It's official – Elden Ring is the greatest game of all time. Except it's not, is it? You can like it a lot, hell, you can say it's your favourite game of all time if you want to. But this is an extremely difficult game, where the best advice I've seen is "keep a real-life notebook to keep track of it", that speaks a specific language that only players who have been onboard with the series for the last two decades can understand, demands failure time and time again, oh and by the way you can't pause it. It's inaccessible and barely approachable, and designed specifically to give veterans a more juiced up experience, and that seems to be confused with making it welcoming to newcomers. It's not. That's okay, but let's not lie about it.
Elden Ring is the most approachable FromSoftware game ever, but then it would be easier for me to win a fight against a middle grade lightweight boxer than it would against Brock Lesnar. Either way, I'm getting my ass kicked. The main issue is we all knew this game was going to be difficult. Not just with tough bosses, but obtuse in its direction and complex in its menu systems. For that reason, practically every outlet in the industry, including us, had a FromSoft veteran on it. This is the perfect game for FromSoft veterans, and only FromSoft veterans reviewed it. Therefore, it reviewed perfectly. But this is not the peak of our medium.
I don't really care about the difficulty. It should be more accessible, in terms of having more settings that allow disabled players to play it, but I don't mind a game being too tough for me to play comfortably. But it doesn't feel like this is difficulty done well. Returnal is a hard game, and it keeps its story wrapped up in complex mythos that it doesn't expect you to understand right off the bat – in those ways it's similar to Elden Ring. But Returnal invites new players to come in and try it, see if they can handle the heat of the kitchen. Elden Ring throws a pan of boiling water at you and scoffs at you for not knowing you were supposed to crouch on the way into the kitchen.
Everyone who knew they were supposed to duck anyway sees the tiny downward pointing arrow on the doorframe and thinks "oh wow, they've made this kitchen so accessible now!", and everyone who didn't know thinks "hey look an arrow, wonder what that's- oh my god it burns, it burns!"
I know what you're going to say. "Git gud." You're right, maybe I should. If I was good at Elden Ring I'd think it was better. I have no doubts that it earned those perfect tens and five-star ratings across the board. Clearly for the gud ones, this is a very very gud video game. But the hugely demanding difficulty, necessity of repeated failure, and complete lack of a fuck given for helping new players understand even an inch of his massive open world cannot be dismissed as "git gud", especially if we're talking about this as not only the early front-runner for all the major end of year awards, but also as the greatest game of all time.
There is a new response this time, too. "Go anywhere you like and see what happens." I died. I've never played one of these games before, what were you expecting to happen? Oh, go somewhere else? I died then, too! Done this five times now, can definitely see the fun in not knowing which massively overpowered beast will kill me next. Again, it's not just the difficulty. I've played hard games before. I played Returnal and always knew what the score was when those bosses were killing me over and over again. Ditto Cuphead. It's not the drip-fed story that's making me feel lost in Elden Ring, it's everything else. Where do I go, what do I do there, how do the stats work, what do these potions mean, can this thing be upgraded, can that one? No answers. Only git gud.
I appreciate that Elden Ring is the best of this type of game ever to exist, and I appreciate that a lot of you love this type of game. Put those two things together and Elden Ring becomes the best game of all time. Except it's not. And that's okay. Gaming's pinnacle cannot be a title the vast majority of players can barely get halfway through, let alone finish.
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