Elden Ring Preview: An Unparalleled Sense Of Melancholic Freedom

Six hours with FromSoftware’s open world epic has us more excited than ever.

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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.

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 a grim example of this fate, teasing the bosses and locales you’ll encounter across the coming hours. It’s hypnotic, taking obvious cues from what came before while also forging something entirely new. The stage is set with immaculate purpose, and within moments I was hooked.

Much like Dark Souls and Bloodborne before it, Elden Ring finds beauty in the quiet solitude that permeates exploration. Subtle musical cues and flourishes might timidly emerge as you stumble across hidden dungeons or an awaiting enemy, but the majority of my time in The Lands Between was spent with my own thoughts. I spoke to myself (and my cats) when something caught my attention on the horizon, the skeleton of a rotting cathedral pulling me closer and closer as I sought to uncover the stories it hoped to tell. The world is filled with larger locales to explore such as sprawling castles and underground caverns – all of which are magnificent – yet the real brilliance sits in all the smaller secrets littered throughout this mythical realm. Under the cover of a cliffside I found a Wolf’s Den filled with canines feasting on corpses, ruled over by a werewolf-esque hybrid who I managed to best on my first encounter. It was close, but I emerged victorious and looted their corpses for spoils.

I’m often drawn to the sea, so it didn’t take me long to venture towards the shoreline in search of bosses to conquer. I soon stumbled upon a castle that flirted with the violent tide, with ethereal jellyfish loitering amidst the crumbling cobblestone ruins. Unfortunately to reach these creatures I needed to drop down into a cavernous tower by balancing precariously on a mixture of wooden beams. I thought safety would await below, but I was ambushed by a swarm of poisonous rats within seconds and immediately met my death. Such a defeat couldn’t deter me, so I returned only to vanquish the rats before stumbling upon my first big boss of the game. That, however, did deter me. Just a smidge.

Elden Ring is all about curiosity being greeted by seemingly insurmountable adversity. In Dark Souls or Bloodborne, such challenges must be tackled in a linear fashion, but the open world utilised here provides so many more options. The versatility afforded by more freedom of exploration transforms the Soulsborne formula. While you had relative permission to explore in the studio’s previous games, here it feels much more substantial. Each new discovery feels natural or rewarding, whether you’re stumbling across bugs harbouring rare crafting materials or a network of catacombs simply begging to be unearthed for the first time in centuries. Nobody will experience Elden Ring in quite the same way.

I talked about the mechanical intricacies of the game in my last preview, so I wanted to spend this final glimpse of Elden Ring before its release talking about everything it does so well, and how it almost commands your attention with its melancholic world so desperately clinging onto the vestiges of hope. Everywhere you turn sits a landscape that feels rotting and overgrown, small pockets of what once proudly existed here giving way to demons and corruption. There’s nothing to strive for in The Lands Between, only crumbling anecdotes of myth and legend that will soon surrender themselves to history. Storytelling remains deliberately vague, item descriptions and pockets of dialogue providing a handful of clues behind certain locations and the wayward souls you might stumble upon.

By the road sat a blind girl, humming peacefully to herself until I caught her attention. She asked me to deliver a message to an old friend who had brought her own life to ruin. Everything she once held dear is now lost, but if she can bring her loved one back from the brink then perhaps there is hope yet to salvage. I can silently agree to her request or move along, ignoring her plight and a potential storyline waiting to be unearthed. Several people like this emerged during the preview. Some were distraught, while others were pompous and overconfident, but all of them felt like a tangible part of Elden Ring’s world.

This comes alive even more so in the Roundtable Hold. Consider this as an equivalent to Demon’s Souls’ Nexus or The Hunter’s Dream in Bloodborne – a hub area where a collection of disparate souls gather to ruminate over the ongoing apocalypse. The place was well populated when I arrived, with knights, monks, and other folk scattered across the tainted manor offering a mixture of advice and ridicule. Some asked me to join their cause, while others weren’t afraid to offer wares in exchange for the right amount of coin. Much like FromSoftware’s previous games, the Roundtable Hold is bound to shift and change throughout the campaign. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the individuals who call it home are willing to betray me, fall victim to the apocalypse and lose themselves, or emerge to lend a helping hand in my darkest moments.

Like so much of Elden Ring, each new discovery is accompanied by several questions, a mountain of lore building upon itself until it almost threatens to collapse. Yet each new piece of information keeps me going, enrapturing me in a constant state of fascination that I can’t wait to further in the full game. I have no idea how large The Lands Between really is. I thought I had a good handle on things until I stumbled upon a weird portal device in the wilderness that asked if I’d like to be transported to a new location. I said yes, and immediately found myself on the steps of a sprawling church guarded by a dragon-like creature I had no chance of beating.

This new area was surrounded by high-level enemies and fluorescent red fungi jutting from the ground, unlike anything I’d seen in the game thus far. Where this place was I had no idea, nor did I know how to escape nor where the unfolding road would take me. It’s disconcerting, but even as I greeted death, my curiosity rose again to seek this place out once more, determined to defeat enemies who threaten to best me time and time again. I experienced several moments like this during my preview, an exciting glimpse at what’s to come later this month when millions can jump into Elden Ring without compromise.

Elden Ring was always going to be good. FromSoftware is a studio of such pedigree that everything it touches now turns to gold, offering a deep, nuanced adventure that constantly surprises and delights. This game does just that, but it also achieves so much more in a way I never could have expected. Not since Breath of the Wild has an open world experience offered such freedom for discovery and experimentation, except Elden Ring is so much darker and more challenging, teasing a vision that all but guarantees to be masterful.

Link Source : https://www.thegamer.com/elden-ring-final-preview/