Holy, this is a soulslike! ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, Fromsoft has some real competition now. The music is insane, the visuals are stunning (the walk to Marrow Keep is chef's kiss), the performance is solid (ultra 130fps solid at 3440x1440p) the exploration is on point, everything you find is interesting, the combat is tight with so many unique playstyles, ranged weapons actually do damage! Did I mention there is no stamina system, and it somehow just works... Wild.
The new option to remove load screens when you take the misty stairs down into a mini shrine/dungeon is amazing and unexpected! Bethesda take notes.
Also just the design of the gates, basically dungeons with a seperate map to the overworld, I was not expecting this when I walked through (I was expecting a simple boss fight).
All this polish and amazing design and yet the game is irreverent, never taking itself or the genre too seriously. [Following line only mentions early game stuff that's in the screenshots and trailers] Yes I've turned into a sheep and beat up a shepherd. Yeh I've fought an overweight lady in a wheelchair who shoots babies from an arm canon at me. It's as amazing as it sounds, and yet never too goofy to take you out of the world.
The game is brilliant, despite a handful of technical hiccups that still need ironing out. I've run into a couple of bugs, one where I couldn't interact with any interactables. I threw myself off a cliff to fix it. This happened twice, both in the same village. I've also briefly had subtitles stay on screen and not disappear (which was a thing in the Beta) and loud stormy wind noises playing constantly until hard scene change or backing out to main menu fixed both. Additionally, some settings do not work, or do not work as intended. Hardware ray tracing setting does nothing (not that I see it being needed over the lumen implementation); chromatic abberation and film grain seem to be always on even when turned off if post processing is set to ultra, turning it down to high fixed this for me. I've heard of others but I will only list what I've personally come across or noticed.
All in all it's an amazing start to the game (first 6-10 hours). I'll update once I've finished the game but it's so good already, if it just maintained what they have for the rest of the game I'd be satisfied. If you like souls games, soulslikes, or you're an action junkie that's never tried one, this is an amazing place to start. I'm looking forward to updating this review, as I think this game is going to be special.
Edit: Important I have to add, the game has an easy difficulty (via the Slayer Seal) and a hard difficulty (via Night Mode). I think this is a great jumping in point for anyone who likes action games and the vibe of souls titles but doesn't want the difficulty many of the other games in the genre have (with exception to Wuchang and DS1 which are both relatively easy in the beginning and ramp it up slowly).
Diegetic difficulty done correctly is a sign of a extremely well designed game. Through items like the Slayers Seal, Bloodhound's fang and systems like Summons (or multiplayer coop), the very best games maintain a shared, common experience, without lazy, immersion breaking text based difficulty menus. The old school easy to implement text menu difficulty leaves you tinkering up and down all game to get the level of challenge right, making challenging fights frustrating or a cakewalk, determined primarily by a menu, where you learn little and negate the reward payoff. This leads to not receiving the intended, common experience that you can share with your friends and other players online.
PC Players have always had these options to change difficulty, grind requirements, or pretty much any systems for any and every game out there, it's called mods. Mods let you change any aspect of the game that you dislike, That's why the developers themselves should focus on crafting an amazing common experience for the community to figure out fun and powerful strategies, and the players who are struggling a bit too much can just use the powerful tools the developers have carefully crafted and tested to still play the same game essentially as their friend who wanted more challenge and turned on night mode. This sounds small but the shared experience, and people posting their favourite and least favourite Elden Ring bosses as the zeitgeist was all about that game was so much fun and expanded players stories into community legends.
I'll also add because I think it's important. I'll take diegetic difficulty options like summons and slayers seal over a immersion breaking, silly menu option every day of the week. Players should advocate for this more, instead of lazy hp/damage scaling or other lazy menu based options that split the intended experience up.
