Recent reviews by lur

I expected something like a Blade Runner-esque cyberpunk noir story, probably from only looking at screenshots before playing. Turns out it's a much smaller and more personal story. Also more realistic in its general setting.

Definitely a weird game, quite open to interpretation. Good writing, good art, good music.

Excellent OutRun-like. Runs great on crappy hardware.

Brilliant simplicity.

Beautiful game, in several ways. Truly something special.

Looks great, sounds great. Evokes themes and atmospheres of Portal, Beyond Good & Evil, The Last Guardian and INFRA. A bit of old-school adventure game in there as well.

Runs well on a 1080 in Windows and in Linux under Proton.

Congratulations to BlueTwelve, Annapurna et. al. I hope we'll get at least one sequel!

Soulsborne PvE veteran here, CV at bottom.

In summary, Elden Ring is to Dark Souls 3 what Super Mario World is to the original Mario Bros. You get a huge increase in scale and scope, a fast-travelable world map, and even a new friend to ride around on. The end result is a fantastic must-play entry in the souls series / genre. Far larger than any previous FromSoft title and more choose-your-own-difficulty than ever before. Art direction is above and beyond. Horse is great. Exploration and combat in the open world and in dungeons is nearly perfect, but some of the big lategame bosses go a bit too far. There are performance issues for sure, but the performance is still much better than e.g that of Bloodborne on the non-pro PS4. Very playable to say the least.

Criticisms:
- Some lategame bosses go too far in difficulty for basic single player melee. Too much damage, too long and brutal mix-and-match combos, too many "weapon art" moves as opposed to simple swipes and slashes, and way too much AoE. Bosses also have fairly low HP. This high-damage-low-HP combo leads to very quick and frantic boss fights as opposed to the slower and more deliberate fights of the older games. It also seems to funnel a lot of players into summoning the mimic just to get some breathing room. It almost feels like some of these bosses are balanced for cooperative play, but at the same time the mimic reduces the difficulty to such an extent that this can't really be the case.
- Malenia is too difficult for a "base game" non-challenge-run boss. The fight took me over five hours to complete and reminded me a lot of fighting Gehrman in my BL4 Bloodborne playthrough. The blade dance move is arguably the closest FromSoft have ever come to sadistic kaizo-style difficulty. I seriously hope FromSoft does not move towards including this type of challenge content as part of the base game going forward. Having an easier version in NG and then including a harder version in NG+ or in something like the Sekiro gauntlets would be great.
- Elden Beast is just not a good fight. Looks cool, but not suited to the core mechanics. Too large, runs a million miles away, etc. Maybe if the player got a flying mech suit for the fight?
- Stakes of Marika are a good addition but creates a new type of serious annoyance when certain areas inexplicably don't use them (e.g Placidusax). Consistency would be great.
- Dragon combat is great, but needs more variety since it's repeated so much. Easy small changes could go a long way, e.g having some dragons really liking to stomp around a lot while others could prefer variations of the fire spitting moves (shorter bursts, spew to one side, etc).
- Some reused bosses could simply be dropped, the game is plenty long already.

Nitpicks:
- Multiplayer messages are 98% jokes now.
- I understand fast travel being blocked when the game considers the player to be in-combat, but please let me at least look at the map.
- Why can I still not consume rune items on the levelup screen? Still so tedious after all these years.
- So many weapons and items, would be great to have some kind of "favorites" system / tab.
- Why does the "Stonesword key was lost with use" message stay around forever and block many actions?

Horse nitpicks:
- The horse knockdown effect lasts far too long.
- Having the horse in full sprint insta-stop from taking a puny hit feels wrong.
- The horse "quick" turnaround animation locks you out of all other actions for like a full second, feels very clunky.

Souls CV: All FromSoft titles starting from DeS + all DLC, Nioh 1+2, Surge 1+2, Hellpoint. 3/4 Sekiro gauntlets, DkS1 SL1, BB BL4, Nioh 1 SL1

I think "all over the place" is a good way to summarize this game. Figuratively and literally.

+ Visuals, audio, technical performance
+ Unique and robust terrain traversal package delivery core mechanics
+ Cool collaborative pseudo-multiplayer aspects
+ Actor likenesses and performances (Reedus, Mikkelsen, Seydoux)

- Too long
- Convoluted narrative, overuse of symbolism and disorganized metaphors (Kojima trademarks?)
- Inconsistent tone, unnatural characters, constant breaking of the fourth wall (Kojima trademarks?)
- No story choices despite two huge opportunities at the end
- Truly awful expository dialogue
- Overuse of tutorials
- Controls feel sluggish in combat scenes (e.g weapon switching)
- Weird trike physics
- Confusing cluttered UIs

I wish the game had focused more on challenging traversal and less (much less) on the story / messages / themes.

7/10.

I like the parts where you fly, and also the parts where you land. Good game.

It's pretty good.

Short and darkly sweet light puzzle game, mixing different themes from works of Kafka to form its setting and story.

+ Visuals and environments.
+ Music and voice acting.
+ Atmosphere.
+ Platforming mechanics.
+ Solid linear experience with very little filler.

- Too expensive at full price.

Excellent getting over/under/into it.