Happy Black Friday I guess. I’m not sure who exactly reads my blog, but you might have noticed a pattern where I post a bunch around the winter holidays because I have the downtime. WELL I noticed this too. Back in January I was like, you know what, 2022 is going to be the year I write blog posts more regularly, or at least knock out some video game backlog stuff. Who knows.
And then I bought Elden Ring on release day to see what the hubbub was about and it consumed two months of my life.
The last time a video game captured my attention like this was probably when Skyrim came out in 2011. Or maybe back in 2015 when I spent the entirety of my winter break playing Fallout 4. But in both those cases, I had school break on my side. It’s not like I quit my job to play Elden Ring, so I’m fascinated that it was able to put my media consumption in a stranglehold for ninety continuous hours over two-plus months. It was the only game I played.
Saying a piece of media made you “feel like a kid again” is a cliché, but here I literally mean that, no hyperbole. I can remember that phrase being thrown around when The Force Awakens came out, but Elden Ring manages to do it without nostalgia-bating you with a beloved childhood franchise. This was my first From Software game, so I didn’t have any previous attachments to their work. The surprise return of Patches in this was totally lost on me. The childlike joy that Elden Ring made me experience was all in the game design philosophy itself, and I think that’s neat, so here’s a blog post about it.
Kids Suck At Video Games
I think that the thing that characterizes most childhood experiences is “needing help”. Pretty much by definition kids are not good at tasks. Their reading comprehension is bad, their problem solving skills are undeveloped, their fine motor skills are still cooking. If YOU TOO want to feel like you have no idea what you’re doing, and that even if you did know what, you couldn’t do it, then From Software is the game studio for you! If you’ve heard anything about their games you’ve heard that they are hard, to the point that it alienates a lot of people. Certainly, before I played Elden Ring I didn’t think I would enjoy that, but it turns out I really did!
One of Elden Ring’s most iconic and universal experiences is trying to fight Margit the Fell Omen right at the beginning of the game and dying instantly to his magic knives or big stick. The first time I fought him it seemed literally impossible. Like, I could not conceive of a reality where beating this giant dude was possible. But eventually, after exploring, and levelling up, and finding maybe a cool amulet, and just improving at the game, I did defeat Margit, and the feeling was incredible. Over and over again Elden Ring poses you with seemingly impossible odds that you go on to prove are very possible. This feeling of overcoming impossible odds, of being a small human being going up against a rogues gallery of progressively more ridiculous monstrosities and coming out victorious, is the game’s core reward to the player. It’s why some people bristle at the suggestion that these games should have an “easy mode”. Without the extreme contrast between victory and defeat all that’s left is George Martin’s cool lore, hidden away in item descriptions.
Now to get back on track, the point I want to make is not that I relished some sort of feeling of childlike impotence. Rather, Elden Ring facilitates behavior I think of as “Asking Your Friend’s Older Brother For Help”. From Software has realized that it’s 2022, the internet exists, and people are going to talk about games as they play them. People love to share tips and tricks, and a lot of the time, sharing strategies like this can totally trivialize a game. If you can just look up where to get the best sword you run the risk of ruining the challenge, not to mention the sense of discovery, for yourself.
From Software’s strategy to combat this is to say, “Okay, you guys can share tips and tricks and character builds and reveal secrets all you want, it’s not going to make it any easier for you.” They make their games so goddamn hard that sharing information like this just makes it, like, normal difficulty. You can look up character builds and item locations on the wiki all you want, but it never guarantees victory, only balances the odds.
This behavior is clearly encouraged via features like co-operative multiplayer and the messaging system. Reading other player’s messages conveys this incredible sense of camaraderie that I’m not sure I’ve ever experienced in a game before. There’s truly nothing like the experience of finally defeating a difficult boss and being greeted by message after message of congratulations and celebration, each victory is a shared, community experience. Of course you can also literally invite “Your Friend’s Older Brother” to help you defeat a boss. I haven’t done a lot of multiplayer, but I think it’s neat that they’ve formalized the practice of passing the controller off to someone else for help. The best example of this is Let Me Solo Her, a guy who would help people defeat probably the game’s hardest boss, wearing nothing but a pot on his head.
So even if you don’t have someone in your real life to help you, Elden Ring encourages you to emulate the experience of getting the Big High Schooler Next Door beating Bowser for you. It doesn’t make victory any less satisfying.
“My uncle works at Nintendo”
Closely related to my first point is that kids love to share secrets. Kids on the playground love to spread hair-brained rumors about their favorite media, to the extent that they’ll just straight up lie. According to Know Your Meme, the urban legend of the kid whose “uncle works at Nintendo” claiming that “you can catch Mew if you use Strength on the truck in Vermilion City” goes all the way back to the 1980s. Elden Ring is bold enough to ask the question of “what if you COULD catch Mew by using Strength on that truck?” The game is full to the brim with mysteries that no individual was ever going to unlock on their own. Only by sharing information with your friends, or with the wider online community, will you ever find everything there is to discover. Case in point is Elden Ring’s iconic 50-hit illusory wall:
For context, Elden Ring is full of illusory walls that lead to shortcuts or secret areas. They’re disabled by hitting them once. Very few have any indication that they’re there, meaning you just have to try and whack all suspiscious walls. Due to a bug at release, one wall required you to do 9,999 damage to it to be destroyed. How someone discovered this is anyone’s guess.
