Revisting Elden Ring

A lifetime ago, in the forgotten age of 2022, FromSoftware, a studio renowned for its brutal difficulty and impenetrable lore, released a game called Elden Ring. It was a roaring success, garnering critical acclaim and making approximately One Infinity Dollars in sales.

I didn’t like it very much.

I thought then, and still do, that the game was too big, too blown out. The open world, though pretty, mostly served to pad the game out with 100 hours of faff. I’ve seen it said here and there that it’s only that bad on a first playthrough, that on a revisit you know where all the important items are and run through the game in a more reasonable time frame. But for me I could not bring myself to replay it. Credits rolled and I was done, done, done! Not even two years and a shiny new expansion could cajole me into booting the game back up.

I needed time. Time to forget, time to grow, and time to go “you know what there were some pretty good bits in that there Elden Ring.”

So in 2026, prompted by a belated dive into the works of Georges Bataille and James G Frazer and recognizing in their pages the Loathsome Dungeater and the very Erdtree itself, I finally went back to Elden Ring, along with its DLC/expansion Shadow of the Erdtree.

If I planned ahead on this I could have done a close reading of the game or something, came out with a more structured essay. But I didn’t. Instead I played the game I think how most art should be experienced: as a living thing shifting constantly beneath ones ever-expanding perception.

Anyways I beat the game this morning and I have some thoughts about it.

Elden Ring is a Game About Lore

If you’re reading this you likely already know that Fromsoft, and Hidetaka Miyazaki in particular, have a fascination with obfuscation. Elden Ring, like its “soulsborne” predecessors defy easy answers or comprehensible plots. Most of the actual wordcount in these games is devoted to events from long ago, “in the age of ancients.” The plots themselves, as in the events of the game from character creation to credits, often feel simple and underdeveloped.

Take Elden Ring. You are some guy, a kind of guy people generally don’t think to highly of. The world has gone to hell, but you don’t know much about that. After all, you’re not much for all that fancy book-learning they teach over at Sellia or Raya Lucaria. But you have a sword, or a knife, or a club, and you know how to use it. Why not start killing shit? It’s all fucked anyways. In your thoughtless and tedious parade of violence you find yourself pulled into something resembling a climax against a genderbender of a final boss. You win and take the throne, as one does in these sorts of power fantasies.

It’s a story with not a lot of emotion, not a lot of meaning. It’s not even really a story with any real closure. I mean, what was up with that mid-cutscene sex change, right? I guess I’ll watch some lore videos on YouTube, because as we all know there’s no way to figure out what’s going on from the game itself.

But consider the same story, the same events with the same characters, from a different perspective.

You are some guy, a kind of guy people generally don’t think to highly of. The world has gone to hell, but you don’t know much about that. After all, you were never much for all that fancy book-learning they teach over at Sellia or Raya Lucaria. But that doesn’t mean you can’t start. You play at amateur anthropology, studying the remains of this declining empire. You peel back the layers of cruft that have accrued over the ages until you get an inkling of what’s going on, what’s been going on since time immemorial. Then you start having Opinions. Those opinions grow into something resembling an ideology, and now you can finally stop reacting and start being an active participant in this world.

Each of the games endings reflect this. Aside from the unsatisfying default Become the Elden Lord ending, the many routes in Elden Ring require some amount of digging into the games setting. What are the Fingers? Who unleashed Destined Death? Whence came Radagon, that red-haired warrior who broke Rennala’s heart? It is possible to find these endings without thinking about those questions, but doing so will just lead to again an unsatisfying conclusion where nothing is meaningfully explained. The Lore is the means by which you transform yourself from a creature of reactionary violence into a being of intent. There is, I think, a large experiential gap between someone who knowingly decides to “let Chaos take the world” and someone who takes that Finger-touched path wholly unaware of what lurks there.

Elden Ring is a Game About Curiosity

Whether or not you take that leap into exploring the game’s rich setting is ultimately up to the player’s discretion. It’s all there, in the item descriptions and the environmental details and the snippets of spoken dialog, but you can easily ignore it if you so choose. Doing so of course leads to a confused and muddled final act, but you can do it. Total incuriosity, however, is almost impossible to get away with.

If there is a prompt to start reading and asking questions about the game, it’s Margit. Likely the first major boss you’ll face, Margit is designed to beat you into the ground until you’re sick of the Fromsoft’s bullshit. This is far from an original observation, I know, but the trick to beating Margit really is to just leave and do something else for a bit. A handy item sold by a certain trustworthy fellow specifically works to weaken Margit, if you read the item description telling you so.

This is why the game’s open world structure does, and I say this through gritted teeth, kind of work. But only kind of.

