Elden Ring
A game of souls and fire
Initially, everything wants to kill you, which is terrifying.
© BANDAI NAMCO ENTERTAINMENT
LET’S GET THE elephant in the room out of the way first. Elden Ring is a Souls game. FromSoftware’s string of action RPGs have a reputation for being brutally hard and unforgiving. From the original Demon’s Souls in 2009, via the main Dark Souls trilogy and Eldritch spinoff Bloodborne, players have thrown themselves against the twin terrors of a game world designed to make them suffer, and gigantic bosses with matching health bars built to hammer home the point. Sometimes literally.
However, Elden Ring sees the Souls game, previously a Metroidvanialike dungeon-crawl that offered little sympathy to the underpowered character (or even those who found the controller a bit awkward to use) take a new approach. There’s nothing as scandalous as an Easy mode, but the open-world setting does allow you to pick and choose who you fight and when, plus you can now run away more easily. Still, you move through this game in much the same way you did the others, pulling vague snippets of lore out of it as you give overpowered monsters a good thumping using nothing but your own skill and the tools you’ve been given.