A Non-Gamer’s Review of Elden Ring

I’ve never been good at really any video games I’ve played. I have played games purely for fun like Minecraft, the Call of Duty games, and Fortnite, but I have never really tried in them. Elden Ring is my first experience with any Dark Souls-like game. The Souls games are known for having you have die one hundred times before you get that one small win. Elden Ring, within the first twenty hours of playing, has made me want to throw my controller across the room and also quite literally scream in joy.

Elden Ring’s lore runs deep and is far too complex to dive into here, but the basic jist is that you play as a tarnished, someone who lost grace and needs to regain it by finding the Elden Ring. The main checkpoints of the game are lost graces. It is where you can store items, allocate your healing potions, and do lots more. The lost graces will keep you on the main quest of the game, but you can easily stray from that and jet off on side quests.

As someone who doesn’t play Dark Souls like games, the learning curve was enormous. It was instantly the hardest game I had ever played. Within the first thirty minutes of getting out of the tutorial I had accidentally hit an NPC, so he started attacking me. I died to him more times than I want to admit. I turned off the game out of anger and left it for maybe twenty minutes before trying again. I had to watch a couple of Youtube videos before I felt confident returning to the game. I ran from the NPC and tried to get a handle on the game.  

I actually ended up switching starting builds to the prisoner. The game’s complexity has gone down tremendously, almost like going from a foreign language to trying to do the wordle. It might take a couple of tries to get the hang of it, but it was do-able. My suggestion is to watch a starter video to help if you aren’t used to these kinds of games. Once I was past the beginning, however the game quickly became an obsession.

The beautiful open world that Elden Ring offers is astounding. I often find myself stopping at the most menial of places to take in the utter beauty of the scenery. The open world aspect is also very forgiving to most beginners. If you feel that you are in too far over your head at any point you can turn around and farm up before trying to take on that challenge again. This inevitably adds to the amount that you end up exploring, which in Elden Ring there is no shortage of.

I really want you to pay attention to this statement. This game is massive. There is over fifty hours of game time if you only focus on the plot of the game, and you don’t explore past what is necessary. If you want to one hundred percent, the game it can take anywhere upwards of one hundred fifty hours of play time.

So far, I would highly recommend playing this game. It has been well worth my money and time, and I’ve enjoyed it thoroughly. Beating the first boss with a cut scene in Elden Ring quite literally made me jump out of my couch and run out of my house. It took me a solid three hours of memorizing timing and banging my head against a wall to feel that weight fall of my shoulders and come crashing down. It made it worth it, and I am looking forward to continuing getting this feeling.