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--- Of all the untold riches that lie within the
staggeringly huge world of Elden Ring—the treasure chest tucked away in the unlikeliest
of places, the NPC with a labyrinthine quest standing in some gazebo in the middle of nowhere
for some reason—the discovery that has really excited me over my forty hours of playtime
are these seemingly daft wee telescopes dotted around each major area of the Lands Between.
Originally writing them off as offering little in the way of actual mechanical benefit, indeed,
they’ve become as much a marker of my progress through the world as the lost grace checkpoints
I’ve been activating along the way—reflecting a playstyle that has focused less on Elden
Ring’s near-perfect action than I thought would be the case when I started, in favour
of a mindset where, moreso than any Souls game before it, exploration of the world is
both the tactical, satisfying challenge and reward in and of itself.
See, after being trapped by a random treasure chest ridiculously early in the game and emerging
in basically hell—a completely different, altogether more sinister skyline appropriately
signalling the threat that lay before me, wondering what I was actually meant to do
but somehow making it out alive—that delightful push-and-pull of being somewhere I shouldn’t
be and realising I could survive it (at least long enough to cowardly escape to relative
safety), sparked in me a need to see how far I could venture into Elden Ring’s hostile
world, regardless of how ready I was to actually be in those areas; to trek through the fog
of war to get a map marker; analyse the topography to get a sense of the path I’d need to take
to get to the next area and just ride into the distance on my trusty steed Torrent.
And it's important to understand that one of my favourite parts of most of the Soulsborne
games is that knowledge that the world is so naturally interconnected that at multiple
points you’re able to gaze into the distance from some newly gained vantage point and think
“I started way over there and now I’m here; that’s what I fought through to get
here.”
A true visual indicator of what felt like a major accomplishment.
But those telescopes in Elden Ring, completely unassuming in their placement within the world,
take that feeling and amplify it to a degree that’s kind of hard to comprehend.
No longer are you merely thinking “wow, I was at the top of that rickety pile of wood
and now I’m at the bottom;” you instead think “I previously conquered that massive
fortress over there that felt like it would constitute an entire level in Demon’s Souls,
travelled miles and miles since, and seen all this utterly majestic stuff just dotted
along the way that makes that previous fortress feel tiny and bland by comparison; and what’s
more, I still have all of this ahead of me—somehow this already terrifyingly huge landmass just
keeps expanding!
The actual border of the map just keeps growing!
Where will it end!
I have to know!”
I’d ridden past large-scale battles involving multiple unique factions, with minion level
enemies fending off towering giants; I’ve constantly fought off and run away from untold
monstrosities that honestly wouldn’t feel out of place in Bloodborne, and that would
surely annihilate me in one hit were I to slow down and figure out what they actually
were; I can ride and ride and ride and not come close to hitting an actual border of
the game world, itself enticing me to carry on with my journey—“just one more lost
grace,” I’d find myself saying.
I’ve ridden through valleys so cavernous that the jump scares you’d previously find
in cramped dungeons—where you’d see a message saying, “be wary of left” and
a daft wee monster would pop up to have a go—are now the realm of huge, armoured beasts
just waiting around the corner of some giant vertical rockface.
On every level Elden Ring represents a shift in the kind of scale, of grandeur that we’ve
come to expect from these games, and just witnessing it all happening around you takes
that familiar Soulsborne sensation—that you’re merely a speck in this world that
cares little about your presence, that the beauty you’re experiencing is always mere
steps away from violently turning on you—and cranks it up to 11.
You can perhaps see this most acutely in the game’s central pillar; your destination,
the Erdtree.
Again, in prior Souls games it can sometimes be difficult to really know what it is you’re
fighting towards, what your ultimate objective might be.
But here, you have a landmark that is so imposing, its golden light so searing the entire landscape,
that it’s easy to see why the people of this world seem to so fervently worship it
despite the rest of the environment being so riddled with decay; the Erdtree’s glow
is downright cleansing, rendering said decay as almost fairy-tale-esque at points.
