Elden Ring Preview: An Unparalleled Sense Of Melancholic Freedom

thegamer.com:

Elden Ring doesn’t hold your hand. That should be obvious to anyone familiar with FromSoftware’s work. Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Sekiro are all uncompromising experiences that demand patience and precision. A failure to acknowledge the lessons it hopes to teach you will result in death time and time again. There are so many ways to enjoy games like this, whether you wish to be a valiant knight or a timid pyromancer. Elden Ring feels like the culmination of a vision that Hidetaka Miyazaki has spent years building towards.

It’s a morbid form of magic, an invitation to lose yourself in a realm that threatens to swallow you whole at every given opportunity. You’re entranced the moment you emerge from the underground and glimpse at the skies above, overwhelmed by the options displayed before you. An archetypally cryptic NPC seeks to guide you in the right direction, but you can just as easily brush aside his advice and let this mythical land swallow you whole. That’s exactly what I did during my six-hour preview, letting The Lands Between and all of its fascinating landmarks dictate my adventure instead of obediently following the rules.

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The result was a mixture of brilliant highs and terrifying lows, as I quickly came to discover how curated yet procedural this world manages to feel when you surrender to its vices. You play as The Tarnished, one of several doomed souls embarking on a quest to obtain the Elden Ring. Its purpose remains ambiguous, but it’s clearly an artifact that many have failed to procure over the years, morphing into their own monstrous forms as the land sought to overtake their very beings. Elden Ring’s opening cutscene is