To gain strength you must wander the Lands Between in a meandering fashion. Here you might find a mine with strange guards; or a rotting dragon that yet lives, and has lived for longer than even the stone around her can recall; or a nondescript catacomb might reveal a grand conspiracy behind the settings darkest secrets. Even if those details escape your eye (and some will, no matter how attentive you might think you are), you’ll still find them. You must, if you want to gather the strength necessary to defeat the next demi-god.

It’s a mechanical parallel to the games narrative structure. You explore Elden Ring’s map the same way you explore its history: meandering, driven mostly by your own curiosity, looking for what seems important to you in this instant.

An example: I had originally intended to skip Goldmask for this playthrough. I had already done his quest on my first go around and knew the big reveal at the end. Since his quest requires no small investment in a stat I wasn’t interested in using this time, it seemed simpler to just let him stand at the precipice of Leyndell with his finger extended eternally towards those golden boughs. Then I did the DLC. While searching for the last map fragment in a damned forest belonging more to lost Carcossa than the high fantasy of the Lands Between, I found myself in the presence of Midra, Lord of the Frenzied Flame, and I realized I was looking at Goldmask. A grotesque parody, perhaps, but Midra’s bodily proportions and the raging sun that stood for his maddening visage made him so alike to his ever-brilliant counterpart that I knew I had to revisit Goldmask, see him again with new eyes. My mechanical exploration of the game’s map led to a new avenue through which I could explore its characters and lore.

It’s in those moments, sprinkled between the recycled Watchdogs and identical catacombs with forgettable loot, that the open world coheres into something special.

Elden Ring is a Game About Myth

The childish wonder of peeling back the outer layer of a fiction and seeing what marvels lie inside is what originally drew me to fantasy as a genre. It’s why Morrowind is my favorite game, and why I’ve always wanted write my own stories. It’s a rare work that invokes that feeling, though. As an adult I’ve only been able to reliably recapture it through the real world. Reading philosophy, theory, or bits of history even as an uneducated layman shows me the world I imagined when I first read Redwall and The Hobbit. I get other things out of fiction now, emotional connections that dry academic texts can never replicate.

Except sometimes something comes along that gets it, something that makes you fall in love all over again. And by god the works of Hidetaka Miyazaki and FromSoftware are that “something.” They manage this through the oldest trick in the book: just steal from the classics, man.

From Enkidu to Aeneas, from Prometheus to Christ, Elden Ring borrows liberally from a range of epic and mythic traditions, disguising and remixing them until it becomes its own entirely new thing. It’s not a surprising choice, that’s how we got most of these stories in the first place. Echoes of the Enuma Elish and the Epic of Gilgamesh can still be found even in the English Bible. Much of the art of storytelling is built on these allusions, these shared cultural monoliths. Adan, Thief of Fire is not a significant character in Elden Ring, but his name and title evoke an image of a First Man, providing a means to fill in the blanks left by his brief appearance. It’s no wonder Adan was condemned to an eternity in a supernatural prison; the last guy who stole the sacred fire got his liver pecked out!

But Elden Ring doesn’t just borrow from these codified archetypes. Fromsoft go so far as to borrow the very process of myth-making itself. Dig deep enough into the game, so deep that you find stars, and you’ll learn that Marika and her children weren’t the original gods of these lands. She is, in a sense, a warm body for the tree spirit that came before her. And before that there was the worship of the Crucible, born out of the pagan worship of horns. Somewhere along the line the Dragonlord Placidusax ruled as Elden Lord, though the exact chronology is left purposefully vague. Poke around the edges of the DLC and it seems that the existing pantheon is in the process, slow as it may be, of transitioning from polytheism to monotheism. Miquella tries to hasten it along, but it doesn’t quite work out, on account of I hit him with a big stick a bunch.

I love this, so much. Genesis is my favorite part of the Bible, and I fell in love with the story of the Odyssey in the second grade. Anything that makes me feel the way I felt reading those for the first time has my heart. Elden Ring gets to sit in an exclusive club that has amongst its members Morrowind, Book of the New Sun, Lord of the Rings, Dark Souls (no surprise there), and not a whole lot else.

Elden Ring is a Game About Symmetry

Symmetry is a common motif in religious art. Nature does not produce perfect symmetry, and so anything symmetrical must be evidence of the divine. Thus Genesis revisits the same sibling rivalry through different names; thus Severian meets a boy who shares his uncommon name; thus the Hornsent integrate the spiral, the perfect form of their natural horns, into the architecture of their most sacred places.

