A FAMILIAR RING
FromSoftware’s games, from Demon’s Souls to Dark Souls to Bloodborne , have always quietly been open worlds. Far off castles and swamps caught your eye, you trekked towards them, fell down a hole, probably died and went looking for a new destination. They didn’t need maps or icons, because their carefully crafted settings were dense with clues and lures leading to new paths and back to old locations.
Elden Ring, FromSoftware’s successor to the Souls series, spreads the mysteries and challenges of Dark Souls across an open world in a more conventional sense. There are castles to infiltrate from several angles, swamps to ride through on horseback, and gargantuan beasts to chase you down. The sheer amount of freedom is a first for the series, and it results in a game packed with what’s so beloved about it: Idiosyncratic characters and buckets of truly horrifying monsters.
is bursting with familiar iconography from the series. Not only is there a woman to level you up and a throne to usurp, there are many enemies that reference or even look and move exactly the same as ones that came before. It’s distracting, and illustrates how scattering the things I love across a new world doesn’t necessarily improve them.
