It's easy to look back at The Stanley Parable and laugh at it. It is, after all, a kind of self-important game that said things about video games that were getting pretty tired even in 2013. I loved the Stanley Parable when I first played the mod, loved it a little less when I played the steam release, and ultimately have found it less and less compelling as time goes on, as the times in which the jokes landed got more and more distant and the commentary got more and more trite.

One might reasonably ask why such an aging process has harmed Stanley when it hasn't harmed other games on quite the same level, and my argument for that would be that Stanley, to use a memetic phrase devoid of meaning, insists upon itself. There's little room for interpretation or multifaceted interpretation of it: Stanley Parable is a two-dimensional game, and what I mean by that is that it works on two dimensions: the jokes, and the commentary. There aren't really any other characters or themes or aesthetic twists and flourishes to appreciate: it's a game that is very blunt about what it's saying, and doesn't really have anything to it other than that. Which is fine! Really! But it kinda relies on the things it's saying being really good, and maybe they were, once on the facepunch forums or on ModDb. But now? Not so much.

Which is why the prospect of Ultra Deluxe intrigued me. It represented an opportunity to provide a new experience, to build on what came before, and make a case for Stanley Parable still being relevant, over a decade after the original mod came out. Perhaps I built some unrealistic expectations for it going in, as I did honestly think that a Rebuild of Stanley Parable was the right step to take for this, and I remember feeling similarly deflated by the steam release of Stanley hewing so close to the original mod, but regardless, The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe arrives with the enthusiastic impact of a wet fart in an empty room, not so much making a case for the relevance of the work in 2022 as making a supreme demonstration for it's growing irrelevance.

What we have here is an acceptable repackaging of the original game (with some pluses being options to sidestep some of the edgier stuff in the original release, namely the unbearably cringeworthy suicide sequence, and some minuses being the stripping out of jokes in the subtitles and the loss of the language of jokes that Source familiarity provided) alongside some, on the whole, pretty dire new content. Teeth-grindingly ancient observations on collectibles and DLC that would make CTRL+ALT+DEL groan paired with the Bucket. The fucking bucket. All the bucket stuff is absolutely unbearable humor that felt like being trapped in 2012-era reddit with people going on about narwhals and bacon. The superfluity of The Bucket Arc is clearly an argument about the futility of adding extra content in a re-release, but you still went and did it, and it was shit. It's satirical bent never rises above putting a dunce hat on itself and going "look at how dumb we're being". Ultra Deluxe has the same problem as Stanley Parable proper: it cannot help but slam you in the face with it's Point and it's Jokes, and when those land it works, but in Ultra Deluxe they almost never do, so you're just left trudging through a tediously unfunny experience reliving 2015 neoGAF in the most agonizing manner imaginable.

Ultra Deluxe is not without merit: there are truly talented artists and level designers at Crows Crows Crows, and they've crafted some really amazing spaces here. It's something they're really great at: their online multiplayer game/space TheClub.zone (which was shut down to give them time to develop this lol) is proof positive of that. But underneath the enormous weight of The Writing, they're never allowed to live, to breathe beyond the confines of The Writing's vehicle, and unfortunately, The Writing here is crap. It's as simple as that.

I wanted Ultra Deluxe to let me love Stanley Parable again. To prove once and for all that it has stood the test of time, that it does have a worthwhile place in video games and video game culture. But after seeing everything Ultra Deluxe has to offer, all I can do is sigh wearily, and type my review, which is as follows.

