[GAMEPLAY] In Elden Ring, players control a customizable player character on a journey to repair the Elden Ring and become the new Elden Lord. The game is presented through a third-person perspective, with players freely roaming its interactive open world. Gameplay elements include combat using several types of weapons and magic spells, horseback riding, and crafting.

[STORY] Elden Ring takes place in the Lands Between, a fictional landmass ruled over by several demigods. It was previously ruled over by the immortal Queen Marika, who acted as keeper of the Elden Ring, a powerful force that manifested as the physical concept of order. When Marika eventually shattered the Elden Ring and disappeared, her demigod children began warring over pieces of the Ring in an event called the Shattering. Each demigod possesses a shard of the Ring called a Great Rune, which corrupts them with power. In the game, the player character is a Tarnished, one of a group of exiles from the Lands Between who are summoned back after the Shattering. As one of the Tarnished, the player must traverse the realm to repair the Elden Ring and become the Elden Lord.

Most of the pictures I'm going through now were taken in the red-skied rotten hellish landscape of Caelid, northeast of the starting region of Limgrave in the Lands Between of the video game Elden Ring. This specific shot features two Minor Erdtrees and the Main Erdtree towering in the far right. Unfortunately the top left space of this screenshot feels a bit too empty but I wanted to include a large portion of the main Erdtree which required angling out of view of the landscape below. My character a female Confessor class who I play as a magic-melee hybrid is wearing Carrion Knight Armor. I find most of the helmets rather boring so I rarely wear any. Her sword is called something like Roger's Rapier (a type of French thrusting-sword, similar to the fencing swordstyle). The almost demonic region of Caelid reminds me of an old Renaissance painting of a biblical underworld.

Here's a better landscape screenshot of a portion of Caelid from point of view of the Divine Tower which you can infiltrate to kill a bunch of Radahn Knights and fight a creepy Godskin Apostle in the basement. The rot effect in Elden Ring is both awe-inspiring and gross, the way it riddles everything with fungal mold and the giant bloated carcasses that have been left mushroomed in its wake. Most of these large mountainous lumps are the remains of giant dragons but from one side of the tower one of the huge masses had the shape of what I swear looked like a colossal skull. I've yet to see any larger humanoids than Trolls or Stone Golems but if a troll isn't even considered a giant I can't imagine what counts as a giant in Elden Ring. While taking this screenshot, with my female Confessor class magic-melee build in the foreground, I couldn't help but laugh at the idea that I'd one day have to battle against a boss responsible for such apocalyptic ruin.

If there's anything in Elden Ring that is lacking, it's cut scenes. Not that there's an absolute lack of them because when the game does show players a cut scene it looks fantastic ... but I would've loved to see some battle clips of the demigod-war they call the Shattering. It would be just incredible to see the battle between Malenia and Radahn in Caelid, to see what the region looked like before those two crazy titans duked it out and made a hell out of a small space of earth.

While riding around Caelid on my magic goat-horse Torrent, the sky will occasionally grace the hellish earth with rain and the scarlet region looks for a moment less menacing. I was shooting arrows at enemies from atop a white fungal hill when I noticed a broken horn while looting bodies. First one broken horn, then another, and next came the realization that what I was earlier on top of was a dead dragon. For this shot, I maneuvered myself near the head and moved the camera higher so the shadows could emphasize the sight in front of me -- a dead wingless dragon. Maybe the wings are buried in the dirt but something tells me they were somehow torn off this great animal in the middle of whatever insane battle or several battles that took place there in Caelid. Fighting one dragon is tough enough, I can't imagine what the Shattering looked like -- a conflict that littered the landscape in dragon corpses and bigger beasts.

Something about Elden Ring, I'm not sure why but the game has a habit of giving you the opportunity to kill sad and tired things -- like this winged singing hag with gold jewelry and headdress. Why do these creatures sing? Are they sirens? Is it just part of their process of luring prey? If this particular creature has the appearance of an old woman, is there one with the appearance of a younger one? I'm once again annoyed that I forgot to re-fill my health and magic bar for this screenshot but I love how my Tarnished character looks here. Perhaps this hagged bat is singing to the Elden Gods for them to end her monstrous existence. My character crouches there in the tall grass, the Outer Gods response to this beast's wailing, me the answer to her song. I'll make a mental note to google different monsters' loot so I can spare the sad -- the saddest ones.

This little pond is one of the few places in Caelid you can find a type of big black tentacled monster called a Land Octopus. They come in two sizes, giant and baby. While they appear in other regions of the Lands Between, they fit the habitat of Caelid the most due to their tangled mutated appearance. Sometimes you can see a shimmering spot in the water where invisible magic beetles are hiding. I found none here. While swinging my camera around, looking for the faintest hint of sparkling light in the water's surface -- if not invisible magic beetles, maybe a firefly crafting ingredient could be spotted -- I thought for a brief moment how beautiful the landscape looked. And not in a dark gothic type of beauty but just a pond at sunset, near some trees and the ruins of a stone arch. Looking at this, who would guess there was a cemetery full of undead skeleton warriors just a few paces away?