changed my primary weapon four times, twice because I found something more interesting and twice because I wanted to see what a different moveset felt like against a boss that was giving me trouble. That is not something I have ever done in a Souls game.

The practical effect is that you get to play the build you find, rather than the build you researched.

Spirit Ashes are not cheating

Spirit Ashes summon an AI ally for the duration of a fight, and they are the largest difficulty lever in the game. They are also the subject of a tedious argument about whether using them is legitimate.

It is. They are a designed system with a resource cost, a dedicated stat to invest in, and upgrade materials scattered deliberately around the map. FromSoftware did not add them by accident. The Mimic Tear, which copies your own build, trivialises several fights, and if trivialising several fights is what gets you through to the parts of this game that are extraordinary, use it. I have never met anyone who enjoyed a game more for having suffered correctly.

Torrent changes the shape of encounters

The spectral horse turns traversal from an overhead into a pleasure, which matters on a map this size. But the thing I did not expect is how much it changes combat. Field bosses become chases. Dragons become something you fight while moving. Double-jumping up a cliff to escape a fight you are losing is a legitimate tactic, and knowing you can do that changes how willing you are to start fights you might not win.

The legacy dungeons are the best level design in the studio's history

Stormveil Castle is the argument for this game. It is a fully interconnected castle with a front gate you can assault and a side path you can sneak through, shortcuts that unlock in both directions, and a vertical structure you gradually come to hold in your head. It is Dark Souls' Undead Burg logic at four times the scale, and it lands.

Leyndell is better. Raya Lucaria is better than most of Dark Souls 3. There are six of these, and any one of them would be the best area in a lesser game.

The bit everyone complains about, and they are right

Between the legacy dungeons sit the catacombs, the mines and the hero graves. There are dozens of them, they reuse the same handful of layouts, and by the fortieth hour you can identify which template you are in from the first corridor.

I understand the design logic. They are pacing furniture: something to find so the space between the good things is not empty, and a reliable source of upgrade materials. But the honest version is that FromSoftware built six extraordinary dungeons and a large amount of filler, and the filler is what you spend a lot of your time in. It does not ruin the game. It is the clearest thing standing between it and a ten.

A focused run lands around sixty hours. Seeing most of the map, the optional legacy dungeons and the alternate endings pushes past a hundred and thirty. My first run was ninety-six hours and I missed at least two entire regions, which tells you something about how badly the phrase completion time fits this game.

What that number hides is how unevenly it is distributed. The first twenty hours in Limgrave are slow and exploratory. The middle fifty are the best stretch. The last twenty, once you are into the endgame regions, are a difficulty spike that some people never get through, and there is no shame in stopping at Leyndell and calling it finished.

Can you play it in short sessions

Not really, and this is worth knowing before you buy. It autosaves constantly, so quitting costs you almost nothing. But there is no pause button, because the game runs an online layer even when you are playing alone. Step away mid-fight and you come back dead.

Sites of grace are the real unit of play. Getting from one to the next runs fifteen to twenty five minutes, so that is your minimum sitting. If your gaming happens in twenty minute gaps between other obligations, this is a harder recommendation than its length suggests.

Co-op is not what you want it to be

You can summon another player for a boss or an area, and they are dismissed when the boss dies or when you do. You cannot roam the open world together without mods. If you were hoping to play through this with a friend the way you would a co-op game, that is not what this is.

Shadow of the Erdtree, released in June 2024, is a large paid expansion. You need to have beaten Starscourge Radahn and Mohg to get into it, which catches people out.

Standalone, no connection to Dark Souls or Bloodborne.

Nothing to play first. It shares design language with Dark Souls but tells a completely separate story with no shared characters or continuity.

It autosaves constantly, so quitting loses almost nothing. But there is no pause button, because the game runs an online layer even in single-player. Stepping away mid-fight means dying.

Sites of grace are the natural stopping point. Getting from one to the next is usually fifteen to twenty five minutes, which sets the real session length.

Elden Ring is the rare game where the scale and the craft both hold. Most large games are a small game stretched thin. This one is a dense game repeated many times over, and the repetition is the only real criticism I have of it.

What it does that I have not seen done this well before is make freedom into a difficulty setting. There is no slider, but there are a hundred ways to make a fight easier, and every one of them is a decision you made rather than a number you lowered. Go somewhere else. Level up. Change your Ash of War. Summon a spirit. Find the item that resists the thing killing you. All of those are the game working as designed, and all of them leave you feeling like you solved something.

After 3,000 games, the ones I remember are the ones that trusted me. This trusted me more than almost anything else has.

If you have bounced off this studio before, start here, and use every tool the game gives you. If you have never played anything like it, understand that you are buying a game that will not explain itself, and decide whether that sounds like freedom or like homework. If you have played all of them, you already bought it, and you already know it is the best one.

Where it lands for me: a 9.5, with the reused dungeons the only thing keeping the last half point. Worth full price, and worth checking the price history anyway, because it goes on sale more often than its reputation suggests.