(ahem)

"Reddit Game."

it feels somewhat rare that an indie game really captures a retro style in a way that does more than pay lip-service to its predecessors. shovel knight was one of those games: a pitch-perfect recreation of NES-style action challenges stripped away of the mechanical uncertainty of the actual games of that era. cuphead captures that for the run-and-gun in a way that makes it not only a loving tribute but a legitimate cornerstone in the genre.

cuphead feels borne by a rigorous design methodology that demonstrates a deep understanding of the fundamentals of boss design in a 2D space. each fight is undergirded by the movement and platform features; this is generally the unifying trait. plenty of fights take place on a featureless flat ground, but very quickly wrinkles such as scrolling, conveyors, limited platforms, or combinations of these are introduced. a great late-game example is the ghost train stage that features of a platform that can and must be moved between left, center, and right using parry controls. these establish for the player the laws of their dominion so to speak: what space can the player leverage? what options exist at any given time to dodge a certain obstacle?

with each phase then comes the primary attack. bosses generally lack dynamic reactive capabilities unlike a human, so they are incapable of mindgames generally speaking. thus, in virtually all boss fights the boss cycles between random attacks that the player must apply a counterstrategy against. in modern games the design parlance is as such: windup animation begets the attack proper begets an opening for a player to either 1) rest if their counterstrategy is not efficient enough to yield a counterattack or 2) counterattack. too unthreatening and the player barely needs to muster a counterattack, and too overpowered and the player will have no time to respond. cuphead weaves in a truly surprising variety of primaries to challenge the player: the enemy may momentarily remove the player's control of the space, such as with the cat at the end of the rat tank fight batting its paws to swat the right and left sides of the screen, or perhaps the enemy creates antagonistic autonomous elements that force the player to utilize their spatial reasoning and pattern recognition to deduce a projectile's movement habits and shift their position accordingly, such as in the bee queen's middle phase where she incorporates stochaistically-drifting geometric projectiles as well as bullets that move in a linear back-and-forth climb on either side of the screen.

primary attacks on their own are only a lock-and-key design principle: find the counterstrategy that works against a particular move and apply it when needed. what creates true tension in the fight are the auxillary attacks. virtually all bosses are able to separately cycle through auxillary attacks that generally involve an entirely separate on-screen entity attacking on their own accord out of sync with the primary opponent. auxillary attacks on their own already heighten the experience by creating a space-constraint intersection that forces the player to adapt their key to more than just a single lock. certain intersections of attacks may prevent successful counterattacks or force the player to fall back on safer strategies, thus making the risk-and-reward judgment more critical and ever mutating. where cuphead really succeeds is having the auxillary attacks cycle as well. it's much like having three basic collared shirts and three basic ties: the combinations they present give you nine outfits, yielding an multiplicative amount of potential attack intersections. phase one of the sea medusa fight is a great example of this: three primary attacks (either summoning ghost projectiles or bringing one of two different fish out of the water with their own projectiles) with three auxillary attacks (staggered puffer fish projectiles, a water jet that forces a positive y velocity, and bombs that explode with a octagonal bullet pattern). each on their own is manageable, but combined there is an additional level of fluidity demanded of the player with adapting on the fly to intersections they may have never seen before.

of course cuphead doesn't simply hew to these elements in every fight; it expands on them and plays with the potential they possess. take the pirate ship fight: this begins with both a small primary attack (pellets fired by the captain one by one) with an auxillary component (a barrel that moves back and forth at the top of the screen, attempting to crush the player when they pass underneath). within time the captain will begin preempting his own pellet attack with a cycle of attacks from different sources, each with their own tell: a shark that consumes the left half of the screen, small bulldog fish(?) that slide across the ground, and a squid that both creates a fountain of bullets and can turn the screen dark if not defeated in time. on its own this is a perfectly interesting fight: manage the primary and auxillary attacks while being cognizant of primary attacks from external components via tells. however, in the second phase, the ship itself begins shooting cannonballs on a timer. at this point the player must not only manage transient attacks from the captain but also track the separate rhythms of the barrel and the ship's cannonballs. these intersect in a truly polyrhythmic fashion that pushes the fight into truly challenging territory that feels immensely rewarding to lock in with.

