Elden Ring is both the most ambitious game From Software has ever developed and the culmination of its many years perfecting the Souls formula. On paper, many of its new ideas shouldn't work, but Hidetaka Miyazaki and his team are considered some of the best game developers on the planet for a reason. For the first time, From Software uses an open-world design, yet it also manages to cleverly maintain the interconnected, locked-door-filled areas of its predecessors. It means that players are free to go nearly anywhere from the very beginning--provided they're up for the combat challenges--but they're still rewarded for careful exploration in the game's many dungeons, cathedrals, and dilapidated villages. A generous (by the developer's standards, at least) equipment-upgrading system encourages players to try out more than one type of weapon, and the many weapon arts and spells mean very few builds will ever be the same.
The freedom to choose your path also extends to the combat, which is, as expected from From Software, superb. The classic sword-and-shield approach is perfectly viable, but so is an ultra-fast nuisance wielding a giant pizza cutter who can make a copy of themselves. Making that choice is largely a matter of personal preference rather than needing one strategy to beat a particular boss, and if players find themselves struggling in a specific area, they can almost always take off in another direction and find a way to get stronger, coming back hours later to show that pesky dragon how a maiden-having Tarnished gets things done. Or, if they prefer, they can simply wander around The Lands Between and bask in its almost-angelic glow, which gives off a false sense of safety that hides the many horrors hiding behind nearly every corner.
Remarkably, despite its brutal difficulty and often-cryptic storytelling, Elden Ring is projected to be one of the best-selling games for all of 2022. It's a rarity that the most critically acclaimed game of the year also tops the charts, but it's also a rarity to get a game as special as Elden Ring. -- Gabe Gurwin
