Elden Ring

FromSoftware’s most ambitious game, incorporating the best of the Japanese studio’s previous projects. If you’re skeptical of the press evaluations shouting about “10 out of 10 at your fingertips”, you’re wrong. Even though perfect games don’t exist, Elden Ring has come as close to perfection as possible.

Elden Ring is assembled from elements of the Souls series, Bloodborne, and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, but every narrative element and every game mechanic is taken to a whole new level here. We kill bosses in intense battles to epic music and don’t wonder why we need to do it at all.

Before Elden Ring, only Sekiro set a clear goal for the player and introduced a hero to pursue it. However, in many ways the game differed from From Software’s previous works and was not to the liking of all its fans. Too much dynamics, only one fixed character, albeit with his multifunctional and interchangeable prosthetics. Elden Ring takes a different path, bringing back the Souls concept familiar to all fans, while maintaining the dynamics of the same Sekiro.

The whole game is an omens to the previous works of the Japanese studio. It has the same animations and sounds, familiar enemies and even characters, like the notorious Scrappy, who tries to get the main character into trouble by directing him towards the treasure, but without revealing the details of how it is guarded.

What sets Elden Ring apart from the same Souls or Bloodborne series, as noted above, is a clear understanding of its place in this world and the goals it sets for Faded, our hero. The universe created by George Martin is full of mysteries, which, like puzzle pieces, gradually add up as the storyline progresses and unfolds. At first it is not quite clear what the Ring is and why we have to stomp to the shining tree several thousand meters high, when there is such a wonderful swamp with a dragon splashing in it, but then everything falls into place.

You quickly figure out how the demigods got the Great Runes that perverted their bodies and souls, and why the right thing to do would be to destroy them rather than try to appeal to reason. Even the behavior of the numerous secondary characters that we meet along the way will be understandable without an in-depth study of numerous articles on Fextralife or reading dozens of pages of fan forums. They willingly share secrets, give clear instructions on what to do and where to go, and are not limited to spatial arguments about the eternal and the ancient gods, as it was in the same Bloodborne.

In Elden Ring the plot is driven by the player’s thirst for adventure, his desire to get under every rock, visit every location, explore every dungeon and destroy every tomb. And the game generously rewards your curiosity with new armor, spell scrolls, weapons and other treasures.