this is also boosted by cuphead having a stellar kit and smooth controls that feel sharp without being too abrupt or linear. his ability to parry specific objects (which are colored pink to distinguish them) adds a scale of mastery of many bullet patterns, with basic familiarity only yielding the ability to dodge while a complete understanding allows navigation to specific bullets for a parry and the reward of extra super meter. the super meter attacks are all rather useful and feel well balanced, though for the full-meter arts I can't really imagine someone using anything other than invincibility. however, I found myself legitimately switching out his shots and charms for different fights, which is not to say I found all of the variety useful (I mainly stuck to chaser and spread along with the smoke dodge and one extra heart depending on the fight), but to require a level of specificity in strategy for each fight encourages me to experiment more than I may otherwise. there are virtually no points of frustration I can attribute to a failure in the controls or a lack of a specific tool; almost every time I was stumped on a particular counterstrategy I always eventually worked something out even if it wasn't optimal.

I would really go as far as to say I don't think cuphead has any particular failings or even elements of unfair frustration that I can think of. while an immensely challenging experience, the primary and auxillary attacks are synergistic in such a way that a given intersection can't truly render an attack undodgeable or debilitating. never did I feel like a particular portion was just inserted because it felt cool or to fill space; rather, every bit of the game feels handled with care and finesse. the dragon fight was the peak of this for me... that particular fight walled me and put me off the game quite a bit. while the exasperation I felt was valid, I could never pinpoint a particular aspect that really felt unfair to me. at the end of the day, those projectiles that explode into smaller projectiles when hit really preyed on my spray-and-pray instincts in a way that punished me (and many others I assume) far more than most games are willing to muster. if I had to name one little thing that did feel off to me, it was the platforms during the bee queen fight. the scrolling part and random gaps don't bother me, but their collision box doesn't feel quite lined up with the art, which sometimes led to me falling randomly in confusing ways.

I do wish the flying stages had the same level of customization as the ground stages, but understandably that's a scope issue and not something I would expect from a small production. the non-boss levels also feel a bit perfunctory, but they are all still fun and only necessary for collecting coins for purchasing items in the shop. both of these won't get in the way of anyone looking to experience this: the core of the gameplay is still the tremendous boss fights. this has given me a a nice little kick in the pants to go back and dive into the early 16-bit fundamental works that helped mold this into the genius showpiece that it is.

The ancient Egyptians postulated seven souls.

The top soul, and the first to leave at the moment of death, is Ren - the secret name. This corresponds to the director, who directs the game of your life from conception to death. The secret name is the title of your game. When you died, that's where Ren came in.

The second soul off the sinking ship is Sekem - energy, power, and light. The director gives the orders, Sekem presses the right buttons.

Number three is Khu, the guardian angel, depicted as flying away across a full moon. A bird with luminous wings and head of light. The sort of thing you might see on a screen in a video game from your Xbox. The Khu is responsible for the subject and can be injured in his defence - but not permanently, since the first three souls are eternal. They go back to heaven for another vessel. The four remaining souls must take their chances with the subject in the Land of the Dead.

Number four is Ba, the heart - often treacherous. This is a hawk's body with your face on it, shrunk down to the size of a fist. Many a hero has been brought down like Samson by a perfidious Ba.

Number five is Ka - the double. Most closely associated with the subject. The Ka, which usually reaches adolescence at the time of bodily death, is the only reliable guide through the Land of the Dead to the Western Sands.

Number six is Khaibit, the shadow memory. Your whole past conditioning from this and other lives.

𓂀

In the autumn of 2011, I got my first ‘real’ job, leaving behind the hell of zero-hour retail and office temp work to become an IT repairman at a big library. Finally, I could provide myself with food, clothing, shelter and, most importantly, video games. I loved problem-solving, working with tools and being on the computer so much already, and now had a professional outlet for all of those things that I enjoyed. It was the best job I’d ever had, but there was one weird snag - the librarians really didn’t like the cleaning and repair staff.

