Elden Ring Review

The moment Elden Ring opens up and shows you the Lands Between for the first time, the Erdtree burning gold on the horizon, ruins scattered across a vast green plain, a dragon asleep in the distance, something clicks. This is what open world is supposed to feel like. Most open worlds are maps with activities pinned to them. Elden Ring is a place. You move toward something because you saw it and wanted to know what it was. No compass marker told you it existed. No quest chain rewards you for arriving. You found it because you looked. That philosophy runs through everything. The lore isn't explained to you, it's scattered across item descriptions, environmental details, and cryptic NPC dialogue that you piece together over dozens of hours. Ranni's questline, one of the most elaborate sidequests ever designed, is entirely missable and never once announces itself as important. You either find it or you don't. The combat is FromSoftware at their most refined. Jump attacks and guard counters were new additions that opened up the toolkit significantly, and the Spirit Ashes, spectral companions you can summon in combat, made the toughest encounters accessible without trivialising them. Radahn, Malenia, Morgott: the boss roster is stacked, and each encounter is a multi-hour puzzle you solve through pattern recognition and stubbornness. Shadow of the Erdtree, the expansion, is as good as the base game and pushed difficulty to genuinely uncomfortable levels. Messmer is the best new character since Ranni. The performance issues are documented and real, frame pacing on consoles has never been fully resolved, and some areas on PC still struggle depending on your setup. It's a legitimate complaint, not a nitpick. But we'd be lying if we said it affected our experience meaningfully. The game is too good for technical caveats to stick.