I first started playing Elden Ring on the PS5. It was a baptism delivered by witnessing a reddit post before I started playing of a destroyed PlayStation 5 controller, and the classic souls "You Died" text on a screen in the background.
Thankfully, that wasn't my controller, but I can assure you in the twenty or more hours I spent with the game on the PS5, there may as well have been water damage to my controller due to the sheer amount of gamer sweat that Elden Ring could produce at any one time.
Around the same time, a content creator I enjoy started streaming Elden Ring, and I noticed that our character arcs were rather similar - so I decided to attempt to do somewhat the same, and decided to purchase the game on PC.
Eventually, I would give the PS5 copy to a friend as a birthday gift. I haven't heard from that friend since - so either its a really good gift, or something that he is still enjoying to this moment.
I streamed a bunch of a brand new playthrough on Twitch, trying to not repeat the hopeless mistakes I made on the PS5. Eventually, I got further and further into the game, into lands I had not yet discovered or explored, and I surely made more mistakes.
Firstly, Elden Ring is a gorgeous game to look at. It has stunning, imposing vistas, grotesque monsters, and elaborately detailed caverns, dungeons, castles, and structures that are overwhelmingly beautiful, while at the same time being overwhelmingly terrified, and being overwhelmingly designed with one soul-crushing purpose - to make you die as effectively as possible.
Elden Ring is a masterclass in game design and art direction, and what feels imbalanced, unfair, and harrowing ends up resolving itself with two simple words.
Git Guud
And you will, should you desire to spend hours and and hours of your life exploring the the arcane, martial, or other lethal arts into which can specialise. No matter what you elect your character to be, the game will find a vulnerability in your armour, and blissfully exploit it, leaving you to bawk at what you've attempted to do for the last however many hours that have melted away as you constantly become engrossed in the gameplay loop of murder, kill, die, retrace, collect, strengthen, murder kill, die, die.
The only frustrating part of Elden Ring is that it is frustrating. This is not due to the fact that the game is designed in a poor manner, or that its too hard - it is just hard to share the joys of the game with those who don't get that this is the sort of hardcore title that doesn't get praised widely by "normans" or "normies", because they don't get it.
What it does do, is give me a deeper appreciation for all the prior "Souls" games, and a definite urge to revisit the origins of this genre in a bid to truly understand gaming greatness.
This is one of the best games of 2022, and will probably win Game of the year, but there are so very many good contenders for that honour this year.
Across the PS5 and the PC, I struggled with Elden Ring for over sixty hours. I still haven't finished it, and I'm not sure I even want to. It's like a good book that you never want to have end.
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