I’m not sure what makes librarians think that alphabetising Anne Rice novels is a more noble profession than networking 500 computers together or replacing tungsten filaments in industrial lighting systems, but nonetheless, they felt justified in keeping the workies out of every kitchen and staff lounge in the building. Mugs, coffee grounds, tea bags, milk, plates and microwaves were all kept in locked cupboards that only “academic” staff could access. Fresh out of retail hell, I just accepted this as a natural law of the universe (of course I was unworthy of a plastic cup for some water!), but in retrospect, it was a little fucked up. My “non-academic” colleagues responded to this in kind by hiding kettles, instant coffee and tin cups in electrical cupboards and storerooms, an essential act of survival misconstrued as spiteful by the microwave-havers. Without anywhere to store fridges in a stock cupboard, there was no milk to be had. Black tea or black coffee were our only options at break-time in the library.

This is how I learned to love black coffee. I had been a white-and-sugars type guy until this point in my personal hot-drink history, treating coffee more as a vehicle for warm milk then an experience in and about itself. Thirsty as hell from running around physically installing Microsoft Excel patches on computers still running Windows 98 in 2011, I had no choice but to forgo my preference for milk and just get used to gulping hot acidic bean water day in, day out when I needed to restore my hit-points. At first I didn’t enjoy it all, but like everything else in life, cultivating patience of habit can allow you to accept and adapt to almost any situation you find yourself in. 11 years later, I now drink nothing but black coffee. I could, probably, somehow - like those wine wankers you see in movies - even tell you the difference between different blends of the hot acid gloop that is burning my insides. Such is my passion for #coffee.

In the autumn of 2011, something else happened. A video game called Dark Souls launched on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, to some degree of fanfare that is still up for debate to this day. Video game historians like to mythologise the rise of the Souls series, and often claim Dark Souls launched to very little acclaim - but from my own historical perspective, I contest this claim. My memory leads me to believe the contrary - that Dark Souls had an exciting buzz about it right out of the gate - for game-fans and game-readers, at least. I was mostly a Halo and Street Fighter IV player at the time, and even I’d felt the urge to buy it on opening week. For some reason... I can’t remember why... That was over a decade ago. An age past. I don’t remember my motivation for every video game I’ve ever bought.

Friends of mine who’d foolishly bought PlayStation 3s to play Metal Gear Solid 4 derisively informed me that Dark Souls was the sequel to Demon’s Souls: their painful memories told mine that Demon’s Souls was a “stupid” and “unfair” game that treated its players with contempt and that I should consider getting Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2 instead because this one was gonna have all-new ways for 12-year-olds to militarily abuse me through the internet. I wasn’t the type of person to listen to my friends, though - I preferred to listen to anonymous message board posters and professional video game journalists. With one of my first paycheques as a fully-fledged computer janitor, I purchased a Cafe AeroPress coffee maker and a copy of Dark Souls.

... And I hated it. As my friends had prophesied, Dark Souls was relentlessly unfair. Enemies came back to life and stabbed me in the back; pathways crumbled and sent me tumbling to my doom; evil knights shrugged off my attacks and responded in kind with bigger and badder swords of their own. The infamous curse status - an affliction that permanently halves your health and prevents you from becoming human - was my final straw. I recognised the gauntlet that was being laid before me in the Undead Depths and chose to reject the challenge. I found solace in the darkness of my coffee maker and put the game away forever.

A few months later, while trying to avoid studying for the most important exams of my life, I picked the game up again. I had decided that wading around damp dark sewers as a cursed little half-health freak up to his knees in rat shit was less daunting than preparing for my final exams before my adulthood-proper. I persevered, #coffee in one hand and a Wiki in the other, learning the ins and outs of the game’s mechanics in far greater depth than any of the Relational Database Management Systems textbooks on my study desk. I would rather prepare to die than prepare to pass.

