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Like most people I’m not good at video games. Or, to be more precise, I’m not good at particular types of video games. Shooting and fighting games that require quick reactions, games where you’re forced to play against Mountain Dew’d up fourteen-year-olds, basketball video games, I’m bad at all of these. I’m decent at most open-world single-player RPGs, a fair amount of puzzle games, and I can hold my own in Mario Kart.
I realize that if you don’t play video games you’ve nodded off at that list. Maybe you perked up at Mario Kart. There’s a strong vein of nostalgia around Nintendo’s racing game, one that affects millennials, Gen X and even a few people older than that. Sidenote, is there something between Gen X and Baby Boomers? I forget. Whatever. Generational lines are made up. In either case, some of those folks remember Mario Kart too. What this essay is going to suggest is that if you’ve never played video games before, or only played Mario Kart, Elden Ring is the place to start.
On the face of it this seems like a massively stupid thing to say. Elden Ring, the latest epic coming out of FromSoftware. Written in part by George R.R. Martin, it’s a massive open-world game that takes place in a dark fantasy world. It’s also hard. Hard to beat, hard to understand what you’re supposed to do, hard to play, hard, hard, hard. Despite all this it is basically the perfect game.
Allow me to note something before I continue. I have not beaten Elden Ring yet, not even close. I’ve beaten neither Margit the Fell Omen nor Godrick the Grafted, the bosses you need to beat to get out of the first main area. I am not good at this game. So, what I’m saying about this game, for those pendants among my readers, is a mix of my own experience and what I’ve seen and read online.
It seems ridiculous for me to recommend a hard game, especially for people who have never played one before. Even the tutorial, something that in most games is unmissable and takes up the first several hours of playing, is possible to miss in Elden Ring. Outside of a short cutscene when you first start the game there are very few story beats. There is no log that tracks whatever you’re supposed to be doing. The map is vague and unrevealing. The combat can be fiddly and tricky. I’m sure some people won’t even realize that you can get a horse. All of this seems like it would be off-putting for people who haven’t played video games before.
I disagree. People only expect those things precisely because they’ve played a lot of video games. All that quality-of-life stuff only seems normal if you end up playing multiple AAA titles a year. Most people do not interact with videogames in that manner. They either play one game, like The Sims, or they just don’t play videogames at all. Elden Ring is great because it allows people to discover things for themselves, forcing people to explore rather than just tick off some boxes on a checklist. It plays like it was meant for completely new players. People who have been playing videogames for a long time like to joke about new players, forgetting that they were once a new player.
Having seen multiple people play open-world video games for the first time I can tell you that there are things that many of them do. One, they experiment. They try to figure out the controls, they try to see where stuff is, they talk to other characters in the world, they test stuff out. Elden Ring is perfectly built for that. It doesn’t tell you to go explore a tree, it makes the tree interesting enough that you want to explore it. The height of “show don’t tell.” The hard combat, the thing that would keep most people away is also much of the time optional. Most enemies can be avoided. Even for bosses like Margit the Fell Omen, the guy I mentioned earlier, there are ways to get around them. At least until you’ve gotten strong enough to take them down pretty easily. And when I do beat them, oooh baby, you know it’s gonna be awesome/ The running away part is great. Not strong enough? Run away. Enemy too fast? Run away. Running away is easy in Elden Ring. No multi-button presses, no combos, just get the hell out of there.
The best part of Elden Ring is that when you do finally beat something, or discover something it’s one of the best feelings. You did it. It might have taken you twenty tries, but you did it. And no one can take that away from you. The best part? The game changes after you beat one of the big bosses or finish one of the quests. You made a difference in the world. You did that. It’s not like a Mario Kart where you just keep running the same races over and over again. That boss is no more, the world it lives in is changed, all because of your actions. That’s a beautiful thing.
Some people will, of course, not like the game for its aesthetics. Perhaps even the word fantasy Elden Ring threw you off. But I would recommend trying it, even if non-real-world settings don’t intrigue you. The world created by the workers at FromSoftware is a fascinating and varied one, with something for everyone. The people might have odd names, but they’re odd in a charming fashion. There are glowing trees, a ghost horse, butterflies, a dragon, and tortoise in a pope hat. I have yet to meet the tortoise, but I am very excited to do so. There are also nasty little bat freaks which I hate, a giant robotic rat(?) that keeps trying to stab me, and a weird unexplained blob that seems like it wants to incorporate me into its body. My guy, named “McLovin,” is a weird little dude who fights with a samurai sword and a double-bladed stick thing. He’s pretty cool.
Newsletter over. Go out and play Elden Ring.
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