You can’t help but be enticed by this thing—the growing extent to which it fills up your screen
again a keen reminder of how far you’ve progressed—despite knowing full well that,
in typical Souls fashion, it isn’t going to be some happy ending when you get there.
It’s just that there’s an artistry to how all this stuff is created and presented
that goes way beyond From Software’s prior work.
It means that even in the game’s most truly cursed areas, the ones in other Souls games
whose grime and rot generally see players wince upon having to go through them, desperate
to feel something as previously insignificant as the sun of Firelink on their character’s
face once more as the oppression of their surroundings grinds them into the ground,
here retain such grandeur, are bathed in such rich, violent crimson tinged with that dazzling
golden hue, that I could come across places with names like the Stench Rot Gullet Hut
of Corpses and I’d still be wistfully gazing out into the distance as if I’d come across
some beautiful vista, as opposed to the bloated, bulging mass of debris that actually lays
before me—the earth’s intestinal lining erupting out of the ground.
The scale here is so humbling that I’d look upon all these wretched sights with absolute
awe—a field of crucifixes upon which hang multiple dead giants, upside down and hacked
to bits.
These are enemies that previously crushed me as if I were an ant under their boot, and
yet something out there, something whose size or shape or strength I have no way of even
envisioning at this point, is able to tear these beasts to shreds and put them on display
as a warning for would-be trespassers.
I shouldn’t be in this area, and yet I’m desperate to know more; these sights are utterly
gruesome, and yet I can’t look away; I know that what awaits me at my destination is pain
and despair, and yet I am endlessly drawn like a moth to a flame.
Long story short, I’ve kinda just spent most of my time riding around a lot and looking
at stuff; the same way I might play a game like Journey or Sable—and it’s been ridiculously
fun.
But that’s not to say that riding through these areas I haven’t been doing any fighting—quite
the opposite in fact, and it’s been an absolute blast to be able to get to these late game
areas and see how long I can hold my own against the onslaught; a true triumph when I use what
limited skill I’ve developed over years of playing these games to take down the vastly
overlevelled enemy in my path.
It’s just that, when I do come up against that insurmountable barrier, one that simply
won’t budge no matter how hard I push against it, I can not only run away from most encounters
should I so choose (allowing me to save the runes I’d built up while getting there)
but I also now have a wealth of lost grace checkpoints built up along my journey, so
it doesn’t take long for me to go back through and find the point where I can really hone
my current combat abilities and find all the many pathways and entire areas I’d missed
my first time through.
In a way, they finally did it!
From Soft finally made a game where the ability to warp between any checkpoint at any time
didn’t hinder that gloriously organic, interconnected world design that some fans (myself included)
have been lamenting since Dark Souls 1—and in fact, given the nature of the “every
nook and cranny” approach Elden Ring takes with exploration, it actually enhances that
feeling, when you come across a seemingly random tiny trinket in this massive expanse
of land, and realise it reminds you of a similarly miniscule object you saw on the completely
opposite end of the map, and you immediately get to connect those dots mechanically.
For me, Elden Ring has been as much a sightseeing tour as an action game—one where the sights
in question rival the most sublime visuals I’ve seen in any game prior, let alone Souls—but
trust me when I say exploring like this is a style of play that goes beyond mere spectacle;
one that loses none of the tension you’d typically associate with the series’ trademark
encounters.
Instead, it’s just a different kind of tension—one that speaks to just how thorough a job From
Software did in accounting for the changes needed to turn a Dark Souls game into a true
open world experience.
In other words, I may not care too much about the actual story stuff here (you know, the
typical Dark Souls thing but George RR Martin swapped the names around a bit) because through
this increased emphasis placed on exploration, in a way that breaks off from tradition of
these games being relentlessly uncompromising, I feel like through my playstyle I’ve been
able to create my own story in Elden Ring—experiencing The Lands Between on my own terms.
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