Like many rookie Dark Souls players, parrying was my Everest - though perhaps over-emphasised by the playerbase as an essential skill for completing the game, it was certainly a far more important mechanic back then than that it is today. I spent many hours in the Undead Parish practicing my defence; learning the intricacies and timings of the mechanic and its follow-ups with my undead knight partners until the synapses solidified and I could pull a parry out of my reflexes without much mental effort. It was the key I needed to unlock my progress through the game, and I proudly rode my parrying prowess to the Kiln of the First Flame, linking the fire in ignorance of an unintended side-effect this new reflex had developed in me in the new ages to come.

Years later, I got the chance to play the now-infamous Dark Souls 2 demo at a video game expo and felt compelled to put my parry skills to the test once more. Despite the fact a coked-out Bandai Namco Games employee was offering free t-shirts to anyone who could beat the Mirror Knight in their allotted 15-minute slot, I persevered in the starting area until I could get my timings down once more. After a few whiffs and some off-colour comments from our jaw-clicking host, I finally managed to bat back a shadowy blade. It was at that moment that I discovered that Dark Souls 2 had a brand new feature - the parries smelt and tasted of black coffee. Despite all the gamer sweat and farts and poorly-ventilated electronics in my environment, I could sense coffee inside my brain. Hours of parry practice while sipping black coffee in my bedroom had built a permanent association between parrying and coffee in my mind. A soul memory.

I’m sure you’re familiar with the concept of soul memory, even if you know it by another name (Mikhail Bakhtin calls it the chronotope, for instance). The taste of spaghetti bolognese reminds you of a good day at your friend’s house in 2002. The fresh scent of factory plastic that emanates from a new video game takes you back to the summer holiday when your mum finally bought you Timesplitters 2 despite it being rated a 15+. Perhaps a particularly bad hangover from a night of drinking rum and coke has forever ruined the taste of Pepsi for you. Petrol makes you think about the forest, for some reason you don’t remember. And so on. You’ve all seen Ratatouille, I guess. I don’t need to labour at this point.

Soul memory is the currency of the sequel and the franchise, and in our current era, soul memory is undergoing hyperinflation - Star Wars: The Force Awakens; Spider-Man: No Way Home; Ghostbusters: Afterlife - filmmakers are eagerly trying to collect soul memories so they can take them to the bureau de change and cash out in dollars. You might baulk at this suggestion that the scent of your grandmother’s baked potatoes can be commodified, but I think there’s ample evidence to suggest that no link in your mind is safe from capital’s claws.

Video games are perhaps the most egregious traders of soul memory. Video games, even the best ones, are standing tall on the shoulders upon shoulders of prior moments in space-time - real and imagined - all the way back down to Donkey Kong. Re-releases and remakes and remasters and retro collections are nostalgia-primers for experiences you might not even have been alive for - we all love Pac-Man, even though we may not have met him in an 80s arcade hall; you and I replicated those experiences instead with a movie) or a PlayStation 3 Arcade Archive or a Pac-Man music video on MTV; phenomena best exemplified by the teenagers I saw on Twitter who are collecting Sonic the Hedgehog 3 & Knuckles promotional Happy Meal toys from 1993 to bring their souls closer to their blue-haired messiah. By letting you collect and play your figurative Rainbow Roads again and again and again in generation after generation after generation of product, video games explore the loss of a childhood place, and our attempts to recreate it.

And so what if the place that we are in the midst of is different from the physical space that we currently inhabit? What if the things we yearn for are located elsewhere, in another place or a falsely-remembered past, and all we now carry within us is an image of this place. We may remember only elements or impressions of it: there may be certain objects, sounds, a level, a character, special moves, cutscenes, or online battles; all of which come out in a manner that we cannot control or understand. Yet any of these elements or impressions make us feel at home in a way that we cannot find in the physical space where we are now stuck. Being displaced and yet capable of remembering the particularity of place: it is the state of being dislocated yet able to discern what it is that locates us. We have a great yearning, but we often cannot fulfil it with anything but memories from our soul.

