I finished Elden Ring twice. And yet, I remain maidenless.

See that mountain? You probably shouldn’t climb it.

Tarnished journal entry #27: It’s 2 a.m. on a Sunday morning, and my eyes are redder than a Caelid sunset. I’ve ridden for days through the pea soup fog of the Consecrated Snowfields, giving runebears, wolfback archers and invisible black knife assassins a proper berth.

I’ve descended what must be miles down the trunk of this massive tree, one large enough to house all of creation within its bark. How could a tree grow to this size? It must be as old as the planet itself.

Tarnished journal entry #28: It is now 3 a.m. I should be surprised to find an entire castle at the base of this tree. I should be concerned to find its guardians, compelled by a force more fervent than piety or duty, standing in my way.
Is it love? As I round a corner, I spy a pair of demi-humans with their eyes skyward and their arms outstretched in reverence. Who are these creatures praying to? No matter; they’ll see them soon enough.

Tarnished journal entry #29: I found their god. Her name is Malenia, Blade of Miquella. And she has never known defeat.

She fought her half-brother to a draw that one time. But she didn’t say “And I have always known victory.” She said “And I have never known defeat.” Technically correct is the best kind of correct.

I’ve begun to suspect that I have what some might call an overactive imagination, or a fantasy prone personality. I do this thing where my mind fills in the future blanks of things I’m experiencing, whether they be video games, books, movies or TV. And every time, the thing I imagined is way more absurd than what actually unfolds. The worst part of all is that, more often than not, I prefer the dumb thing my brain concocted to reality. It’s frustrating to have your mind working to actively sabotage fiction as you enjoy it in real time.

What does having Great-Value-brand clairvoyance get you? Not much, beyond having your head shoved into a toilet every day at Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters.

Elden Ring is the first game in about a decade to quiet the annoying part of my brain that has gone rampant since the pandemic began. At first, I thought it was because I was too focused on not dying to worry about what was around the corner. But I’ve been doing the FromSoft two-step for nearly 13 years now; that couldn’t be it.

What’s an adventure without a rickety bridge?

Then it hit me, as abruptly as a wolf cyclone atop Stormhill: this game is daring me to guess what happens next.

Elden Ring is weird. Not even just raining-literal-wolves-from-the-sky weird, or honorable-jar-warrior-stuck-in-the-ground weird, or even two-headed-time-dragon-in-a-tornado weird. WILD things will occur throughout Elden Ring’s considerable playtime with alarming frequency.

Turtle Pope is weird, but the very best kind of weird.

And I should know. I beat it twice. The first time was as a Swordsman of Night and Flame, hurling comets at foes with my partner in crime, Black Knife Tiche. Tiche was one of the assassins who slew Godwyn the Golden, a literal demi-god and son of the two most-powerful beings who had ever inhabited the Lands Between. No one thought Godwyn could die—perhaps Godwyn himself, least of all.
I enjoyed all 122 of those hours, but it felt a little hollow. Many bosses died before I could see what they were made of.

Except Malenia, of course.
The second time, I chose the skeptic’s path. She didn’t believe in magic, summons or even the concept of help. No, she only believed in the claymore.

I tried to make a Claymore from the manga/anime of the same name. Instead, I ended up with ̶C̶o̶n̶a̶n̶ Cara Delevingne the Barbarian. This isn’t her blood.

These self-imposed limitations drastically increased my enjoyment of the game. I actually learned bosses’ movesets this time. I found dungeons I previously missed. I sought out questlines that I neglected. I still killed Patches.
Always kill Patches.

Elden Ring is full of surprises. But the biggest surprise was how deep my enjoyment remained even after I learned that golems have less health while its raining, or that stone imps freak out and attack one another when hit with crystal darts, or how to undo Morbin’ Time™ Mohg’s blood curse. Even when the veil of discovery and wonder has lifted, there’s still a pretty compelling video game underneath.

I began playing tabletop RPGs like D&D and Pathfinder the same year I played my first FromSoft game (2009), and yet I’ve never felt compelled to combine those experiences and take the roleplaying aspect of character creation seriously. But there is an indescribable mood to the Lands Between. Time has always existed here. Before there was an Elden Ring, before there was a towering Erdtree and before the Shattering, life existed here. If you’re diligent enough, you’ll find such evidence of lost civilizations that never knew the warmth of the Golden Order.

I’m underground, but… there’s a sky?

Life in this place will continue long after you’re gone, too. Something about the warm indifference of the Lands Between made me want to exert myself onto this world as much as possible. I wanted to prove that I existed here. That I mattered here, regardless of whether I took the mantle of elden lord.

Boletaria, Lordran and even Yharnam felt like forensic exercises by comparison, snow globes in which the snow has long since settled into place. You’re an archeologist, stumbling among the rubble. Civilization has ended. “Don’t mind me; I’m just passing through.”

But the various enemies of the Lands Between have their own lives to live. You’ll find some of them taking in a sunrise, grieving lost loved ones or even dancing like schoolchildren. There’s a voyeuristic quality to navigating Elden Ring’s many locales, and all the while, one thought resonated in my mind. “You don’t belong here, trespasser.”

Some boss encounters make it extremely clear that the thing you’re about to kill probably deserves to exist more than you do.

It is hardly the first FromSoft game to interrogate the role of the player character, but it is the most effective.

Elden Ring is one of the best games I’ve ever played. By my estimation, it is the fifth-best game I’ve ever played, and it didn’t take me three months to reach this conclusion. I just couldn’t pull myself from the game long enough to write this. Honestly, everything was great until I realized it’s June and I’m still playing Elden Ring.

I’m still here, writing to you from the Lands Between. They just mail you citizenship papers after 200 hours. Send help.

Or don’t. I have an idea for a third character.