Elden Ring - A Casual Game Review

Lord of the Elden Rings

Why is every game and franchise catching the open-world bug? I get the allure of exploring a stunning world populated with challenges, dungeons, and Divine Beasts, but do they ever actually end up being that good? Most of the time, I feel like I’ve been given the wrong order. “Excuse me, I wanted the deluxe meal with extra intrigue and a side of exploration, but instead I received an empty world filled with copy and paste missions, the same enemy but with different colours, and a list of collectibles as long as a Final Fantasy tutorial. Yes, I’ll hold.”

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed riding my horse down the old town road in Red Dead Redemption 2 as much as the next person, but after 30 hours of galloping to missions just to have a conversation while we ride, a quick shoot out, and then riding to the next mission, it gets a little boring. It seems that whenever the focus is on how expansive a world is, the story always suffers; it becomes a backdrop to the gameplay which is extremely noticeable when a franchise transitions into the open-world scene. Halo Infinite was meant to be ground-breaking, instead it is a lifeless map where everything happens through holograms or off-screen, but we got a grappling hook so we can’t be too upset.

In 2017, Nintendo figured out how to balance sandbox and story with Breath of the Wild: a game which opens in a small tutorial area and then says, boom, here is the entire map and you can go where you want. You want to fight Ganon, go ahead. You want to fuck about with the physics and fly across the map on a rock, we got you. You want a story, stop being lazy and go find it yourself ‘cause we ain’t giving it to you for free. Who needs Cooking Mama when you have Cooking with Koko? Nintendo set the standard for what an open-environment should look and feel like by populating Hyrule with enough random shit that no matter which way you go, there is something worthwhile to discover.

Five years and a billion boring open-world triple A titles later, FromSoftware say, “Guys, Dark Souls is going to be open-world.” What! Why? Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Sekiro; these are all games that gave me that sense of wonder, that feeling of discovery and exploration in a more linear fashion. I was free to explore and backtrack and find new shortcuts between areas, but I was also being guided. All the content I was looking at was carefully crafted because, although there were secret areas, I picked up every rock and hit every wall knowing that if there was something to discover, it would be worth it. I didn’t need a gigantic map to keep me excited when I had a coherent and refined universe, one with thought rather than one populated with low-resolution trees just to fill in the space.

Holy shit was I wrong. Elden Ring is everything it could be and much, much more. Unlike other IPs, FromSoftware were able to capture that same sense of difficulty, frustration, and euphoria from all their other titles without compromising any of it for their map. If anything, Elden Ring’s open-world adds a new layer of difficulty but also ease: instead of being forced to constantly run into the same boss room, telling myself that this will be the run (and knowing it won’t), I had to gauge whether or not I had stumbled into an area that was above my paygrade while having the ability to leave and come back later with some better equipment. I had to learn that lesson the hard way after five hours of ramming my head against a wall until it finally budged, only to realise I had skipped over a lot of the starting area.

But I eventually defeated Magrit – the first of many bullshit bosses – and all my fears melted away. I had felt this same sense of relief and elation in all the other Souls games, so however this open-world gimmick is going to pan out, at least that is still intact. Then I began to explore and was instantly converted.

As huge maps go, Elden Ring is GIGANTIC. At first, the map is about the size of single sheet of toilet roll, and then it opens to the size of a kitchen towel, eventually looking like an A2 poster. Instead of immediately boasting its size with a massive empty world map, it grows as you explore it, fuelling the drive to roam around as I slowly began to realise how little I had seen. And then director Hidetaka Miyazaki goes, “you think that’s it?” Bam, an entire underground section that is accessed from a random lift which leads to a secret area which leads to another secret area. And then there are two more underground areas which are accessed from portals in the middle of nowhere which also have more secret areas.

However, most open-world games suffer from the same symptom: they are too long. Generally speaking, these titles refuse to end as more and more unending plot is thrown at you, unlocking a new gun here and there as a weak excuse for ‘progress.’ Elden Ring, a fantasy rpg, has a solution. Imagine, a game that is approximately 100 hours long, but the moment you get bored you can completely change your character, moving around your stats to try out new weapons, spells, and armour. You get to keep exploring a world that keeps giving without having to start a new character because you have gotten tired of using the same sword for three weeks.

Elden Ring’s versatility is what makes this game an evolution from their previous ones. You can go where you want, tackle the game in mostly any order you want, and play it however you want; all while you ride around on a horse with a double jump, slaying dragons and solving Zelda-esque dungeons. I never imagined I would prefer an open-world alternative to its more linear counterparts, but Elden Ring is a masterpiece that does what FromSoftware do best: forcing me to rage quit just so I can return five minutes later to be killed by the same exact bullshit over, and over again. Except it is really fun.