Elden Ring
Once in a while, a game comes along that effortlessly combines near flawless gameplay, a wonder filled world, incredible tone-setting music, and Unique and stunning art direction. This year that game is from Software’s Elden Ring, this dark fantasy action RPG that channels the best aspects of the studio’s last decade of work into one enormous package. This insanely ambitious open world captivated my curiosity, it stumped me with its puzzles, secrets, and mysteries. The game has served up unbelievably satisfying moments as I experienced one of the most extraordinary adventures of all time. From my initial start into the world to the final moments, every step of the journey is a note in a personalized grand journey that kept me coming back for more. This trek through a dark and twisted fantasy is an endless exploration, continually serving up sensational sights that only get more enthralling and fantastic as the voyage goes on.
Story
-Elden Ring has a dark fantasy setting that takes place in the “Lands Between”.
-Features many characters and lore hinted at in past Dark Souls games.
-But it’s still primarily about combat, not talking to NPCs.
The Elden Ring world is full of discovery,
While a clear path forward exists is not always the most obvious, There are several online walkthroughs to help you plan your journey. Roaming the lands unfettered without a particular goal in mind often yields surprises, though more often than not those surprises will kill you if you’re not prepared. Elden Ring is not a theme park-style open world where each ride is bolstered by breadcrumbs, so they won’t be missed. There are significant areas, bosses, dungeons, and other huge revelations that can be passed by, making these finds even more delightful. Even after over 2 days of gameplay, I know that I’ve missed plenty cool sights. Instead of crying over what I haven’t found, yet, I’m inspired to keep exploring. The grandiose world is chock-full of characters, quests, and various dungeon crawls ranging from tiny catacombs to massive multilayered tombs. While the journey starts with little caves, mines, and other smaller dungeons, these experiences become more complex and insanely harder to clear. Two-room affairs eventually become intricate teleport puzzles or scenarios where you discover unusual ways to interact with the environment, like learning to use traps for traversal or sniffing out secret walls.
Veterans of Software games will find themselves at home in Elden Ring quickly.
The combat fundamentals are as strong as ever, while still meaning to be completely infuriating. You need to manage your stamina, picking your moment to strike or dodge. Blindly attacking will leave you tired and vulnerable in the path of enemies who hit hard, slicing your health bar to nothing in just a few strikes. You want to make sure you are ready and blocking their attack or not in the path of their weapon at all.
Leveling up works pretty much the same way as it did in Dark Souls, tasking you to battle your way from checkpoint to checkpoint and spend your hard-earned experience points to level up as you do. The only difference is that experience points are now called Runes, rather than Souls, and the checkpoints are now called sites of grace, instead of bonfires.
Your character is incredibly customizable,
Which I found highly rewarding. You can attach various skills and scaling mechanics across the board, allowing you to truly create your own vision of a traveling hero. Re specialization and alterations allow you to finely tweak your creation without worrying too much about experimentation along the way as you arm yourself with everything from explosive pots to potent perfumes to complement your ever-growing arsenal. Combat will vary greatly from player to player and build to build, but the precise dance of melee combat is more refined and diverse than ever.
You can now even bring summonable monsters to battles, Pokémon style, called Spirit ashes. Underneath all of Elden Ring’s lore and world design, there’s a simple joy to smashing enemies with a big sword underneath or cutting them to pieces with your Whips of doom.