Game review: Elden Ring Takes You to a Magical World Where Everything Murders You!

Video games let us explore our fantasies. Without leaving your couch, you can be a bandit in the Old West or an astronaut traversing the galaxy. Games are adventure by proxy; they allow us to imagine ourselves in a world without limits. Elden Ring — the new epic by FromSoftware games — lets players explore the question: What if you were a helpless slab of meat being torn to ribbons by everything you encounter?

The world of Elden Ring will seem familiar to fans of the fantasy genre: There are castles, swords, potions, spells, and fantastical creatures hiding behind every corner. What makes Elden Ring different is that every last one of those fantastical creatures can and will shred you to a pulp before you can even unsheathe your sword. You will be vivisected, crushed, bitten, sliced open, burnt, gored, poisoned, disemboweled, and occasionally digested and shat out by a variety of creatures in stunning 4K. In Elden Ring, you are less an adventurer exploring magical lands and more of a Human Chum Bucket being tossed to a pack of ravenous beasts.

A player’s first task in Elden Ring is to pick their class: Being a Bandit, Warrior, Prophet or some other class will give your character certain properties. Unfortunately, none of those properties do anything to keep you from being mercilessly raw dogged by everything you encounter. The game begins in the Cave of Knowledge, where you will learn basic skills, none of which will do anything to prevent you from being butchered like a suckling pig the second you venture into the world. You will acquire puny weapons and learn feeble spells, which you will wave at your opponents in a sad, little display of impotence before you are turned into a corpse by your barely-troubled foe. As the game progresses, your enemies’ difficulty increases at roughly twice the rate of your skills, which makes the entire venture into a Sisyphean ordeal in which your fate as faint blood stain on some dank dungeon floor is never really in doubt.

The imagination behind the various creatures who will feast on your lifeless cadaver is stunning. Here are my three favorite Elden Ring characters who fucked me bloody before I could even draw breath:

Margit, the Fell Omen

There are chickens in Perdue plants who stand a better chance against the farmer than I did against Margit, the Fell Omen. Armed with a sword that’s as long as the distance my character could run in half a day and a jumping ability that makes Simone Biles look like a pile of rocks, Margit spent the better part of a week inflicting such bloody horror on me that it would make Jeffrey Dahmer squeamish. Only with the help of Rogier the Sorcerer, the Lone Wolf ashes, and a glitch where Margit got wedged behind a tree for a pretty long time was I eventually able to prevail.

Makar the Magma Wyrm

This fucking lizard has a sword. Apparently, the game designers felt that a 500 ton Gila monster who spews hot magma didn’t make for enough of a mismatch, so they gave him a big-ass stone sword. The sword by itself is about four times my character’s size, and Makar can reach pretty much every part of his lizard house with it, so when I see him rearing back to use it, there’s not much I can do except hope that he dies of a heart attack before he strikes. After he kills me, he typically stomps around and spews magma where I had been standing, which I assume is the Magma Wyrm equivalent of unzipping his pants and peeing on my corpse.

This Fucking Pig

Yes: Even a goddamned hog got to do a touchdown dance on my lifeless body in Elden Ring. In the course of taking out my frustrations on chipmunks and sheep because they’re the only thing in the game that won’t reduce me to maggot food save for the flowers (actually: some flowers), I managed to get ragdolled by Zuckerman’s Famous Pig. Maybe it was the element of surprise, or maybe I’d started to sympathize with my tormenters in sort of a porcine version of Stockholm syndrome, but this wily bastard got his pig tusk basically all the way up my ass before I even knew what was happening. I imagine that after I died, the chipmunks and sheep took turns spitting on my carcass while the pig was hailed as a hero for striking back on behalf of the woodland creatures.

It’s no surprise that Elden Ring is a collaboration with Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin. Mr. Martin has proven himself to be perhaps the most creative conjurer of gruesome deaths that the world has ever known. Game of Thrones is rife with horrific ways to die, like the time a guy got eaten by his own dogs or when that dude got his head cracked open like a pistachio. In Elden Ring, you don’t just witness those deaths: You experience them. In fact, you experience them over and over and over again, thousands if not millions of times. Rare is the opportunity to interact so intimately with one of literature’s true geniuses as his creations flay you, mutilate you, and stomp you into oblivion in ways that most people couldn’t dream.

If I have one criticism of Elden Ring, it’s that multiplayer mode allows occasional respite from the carnage in what seems like a thematic break from the rest of the game. True: You will spend most of your time in multiplayer being effortlessly hacked apart by nine year-olds from around the globe. But you will eventually encounter some hapless dolt every bit as incompetent as you. This puts you in the unusual position of being just as likely to kill as be killed. Once you’ve played the game for a bit, that’s an eerie feeling. The first time I bested a foe, it felt like I’d done something wrong; why wasn’t I the one lying in the shrubs like so much decaying bush meat? Of course, I was only able to ponder this oddity for a second before a player called FukdYoMomma69 split me in half with a battle-axe.

In conclusion: If you’ve ever dreamed of having the experience of being a human bait fish who exists only to be devoured by creatures higher up the food chain, Elden Ring is the game for you. The sheer scope and variety of ways to get poleaxed will see you getting your guts strewn across the countryside for hundreds if not thousands of hours. I give it my highest rating: Five decimated corpses out of five!