I admit defeat. For reasons beyond my comprehension, I gave Elden Ring on the Switch 2 another chance. And another. And another.
Now I’m 22 hours and 53 minutes into the game. My Wretch, which basically is the weakest game character with the worst starting position in the game, has now reached level 29. And is capable of sorcery and can wield the meteorite staff. Which literally was a game changer and gives this character a fighting chance.
The game managed to get its hooks into me and now I’m also looking for that next place to explore and to take care of that next monstrous thing.
Yes, the controls still suck ROCKS. Yes, there still is absolutely zero story to find.
But it somehow doesn’t matter anymore.
When my character now dies another horrible death, I sometimes even smile and think “ah, that’s how they want to finish me off this time. Ah, that’s the trap they made for me. Okay, now that I know, I know how to wipe you off the map.”
The game really likes to ridicule you. They let you find a hidden teleport… That takes you directly to the Royal City. A place you’re not even supposed to know that it exists. They even give you a save and fast travel point there, so that you can always return, whenever you like.
Only to put an insanely superior enemy there that you have zero chance to defeat or bypass.
But after so many hours in, you begin to get the sadistic humor of the developers.
You just think: “Your time will come soon enough.”
And then you go back to the grind and slowly but surely level up your character until you know that you have an actual chance at beating this thing.
That is Elden Ring.
It absolutely is not a game for everybody, with all its (technical) shortcomings it certainly is not a masterpiece by any objective measure and it absolutely is not a game that I would ever in good conscience recommend to anybody who is not willing to throw over 250 hours at grinding through a game. Like I did in AC Odyssey, for example. Until I literally finished 100% of all locations, quests, side quests and whatever else there might have been in the game. But in all fairness, Odyssey’s Kassandra was the greatest character that was ever created for a game and Melissanthi Mahut gave the best voice acting performance in the history of computer games. So there’s that.
Elden Ring does not have any of that. But for some strange reason, it also doesn’t need it.
Elden Ring knows that it only needs to trigger your ambition as a gamer. If you’re not that kind of gamer, it makes it very clear with its brutally inaccessible design that it doesn’t want to be played by you.