Very little in Elden Ring is visibly symmetrical. The world is too alive, too base. Instead everything important in the game has an echo somewhere. Sometimes it’s an explicit doubling of identity: Radagon and Marika; Godfrey and Hourah Loux; Miquella and Saint Trina. Sometimes it’s what Caves of Qud might call a layer cake: the Lake of Rot beneath the Lake of Liurnia; Marika’s home the Sullen Lands are really the Lands Between in miniature; the horn-worshiping pagans who are definitely actually worshiping the Erdtree and just don’t know it, trust us, the imperial regime with no ulterior motives. And of course, sometimes it’s just a bunch of guys with the same name. Hello, Godrick and Godefroy and Godfrey. I bet family reunions are a hell of a time.

Elden Ring is a Game About Parody

“It is clear that the world is purely parodic, in other words, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form.^[*]”

Where Elden Ring utilizes divine symmetry it also invokes grotesque parody. I already touched on the similarities between Goldmask and his parody found in Midra. The DLC is full of these parallels. Miquella follows in Marika’s footsteps, even breaking his rune and binding a great warrior to his “civilized” will as Serosh bound Hourah Loux. And to defeat Miquella, you must retrace your own steps, seeking kindling to burn an already blackened tree and enter an ancient and holy place, this time one still in use by a people still in their waning glory.

But the greatest example of parody is in the Tarnished themself.

Deep beneath the capital city of Leyndell there is a man imprisoned. The Loathsome Dungeater lives up to his name, killing and cursing so that his victims can never be born into Grace. You can, if you are so inclined, free him from his cell. Predictably this leads him to call on you as his next victim. Fight him off and he says this: “There you are. You warded off my blessing. Despite the curse stirring within you. No one has succeeded in that before. How? I thought. Then it hit me. That you are, in fact, me. And I… am the Dung Eater. It is my flesh that must receive the blessing.^[†]”

On first blush these are the ravings of a madman. But it makes a certain amount of sense. If everything important in Elden Ring has a double, then it stands to reason that you, the player, should have one too. And if you are a noble hero, then your double ought to be the most despicable creature ever to walk the Earth.

Elden Ring is a Game About Shit

The Loathsome Dungeater is an evil, repellent man. I wouldn’t want him anywhere near me. Yet his ultimate desire is an end to the racial and class divides of the Lands Between. The curse he fosters in those he kills is the curse of the Omen, a shameful remnant of the pagan Hornsent. Anyone born with horns, once a symbol of divinity, are locked away in the sewers with the rest of the kingdom’s filth. But what if everyone were Omen? No one can be cursed if everyone is cursed. Ah, what an egalitarian paradise that must be!

It won’t work. Ultimately the Loathsome Dungeater cannot conceive of a way to break completely from the Golden Order. His plan, which already demands an upsetting amount of personal cruelty, requires an Elden Lord to restore the Elden Ring. He is a rebel, not a revolutionary. The same might be said of you, depending on your investment in history and politics of the Lands Between.

To really fix things requires a clean break from the machinations of the Greater Will, a new order that refuses to march to the Two Fingers’ tune. Two options are presented in Elden Ring. Of these, Ranni’s Age of Stars is clearly the kindest option with the brightest future. It is also the hardest ending to find, the one least likely to be achieved by accident.

There is another equally revolutionary ending available. Buried even deeper than the Dungeater is a tomb. A people whose eyes burned with the fury of the sun were locked away and left to starve, lest their heresies spread like fire across the land. The source of this flame is the cut-off child of Metyr: the Three Fingers. Time and time again the Frenzied Flame finds purchase in those who reject utterly the hierarchies imposed by the Greater Will and its Golden Order, who look at the world and see nothing but irredeemable injustice.

The Loathsome Dungeater wears a solar crest upon his breast. Goldmask wears it on his head. But the Lords of the Frenzied Flame—Midra and possibly yourself—need no such idols. The sun is only faintly seen in the sky of Elden Ring, but you wear it with such brilliance! The golden light of Grace falters against the excremental flame of your being. Only thus can the land be truly cursed, defiled in such a way that the Golden Order will lose its purchase. “Let Chaos take the world!”

Elden Ring is a Game About Gender

I mean. Yeah. Look at it.

Addendum: Elden Ring is a Movie?

Alex Garland, best known for his work on DmC:Devil May Cry, is directing an Elden Ring movie. This has been in the works for some time, and with every scrap of new information about this project comes a hail of concerns as to how exactly Elden Ring could be adapted to film.

But I don’t think a faithful adaptation is some impossible pipe dream? Look at films like Angel’s Egg or Mirror. Surreal, dreamlike imagery that defies explanation isn’t exactly new for movies. Just follow in the footsteps of some of the best to ever do it, easy.

Now do I think A24 and Alex Garland can live up to that? eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

[*] Georges Bataille, The Solar Anus (1931)

[†] Emphasis mine.