I miss Caelid...


To this day, I still can't believe this game actually exists.
The game's been living rent free in my mind for months now...
The scope, the lore, the open world, the gameplay, the ambiances are mind blowing.
It's as if Lovecraft, Lucian Freud, Jerome Bos.ch, Dali and David Lynch worked together (TOGETHAAAA) to build this obsessively fascinating world. Both grandiose and terrifying, extremely gloomy, gore, and sublime.
The lore is cryptic like a religious text, you have to go look and extract meaning with your teeth, the game makes a detective out of you, you're on your own to understand whatever you can...

It was my first FS game, and let say the game is not really new comer friendly: for instance, I tried at the beginning to equip an item from my inventory, like a normal person (this is not the way), I even had to google how to exit the game the first time; the UI could be improved, it's not the 90's anymore Myiazaki, I'm not asking much, but even a journal with a brief summary in 2 lines of text of who is this NPC I met 90 hours ago would be welcome tbh.

Gameplay-wise, I started playing with a bow, at distance like a coward hidding behind a shield for melee, it made me feel like a sniper main, but with the time I ended up power stancing 2 great curved swords like a DEMO CHAD. The combats are what Skyrim should have been, challenging and interresting in most cases, mistakes are punished, the game make you take him seriously.
The game has a lot various ways to approch it, crafting will help a lot compensate the lack of spell casting builds for instance, you can either play hard or smart (or dirty, yeah I'm talking about you spellcasters),, the game really let you set the difficulty on your own, there is always an easier way, a smarter way...
But the difficulty is part of the experience, otherwise adventure without danger is just a walk in the park. The game makes you pay attention, unlike the witcher or Skyrim for instance, where you become OP at some point and basically do combats with one hand in your back.

Elden Ring isn't perfect though, the platforming phases are usually frustrating, fall damage is what killed me the most (probably a TF2 reference); the camera can become a problem especially against collossal bosses, the action become most of the time unreadable unfortunately; and last but not least, you have to kill a lot of doggos in the game :(

Yet, it's easily the game of the decade...

I have more hours in this game as pyro, than in Skyrim... AS PYRO !!!


(to this day, I have NEVER even equip the phlog).