Another example is From Software’s famously sparse quest system. There’s no quest log, and many characters are vague about what their goals are or what they want you to do. Here’s the quest walkthrough for Nepheli Loux’s questline, for example. (obviously, spoilers abound if you care). These quests have gotten some flak for being so convoluted, but I would argue that 100%ing all of the quests is far from the game’s expectation of the player. None are required to beat the game, although many unlock new endings. The fact that the quests are confusing seems to me to be intended as another motivator for players to share information with others. Everyone has a slightly different experience, and you can go to your friends and excitedly tell them about something they may have completely missed. And, there’s so much there that a complete experience does not require success in every quest. It leaves players with a lingering mystery that leaves them thinking, maybe if they try again they can find the Albinauric Woman whose quest they completely skipped. In that case, New Game+ is waiting.
Virtual Disneyland for Adults
A core draw of theme parks is that they pack a variety of real-seeming settings into a tight, explorable package. Many video games function similarly, with settings so varied in content that you start to question how they work, like, hydrologically. Elden Ring, somehow, has managed to pace the scale and intensity of its visual set pieces in such a way that, rather than jump the shark, you find yourself on a steady treadmill of crazy shit. Somehow, it manages to overawe you time after time without that desensitizing you. This variety makes exploring the huge open world incredibly rewarding. Even if you can’t beat the boss, well, at least you saw a gigantic underground city! Just wanting to see what’s around the next corner really motivates you through the roughest parts of the game.
Elden Ring’s Lands Between are to an adult what an adult’s “generic” fantasy setting are to a child. Many fantasy fans have seen every permutation of Lord of the Rings-derived settings under the sun, and while Elden Ring’s setting is definitely Lord of the Rings-derived (it’s not called Elden like, Hat, or something) it manages to take an adult’s preconceptions and inflate them to often absurd extremes. Case in point are the giant-man-on-a-tiny-horse, the multiple plateaus so high they can only be accessed by fantasy elevator, the town in the caldera of an active volcano, and the sentient Indiana-Jones-boulder-traps that chase you after you think you’ve dodged them. And when so much is the same level of ridiculous, it becomes weirdly cohesive. There’s just something beautiful about the sharp contrast between traversing the dangerous, grimdark Lands Between only to enter Ruined Cathedral #298 and encounter a giant talking tortoise wearing a mitre.
It’s a lot harder to surprise an adult in this sort of a verging-on-comic way in general, doubly so if you’re playing the same game for tens of hours, and yet Elden Ring does it fairly consistently.
Slapstick Simulator 2022
As you might guess from the above, From Software’s ability to constantly sidestep your expectations is used to great effect for comedic purposes. You end up with an excellent recreation of the experience of attending a sleepover, booting up Wii Sports, and bowling backwards on purpose to make Barack Obama, Peter Griffin, and your Grandma jump out of the way.
I don’t think there’s anything I can say on this topic that wasn’t put better by the following two videos from Polygon:
To summarize, Elden Ring’s difficulty, enraging for some, is hilarious for others (me). Once you learn to let go and laugh at your own misfortune, it becomes the funniest game you’ve ever played. Nothing can compare to the feeling of walking into a room, seeing other players’ blood pools littering the floor, and barely having enough time to say “oh no” before a figurative piano is dropped on top of you. People complain about boss-battle reuse in this game, but it led to some of my biggest laughs. There’s nothing like entering what is clearly a boss arena and hunting for the boss so that you can get a leg up on it, only for a guy that’s already killed you a million times on the other side of the map to crawl slowly out from around a corner (looking at you, Magma Wyrm).
With regards to character creation I feel like the joy of making a ridiculous looking character in a video game and then witnessing your goofy guy doing bad-ass stunts and slaying demigods and whatnot should be self-evident.
Just look at this guy. Why can I make my skin green when I wore a full-face helmet for 90% of the game? Who cares, it’s awesome!
Conclusion
I should have written all of these thoughts down back in April, when they were fresher in my mind, but I didn’t. But I started thinking about it recently because of the recent release of new Pokemon games. Why is it that Elden Ring, the first From Software game I’ve ever played, could conjure such powerful feelings of nostalgia, while Pokemon, a series I played pretty much continually from the ages of eight to eighteen, has begun to fall flat in the eyes of many fans? What does “Pokemon for adults” look like? What would it even mean for there to be a “Dark Souls of Pokemon”? Why do I even care so much?
I don’t think anyone has made a game which has answered these questions to anyone’s satisfaction. These are questions I have a lot of thoughts on actually and may write future blog posts about. But for now, let me conclude by saying that Elden Ring is my own game of the year for 2022, and without a doubt in the top five games I’ve ever played.