A Journey That Leaves You Hollow and Whole All at Once

I didn’t expect Elden Ring to stay with me the way it did.
When I stepped into the Lands Between, I wasn’t thinking about fate or endings or who I would become. I just walked. And somehow, somewhere along that long road of blood and grace and quiet nights, the game stopped being a game. It became a place—one I inhabited the way you inhabit a memory: unconsciously, then completely.

My first ending was the Perfect Order.
Even now I’m not sure why I chose it. Maybe it was because Melina asked—not with force, not with grand speeches, but with that calm, unwavering voice of hers. She never demanded destiny from me. She simply stood beside the fire, offered her strength, and walked until her steps ran out. When she burned, something in me steadied, like my purpose finally had weight. The throne wasn’t a prize. It was a debt. A quiet repayment for a life that carried me further than I knew how to walk alone.

And the journey there…
It wasn’t just bosses and runes. It was people who lived their brief lives alongside mine—Alexander bursting open with a laugh so loud it seemed to echo after he was gone; Juno Hoslow, chasing honor until honor hollowed him out. These figures should have been small in a world that large, but their absence left entire regions feeling colder. That’s the kind of loneliness Elden Ring understands: the kind that arrives after the noise fades.

My final ending was nothing like the first.
No law, no throne, no dazzling tree holding the sky together. Just Ranni’s hand in mine, and the two of us walking into a night that felt bigger than the world we left behind. There was no triumph in it—only an unfamiliar quiet. The Golden Tree shrank behind us until it became a star, and then a memory of a star. I didn’t feel like a ruler anymore. I felt like someone who, for once, chose his own story.

That’s the strange beauty of Elden Ring:
it tells you everything without telling you anything.
It shows you a world collapsing in on itself, then trusts you to understand it in your own way. There were moments when I rested at a Site of Grace and Melina sat across from me, the silence between us somehow heavier than any boss fight. There were nights in Nokron that felt like I had fallen into someone else’s dream. There were winds across the Altus fields that made the ruins look alive.

But what stays the longest are the small things—the graves hidden under a golden leaf, the rusted sword leaning against a nameless wall, the footsteps you leave behind without realizing they’ll never be yours again.

When I finished the game, I didn’t feel victorious.
I felt… shifted. Like something had rearranged itself quietly inside me. I put the controller down, but the world didn’t let me go. It still hasn’t.

Sometimes I close my eyes and see Melina framed by firelight; hear Alexander’s laugh like he’s still charging forward; feel the cold starlight of Ranni’s realm wrapping around everything I thought I knew about endings. These aren’t just scenes. They’re the residue of a journey I lived.

Elden Ring doesn’t vanish when the credits roll.
It lingers—like the afterglow you see when you stare at the sun too long. It leaves you hollow in the way loss does, and whole in the way great stories do. You can replay it, yes. You can change choices. But the first time—the first scar, the first miracle, the first fire—belongs to a version of you that will never exist again.

Maybe that’s why it hurts.
Maybe that’s why it’s beautiful.

And when the screen finally fades to black and the room goes quiet, you realize the quiet isn’t empty.
It’s everything you’ve lived there, still whispering back.