I cheesed my way to the top in Elden Ring and I regret nothing

techradar.com:

Elden Ring, Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and other FromSoftware titles are beloved for their penumbric narrative style, trademark grimdark settings, and their incredible sense of scale and opportunities for discovery. They are also infamous for being punishingly hard.

For some dedicated players, this last part is all that really matters. The difficulty, and their subsequent investment of time and energy into mastering the game's melee combat system, is what makes FromSoftware's games what they are. Many of those same players would tell you that this is just the way they play, and they don't begrudge other players their different play styles or where they find satisfaction in the game. 

And then there are the other ones. The ones who would – and do – tell everyone whether they ask or not that unless you play as they do and reach their level of skill in lightning-quick parries, dodge rolls, and precisely executed combos, you aren't legitimately playing. 

For some, Elden Ring's various systems like summoning Ashes to help take down difficult encounters, spamming Comet Azur from a distance to melt away a dragon's HP, or even bringing in multiplayer cooperators for boss fights is tantamount to breaking the game. If even those tactics are illegitimate, then «cheesing» is the true Cardinal Sin of Elden Ring.

Cheesing, broadly, is using unconventional tactics to advance through the game that some argue is exploitative and violates the game's spirit. If that grafted scion is too big to physically fit through a doorway and you stand on the other side, whittling down its health with arrows or Glintstone Shards while staying out of reach of its attacks, well then, you are little better than a cheater.

I'm here to tell you that not only are