A broken throne. A shattered pantheon. A land wheezing for its last breath. And all around, as far as the eye can see, death. The perfect contiguity of nature’s beauty and mankind’s folly. Take a moment and take it all in. This is the adventure of your life.
What I always find most fascinating about the Lands Between is not its huge, spiraling open world. It’s not the torture of finding your way through the desolate planes of Caelid, or the nightmare of fighting your way through Volcano Manor. It’s not even learning of Maliketh’s tragic existence, or General Radahn’s ill-fated last stand.
Some might indeed look at this latest FromSoftware creation and see a chaotic journey fueled only by the player’s masochistic tendencies. Some might say that the entire point is to challenge yourself and in turn overcome the challenges the game sets for you. What fun there is to be had might be found in humbling the demigod Malenia, who has never known defeat, without using summons or spamming overpowered spells. The common conception, or rather, misconception, is that this game isn’t for everyone; that you need to “git gud” and learn how to accept defeat; that FromSoftware’s philosophy is to make you suffer and never hold your hand.
Much like many other things in this life, the common consensus gets it all wrong.
The true beauty of Elden Ring lies not in any one of these trifling aspects, but all of them. To me, this game has never resembled a challenge to be surmounted. I’d even go so far as to argue that it’s not difficult at all. For amidst all the chaos, and the randomness, and the relentlessly hostile environment, Elden Ring is, above all else, about contemplation.
In our fast-paced modern lives, where the days fly by despite the monotony, we rarely find a moment to ourselves, alone with our thoughts. The modern human’s energy is spent cajoling the unceasing rush of dopamine. We are ruled more than anything by our inclination to stare at a digital screen, consuming content. Whether that content be the latest generic film produced by Netflix, or the video essay posted by that YouTuber, or the endless parade of TikTok reels, or the ranting Tweets of the so-called influencer, or even a video game and its latest Season Pass, the idea is to occupy every waking moment of your time. You finish a gaming session to immediately pick up your phone and check your notifications. You put your phone down to binge through the latest season of a mediocre television show that’s all the rave right now, only because you have nothing better to do. Sometimes, people are so distracted by their own subconscious fixations that they don’t realize how consumed they are by all of it.
And so, in this day and age, we’re confronted with souls that are overburdened, hearts that are overladen, and minds that are overwhelmed. The peace and quiet of a simple life is the stuff of legends, and boredom is a thing of the past. Where does the overgratified brain find shelter when the illusion of being held tightly in the oblivious palms of indulgence shatters? What does the modern human do when his purpose-starved soul aches in longing for something he has all but forgotten?
Nothing. Because you have nothing to worry about as long as you can keep yourself distracted. And trust me, we’ve become experts at keeping up this charade.
And yet, here I am complaining about a world that’s going crazy. Here I am criticizing other people even as I, too, drown in this mire of human hubris. Perhaps because the aching in my heart is too painful to disregard. Perhaps because the alarm bells going off in my head are too loud to ignore.
And perhaps because I realize that even as we sit here musing over this stuff, the last bastions of human sanity are being consumed by folly. That even art and artistic endeavors are slowly morphing into a twisted, ill-grafted vermin that breathes and dies at the whim of those who have long ago sold their souls and surrendered their wills.
What does any of this have to do with Elden Ring, you wonder? The answer is simple. In a world concerned only with content consumption in any form, Elden Ring is a welcome, if rare, change of pace.
All too often nowadays, we’re confronted by game worlds that have no heart. No artistic touch to give them a sense of identity. Nothing to remotely distinguish them in the sea of other contemporary works. And why would they? As I said earlier, the goal is to create content. Content to consume. Content to waste, and waste away in the process. A whole world clutched in the terrible grip of blissful ignorance and willful forgetfulness. Lives spent staring at a screen. To think is a curse, to contemplate is a sin, to ideate is an unfortunate side effect of a disease that modernity cured long ago.
It makes you question what a game should be in the first place. Is it all about the fun factor? Are you just there to forget about your real-life troubles? Are you looking for a story that consoles your yearning soul and gives you something, anything, other than the monotony of your uneventful life? Are we all collectively pretending to live lives other than our own, inculcating an abstract to a point where it becomes the reality? What is the fine line that separates content from art?
In the Lands Between, almost everything you come across wants to kill you. At times, it seems as though the whole experience is an exercise in patient torture. Most people look at this game and roll their eyes at how difficult they perceive it to be. At least, difficult compared to what they’re used to in modern games. Elden Ring and every FromSoftware game that came before it contends with the expectations of a changing audience. The whole design seems to be centered around the idea of adhering to a philosophy that died a long time ago. And it is for this very reason that we love Elden RIng.
In a world hell-bent on killing the past, forgetting the ideals of a so-called bygone age, and bringing its whole cognitive might — what remains of it anyway — to bear on the truth, on values and on frameworks, on the very idea that there may something more to life other than the immediacy of our whims and the pull of our physiological urge to comfort, in a world where thought is the greatest capability of humans and simultaneously the hardest thing they ever bring themselves to do, there remain few reminders of the precious, hearty existence we’ve left behind.
There certainly is fun to be had in Elden Ring, and challenges to overcome, and even a world to explore and uncover, yet the quiet, tentative solitude that pervades every inch of this world is what brings the whole experience together. The sublime beauty is not in beating a demigod in a sweat-inducing grind, but the silence that follows their defeat. It is in the act of beholding this vacant world, rid of all its folly in the aftermath of a war that has shaken the very roots of the earth and unraveled the invisible pillars of the sky. It is in the abundant moments of peaceful deliberation where the player is not information-bombed, or overwhelmed by objectives, side quests, and achievements to unlock. It is in the very summons to think, to exercise those dormant mental muscles, in order to continue the story, as opposed to being offered every little hint on a silver platter, and many other signs and markers besides. It is in the perseverance against a terrible challenge, for you know that just because you’ve decided to have a little fun doesn’t mean that it should be mindless and easy, nor reinforce the very terrible inclinations that have turned society into this circus of dimwitted phoneys. It is in the knowledge that we could benefit from challenging ourselves every once in a while, and understanding that it takes mindful effort and patience to achieve anything of worth in this life.
At the end of the day, Elden Ring is therapeutic in much the same way as reading a book on a rainy fall afternoon, or listening to a piece of music as you’re hiking up the mountain trail, or having a cup of coffee while you’re hanging out with your friends and chatting about anything and everything… free of the shackles that are ever so slowly burdening our souls and killing our minds. That makes everything we experience in this life all the more meaningful, meanings that we have learned to overlook in the face of our over-exerted brains. In every Elden Ring playthrough, you die a hundred times, but there is meaning to be found in each death, for it is in the silence that follows where the death throes find meaning.
