Elden Ring is my new favorite Alice in Wonderland adaptation

polygon.com:

Elden Ring, like so many other FromSoftware games, evokes the same uncanny feeling as a nightmare. You meet a series of strange creatures in its mysterious world, and its story plays out like a parable. It’s a lot like the world Lewis Carroll crafted in Alicein Wonderland, a novel about a young English girl named Alice who has a lengthy dream about a hostile world full of similarly bizarre characters.

The minimalist, symbol-laden storytelling in FromSoftware games allows players to find their own sense of meaning. I’ve personally compared “going hollow” in Dark Souls to living with depression, and other critics have compared its doomed world to the experience of living under capitalism. Similarly, Alice in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking Glass have inspired critics over the ages to opine that it’s a commentary on the poor treatment of children in Victorian society, or perhaps a political satire of the royals. By creating a dreamlike world full of vague and relatively undeveloped but provocative characters, both FromSoftware and Lewis Carroll have invited endless debate over these works.

I could spend the rest of this article explaining why Elden Ring and Alice in Wonderland both effectively poke wise at various societal norms, but I’d much rather tell you Alice’s story through the lens of the Lands Between. After all, it’s plain to see that the smoking caterpillar and smiling Cheshire cat would fit in just fine in Elden Ring — and my own journey as the Tarnished has me feeling just as baffled as Alice felt in Wonderland.

Into the rabbit hole we go!

It was all very well to say “Drink me,” but the wise little Alice was not going to do that in a hurry: “no, I’ll look first,” she said, “and see whether it’s