In my review of Halo Infinite at the end of last year, I suggested the possibility that game developers are attempting to harness soul memory in new and exciting ways, the limits between your imagination and theirs almost fully removed in this gilded age of RTX and NGX and Speed Tree and shader-caching and other computer stuff I don’t understand; the world expanding ever-wider as we slot in more and more chips, spreading the channels between CPU and memory (both silicon and cerebellum) ever-wider. The end-state, no doubt, is a game that never ends, expanding outwards like our universe, all contained in the heart of an eternally-burning electric star on the platter of your hard drive. But how do you fuel a world-game of such approaching-infinite size? With the dependable financial and artistic mainstays of gaming, of course - the memory of/reverie in/nostalgia for/ known experiences, known systems, known self. Which makes Halo - a DirectX-based comfort food of the 18-35 crowd - an ideal candidate for colonisation via constant computer creation.

With Halo Infinite, it’s hard to gauge the intentionality of the author (and the multi-billion dollar corporation employing the author). By all accounts, Infinite was a scrap-piece, a million shattered pieces of contractor work and discarded concepts fused into a Holiday Product - something that, at least initially, presents itself as a never-ending ring-world: Zeta Halo could not be more apt as a setting for the beyond-open world template that’s come into vogue this generation (see also: Microsoft’s other tentpole, Forza Horizon). But was this product forged with any purpose greater than a shareholder deadline, a gilded-gold ring that can’t sustain itself beyond a financial quarter (never mind an eternal age!)? Fields upon fields of the same retrofuturistic alien base and knowing remarks about crunch and copy-pasted environments from your maiden, Cortana Weapon, imply that Halo Infinite was an illusion produced by profit - a defective ring-world, nothing more; but there are, at the very least, implications that game developers know what they create. In this new Halo instalment, Master Chief, regretting his transition out of cryostasis, is the only character in the game who opposes the rebuilding of the Halo installations. Too bad, John - you’re going for another last-minute warthog ride to the sounds of early-2000s progressive hard rock.

Does Halo Infinite sound familiar? Well, you might have played Dark Souls 3 and its downloadable follow-up: The Ringed City. Hidetaka Miyazaki's Souls series homecoming may have been hailed as a "return to form" for the franchise after the polarising reception to Dark Souls 2, but this oft-quoted games-journalist soundbite has a double-edge to it - namely, that it quite literally returned Dark Souls to its original form, repurposing locations, bosses, and emotional beats from the games that came before it. Lothric isn't a million lightyears away from Zeta Halo - it forges a similarly flimsy ring of questionable geography and architecture, a Dark Souls Disneyland built from item and character references that no longer mean anything beyond commercialised self-sabotage, names and item descriptions appearing only for the purposes of cynical, cyclical continuity with its predecessors. The game knew what it was creating with itself in its Bandai-Namco-hued orange-yellow wasteland - an idea perhaps best exemplified in the Abyss Watchers, a gang of frenzied Artorias fanboys from the Firelink Shrine who serve no literary purpose beyond infighting among themselves about the ways Artorias of the Abyss was like, really, really cool. (For some reason, I am now recalling the fact my PlayStation 4 copy of Dark Souls 3 came with a mail-order slip for a £344.99 statue of Artorias from the Bandai-Namco Official European Store...) These references without continuity, these connections without purpose... all they do is ring a Pavlovian spirit bell of soul memory in your brain for a fleeting moment. Nothing more. And Dark Souls 3 didn't just know this - it made it a central tenet of its thematics, even building its last-ever DLC around the concept of painting a forever-world made of the Dark Soul itself. Known experiences, known systems, known self, known forever. Consuming the Gods without question, like Gael, until the coming Age of Dark.

