What a delight Elden Ring is! It's culmination of everything From has learned from it's previous 3rd person action/adventure games (Souls, Bloodborne, Sekiro) and it is a rousing success.

If you have never played any of those games, then let me explain what we are dealing with here. 3rd person, action adventure. Extremely deliberate combat, with difficult, but mostly fair enemies. A dodge roll with some invincibility frames. Freedom to spec your character as you like, brawn, speed, spellcasting, and more, are all available.

So what makes Elden Ring different from Froms previous games? A massive open world! Their previous games were all contained very large worlds, but were a series of interconnected areas, while Elden is a true open world, with an utterly massive map. There is an incredible amount to do, and almost all of it is challenging and rewarding.

Like Froms other games, Elden does not hit you over the head with its lore. It introduces the world, and gives you some information that you half understand, then you start the game and there are a few NPC's around after the initial cave... and you half understand what they tell you. If you are willing to put in the time and the effort though, you will see that there is a ton of story and depth and detail in the world. You may have to read item descriptions, you may have to look around and see visual clues in the environment, to get the full story, but it is there. I'm not sure everyone enjoys this, but for me, it is a huge positive. Too often, games cater to the lowest common denominator, and keep things very basic, or just give you huge exposition dumps and tell you absolutely everything, with no nuance. I would much rather a game respect me, and my intelligence, and let me do some of the work and feel the excitement of discovering things for myself.

From games are known for their difficulty, and Elden is no exception. It will punish you for rushing in blindly, mashing buttons, or not taking enemies, even basic ones, seriously. That being said, the game is also exceedingly fair, you have all the tools you need at your disposal, to beat anyone or anything. I feel From has made some changes to their formula that benefit new players and ease them in a little. The first one, is that fast travel is available right from the start. This eliminates the situations where you are stuck in some area with enemies that you have a very hard time with and can't get back to another save point/bonfire, as you can just warp there. It also helps if you are on deaths doorstep with a bunch of runes, as you can just warp, rather than running through some dangerous area and risking your runes. Another boon to new players is the map. Just like fast travel, the map may have been necessitated by the open world design, rather than benevolence, but it ends up giving the player a sense of where they are and what is around them, more than something like Dark Souls, where sometimes you can be completely overwhelmed and lost. Lastly, in certain areas, you can cast a summon spell, regardless of how you have spec'd your character, you don't have to be a mage or a caster, to help you. In the early game, especially if you are having trouble with a boss or sub boss, using the summon to take the heat off of yourself for a few seconds while you heal/recover stamina/etc is invaluable.

For such a large game, it's amazing how bespoke everything feels in Elden Ring. Lots of open world games have cookie cutter copied missions, and fall prey to stuff like having a mission in a new area, be the same as a previous mission, just more difficult. And usually it's false difficulty, like there are just more enemies, or they do more damage than before. The little dungeons you find scattered across the map in Elden Ring may share a texture set, every one feels like its own little place, with its own secrets, and its own boss. Even when Elden does repeat something, like the erdtree avatars at every minor erdtree, each one will have its own twist, forcing you to reevaluate how you are going to take it down.

Before the game was released, I wondered if the open world design of the game was going to negatively affect some of the super tight, fantastic level design seen in previous From games. My worries were unfounded, however, as there are large areas, such as castles, that you enter and then have that old "Souls" experience, progressing slowly, and learning, while you unlock shortcuts to make your next run easier. In fact, I found the open world design enhanced the "Souls" formula for me. If I was having a particularly hard time with the one or two areas that seemed to be what I should do next, I could always just ride around the vast landscape on my mount, and search for other, smaller, things to do, rather than just bang my head against the same part over and over. One of the things I dislike about open world games, is that I find the pacing suffers. I find that any sense of urgency is lost, In order to accommodate open world roaming. Elden Ring does not suffer from this issue. As From games always have you sort of roaming around, tackling tasks in any order you please, they know how to perfectly balance tension and freedom, and Elden is no exception.

Elden Ring is visually stunning. Gorgeous, varied landscapes, combined with creative, sometimes bizarre locations. Amazing detail in weapons and armor, both yours, and the enemies. There are some technical issues, there is stutter in certain places, and it has nothing to do with what hardware you are running, its the code. This is disappointing, but I am hopeful it will patched at some point. I would really like to see DLSS support added as well, even though besides from the stuttering, the game runs pretty well, even on seemingly modest systems.

I loved my time with Elden Ring. Despite some issues, the aforementioned stuttering, sometimes not knowing where to go next, getting frustrated about how long it takes to respawn when you die, and getting frustrated that you have to watch the splash screen and reconnect to the server before it lets you exit to Windows, I feel very comfortable giving this game a ten. It does what it sets out to do so, so well. It is massive, but never padded. I got my moneys worth two times over. Play this game.

10/10