notes from the Land Between
Elden Ring, the long-anticipated open-world game from legendary developer FromSoftware, is an immense region of unexplained occurrences: monsters, apparitions, animated stones, creatures without name. Some, like this great earthen belltower, are not aggressive, but mostly the world is full of blight and rot and trying to kill you. Guided by a light called Grace, you make your way through the inscrutable Lands Between, gaining powers and weaponry and pieces of your map without fully grasping what has happened and what you are doing there. You are something called a Tarnished, and have been recruited by a mysterious Golden Order to restore a fallen world. But, hours and hours into the game, it remains unclear exactly how or why.
This murkiness is one of the game’s great strengths; the sense that information is being withheld only drives you to discover further. Your mission—a vague charge to “become the Elden Lord”—starts to feel secondary to your exploration of the game’s vast map. For, rather than being crammed with tutorials and exposition and clichés, Elden Ring throws you into the midst of things. As if to say: this world is something you must see for yourself, something you must survive.
Exposition, after all, is the enemy of wonder. Used by movies to patch plot holes, video games to ennoble fetch quests, and storytellers to retrofit their tales with stakes, it is almost always a sign of narrative laziness. In video games, such info-dumps abound: someone to teach you how to use your weapons, someone to recite their traumatic backstory, someone to tell you just how important your mission is, how everyone is depending on you. From the Mass Effect trilogy to Skyrim, blockbuster games are incessantly yammering about your heroics. You are the chosen one, the Dragonborn, the war hero, the one to save the world. Quests and dialogue converge on your supremacy. You hone yourself into a savior, a super-weapon. You die a lot, but your victory is preordained.
Elden Ring is a more harrowing, humbling game. You die constantly. Other characters rarely tell you what’s going on or give you praise. Instead of interrupting your journey with cinematic cutscenes, trauma plots, plot twists, and B-movie heroics, Elden Ring is elegant and unforgiving, encouraging players to imagine and innovate as they move through the world. As games look more and more like movies, and vice versa, Elden Ring is a timely reminder that video games need not depend on cinematic tropes to succeed—even suggesting that they shouldn’t. For a video game is not a story so much as a series of encounters. A challenge, a journey, a pieced-together map.
Much of the satisfaction I’ve found in playing Elden Ring is not really satisfaction at all. Or at least not narrative satisfaction: it isn’t a matter of plot resolution and character development and beginnings and ends. Instead, it is a constant sensation of fear and awe. Every crumbling spire and abandoned library, every cursed village and fetid swamp, is filled with dangerous beasts and haunted by a feeling of loss—What happened to this place?—and terror—Is this thing going to kill me? The challenge of Elden Ring is not really to save the world. Your quest is to try in vain to make sense of its ruin, trying all the while not to die.
The bell continues to toll. If you purchase a scrap of paper from a nearby merchant, you will learn that this is a wandering mausoleum. That to access the door, you must scrape off the white bones that have barnacled its feet. And so you swing your sword and dodge its lethal footfalls. The great mausoleum kneels. The earth trembles. The bell goes silent. Awe-struck, Tarnished, you may enter.
ben tapeworm