Elden Ring

FromSoftware's combat didn't change much for Elden Ring. What changed is where it happens, and how much of it you can simply decline to deal with yet.

What you're actually doing

You wake up Tarnished, blessed by grace, and pointed at the Lands Between to become Elden Lord. Nobody explains what either term means. There's no quest log and no markers on the map, so the only record of what you're partway through is your own head. Characters don't flag you down or announce that they have a job for you; they have their own reasons for being where they are, and some of them will watch you walk past without a word.

This is the part of Elden Ring that divides people, and it's worth being precise about why. Nothing in the world feels like a checklist, which is rarer than it should be in a game this size — you find things because you went looking, not because an icon told you to. The cost of that is immediate and real. Leave an area for twenty hours and you can come back to find a storyline closed, with no warning that it had a deadline. The game is not tracking your loose ends for you because it isn't tracking anything.

The tools that keep you moving

The assistance is genuine, and almost every part of it is conditional. Spirit Summons let you call in a temporary ally, but their damage is slight and they only work in certain places, so what they really buy you is a few seconds of breathing room rather than a fight won. Flasks refill after you clear an entire group of enemies, which quietly rewards pushing through a bad situation instead of retreating to reset it.

Stakes of Marika are the most welcome of the lot. Dying to a boss usually puts you back near the boss instead of at the start of the route, which removes the worst chore in this genre — the long, silent walk back. You pay for it by losing access to the setup changes a Site of Grace gives you. Great Runes are the strongest lever and the clumsiest: they need activating through a process the game doesn't spell out, they run on a rare consumable, and the effect lasts only as long as you stay alive. Assistance in Elden Ring is never unconditional, which is a deliberate choice rather than an oversight.

Where it grates

Most of what's irritating here traces back to the same instinct that makes the game good. Withholding information is atmospheric right up until it's a wall, and Elden Ring crosses that line more often than it needs to. The absence of a journal is the clearest example, because it isn't a difficulty setting — it's bookkeeping, and doing it on paper is not more immersive, just more annoying.

The scale has a cost too. Regions are pitched at wildly different levels and little warns you which one you've wandered into, so the early hours can feel directionless if you're expecting the game to set a pace. That's the design working as intended. It's also the reason some players bounce off in the first evening and others don't put it down for a month.

The pulse

The broader reception has been about as unanimous as games get. The worry that dominated the run-up to release — that FromSoftware's formula wouldn't survive being spread across a world this size — mostly didn't happen, and the familiar complaints that did surface are about the late game rather than the early one: repeated boss encounters, a difficulty spike that outpaces the tools you have, and a final stretch that runs longer than it earns. Those are worth weighing, but they're the back half of a very long game, not its character.

Should you play it

Yes, if you want a hard game you can approach at your own pace, and you'd rather assemble a world from fragments than be briefed on it. It's also a reasonable entry point if you've been put off this genre before, because the summon system gives you a way through a wall without a difficulty menu.

Think twice if you need a story told to you directly, or if a quest log isn't optional for you. And if the idea of wandering into content you're badly under-levelled for sounds like a waste of an evening rather than an invitation, the freedom here is the obstacle — it's the same design choice, and it doesn't split neatly into a good half and a bad one.