[[LAUNCH DEADLINE REACHED - BACKLOGGD SHAREHOLDERS ARE DEMANDING A Q2 LAUNCH OF THIS REVIEW ]]
// TODO: placeholder for another 9 paragraphs discussing the cyclical ages of fire depicted in the Dark Souls trilogy here and how the idea can be metatextually applied to the development cycles of each Souls game and their growing commercial impact vs. receding artistic impact. This part will be included in a post-launch patch to this review at an undetermined date. Hopefully never.

In Buddhism, the Four Noble Truths are the truths of the “Noble Ones”: those who are deemed “spiritually worthy". These truths are:

- Dukkha (suffering, incapable of satisfying, painful) is an innate characteristic of existence in the realm of samsara, the world-cycle of death and rebirth we all live through. Existence is pain, to some degree.

- Samudaya (origin, arising, combination; 'cause'): together with dukkha arises taṇhā ("craving, desire or attachment, lit. "thirst”). While tanha is traditionally interpreted in western languages as the 'cause' of dukkha, tanha can also be seen as the factor tying us to dukkha, or as a response to dukkha, trying to escape it; a suffering often understood to be a combination of a consumptive desire for fleeting things, destructive hatefulness, and ignorance of the world as it truly is.

- Nirodha (cessation, ending, confinement) dukkha can be ended or contained by the renouncement or letting go of this taṇhā; the confinement of tanha releases the excessive bind of dukkha; the end of suffering. We are finite flawed creatures with only two ways out: either cyclical death, or transcendence through enlightenment.

- Magga (the path, the Noble Eightfold Path) is the path leading to the confinement of tanha and dukkha. The next path in the teachings; Buddhism’s sequel, post-launch DLC or content update.

☸

Elden Ring is an action role-playing game developed by FromSoftware and published by Bandai Namco Entertainment. The game was directed by Hidetaka Miyazaki and made in collaboration with fantasy novelist George R. R. Martin, who provided material for the game's setting. It was released for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S on February 25, 2022.

Elden Ring is presented through a third-person perspective, with players freely roaming its interactive open world. Gameplay elements include combat featuring several types of weapons and magic spells, horseback riding, summons, and crafting. Elden Ring received critical acclaim, with praise for its open-world gameplay, fantasy setting, and evolution of the Souls formula. The game sold 12 million copies within three weeks of its release.

Elden Ring is From Software's first game of a new decade that follows an Age of Dark.

The exciting thing about a long voyage like Elden Ring is that it can inhabit so many spaces and times within your life, entwining its soul memories with your own in so many more ways than just an association between coffee and parrying. Due to its epic scale, brutal difficulty and my desire to travel through it as un-aided as possible, it took me four months to beat the game. Looking back from the now, the distance from February until May feels, as it often does in modern times, like a lifetime and a moment. Nothing and everything happened within the standard cycles of my life. I got up and went to work every day, playing through Elden Ring in spare moments and evenings. A war broke out while I was playing Elden Ring. I finished all six seasons of The Sopranos and four seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the time period I existed within while attempting to beat Elden Ring for the first time, and I noted that Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleed for the PlayStation 2 plays surprisingly similarly to Elden Ring. I went abroad for the first time in over two years, often thinking about Elden Ring while looking at the cathedrals and sweeping vistas of Barcelona. I saw a bunch of my friends in person for the first time in years while playing Elden Ring, and we discussed what builds were cool and which characters were cool. When I started Elden Ring, social distancing and facemasks were still mandatory in many places; when I finished Elden Ring, they were not.

