Elden Ring

A game of souls and fire

- IAN EVENDEN

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.

There's a beautiful example of this just as you crawl out of the tutorial area and into the game world proper. A knight in fabulous armor on a golden horse patrol up and down. You can see him past the site of grace (save point) and the NPC who mumbles something vague to greet you. Depending on which character class you've chosen, you may be naked with a pot on your head, or you may be in full samurai armor with a katana. It doesn't matter. That knight is going to beat you into the grass over and over again.