So how do these new memories of mine intermingle with those presented in Elden Ring? Does Hoarfrost Stomp taste like marzipan? Is the Altus Plateau a portal to the golden fields of childhood freedom? Have I come to understand Godfrey as a Tony Soprano-like patriarchal figure in relation to Godrick's AJ? Perhaps nothing as crass or immediately interdependent as that. Has playing Elden Ring while existing in 2022 caused me to draw personal and societal parallels between my different lives? I'm tempted to say yes. I'm tempted to take apart Elden Ring's Elden Ring piece-by-piece and point at its golden roots and talk about the scarlet rot and the human ashes that drown the golden skyscrapers of Leyendell and all the ways in which this tale of souls and swords can be applied to someone who travels in the world of our present. But I'd be here even longer than I already am, hanging onto the dying embers of a rambling essay that has gone on too long. In a sense, choosing what aspect of Elden Ring to unpack and explore is exactly how the game makes you feel when you're contemplating which path to take at a crossroads in the Lands Between - whether to explore a cave, a castle, a peninsula, a continent, a realm, a galaxy, an age, a concept of the afterlife turned into a video game level. Naturally, you have to let go of possibility and walk down a single path in order to move forward.

This painful push and pull between potential possibility and your (perhaps pre-determined) path is what makes Elden Ring so compelling. Of course games like Breath of the Wild have already explored this concept of 'go-anywhere', but not in an artistic sense that exists beyond the controller and the things that are happening literally on the screen. In Breath of the Wild, going up a hill will get you into a fight with a bird and you will do a puzzle and you will get a cool sword and you will have a lot of fun - but experiences begin to entwine and overlap, memories becoming overwritten and jumbled in endless plains of rolling green and goblin. Memories require delineation if they are to be stored within containers of consciousness, and in Elden Ring, going up a hill can turn into a 20-hour odyssey through the ashes of time to explore an all-out conquest that was once fought over the very nature of Godhood, where you will meet and contemplate primordial, psychological and philosophical concepts in the form of a dude with a wolf head who reads Berserk. Or maybe you will explore the entirety of a lost kingdom on the edge of the afterlife's cosmos and wonder why it exists or even existed at all, all while the ghost of a forgotten world-serpent caves your skull in. And you will get a cool sword and you will have a lot of fun and those unique, memorable moments will bond with a greater space and time in your head.

Exploration of space beyond the time is a fundamental element of Elden Ring and the Elden Ring. From Software understand that space-time extends with video games, through video games, in video games - that old cliche of a gamer living a thousand lives. In much the same way that it can be confusing to refer to Elden Ring as both a video game product and a concept within the world of Elden Ring itself (it is amusing to note how difficult it is to get the wiki page for the Elden Ring on the Elden Ring Wiki), so too can it be confusing to separate memory and space-time as they exist within and outwith ourselves, our Golden Orders of subjective fact and fiction; moments and how we place ourselves inside them, the near-infinite subjectivity of experience that so often causes people to argue with each other over matters that are ultimately our inner order of perception and recollection. Was Radahn right? Was Malenia right? Sound off in the comments below.

For a long time, one of my most-visited YouTube videos was this performance of Dragon Quest V’s music by the NHK Symphony Orchestra. The music is a fantastic soundtrack to a comments section full of positive nostalgia in a foreign language. Google Translate doesn’t get the full meaning across, but you can feel all that’s being said despite the barriers between people on opposite sides of the internet's round table. This is the comment that always stands out to me when I scroll down:

“This was a game of my dad’s era, but it makes me nostalgic for that time all the same.”

I only beat Dragon Quest V in 2019, but I feel this same nostalgia, these same memories, this same realisation of a video game world as a portal through soul memory. I beat the iOS port of the DS port of the original Super Famicom version while sitting on the toilet at work, but my shared DQV reality with that kid, and his father before him, who played the game on different hardware in a different space in a different time, allows me to understand them. We saved the world and that adventure will stay with us all for a lifetime. Bur this feeling isn't anything unique - throw a dart at the board of YouTube's video game soundtracks and you'll find this phenomenon replicated for pretty much every video game ever made. Queen Rennala stands in a Grand Library and offers you endless rebirth.

The beauty of Elden Ring's length, scale and scope is that it's also capable of playing with this concept of chronotope from within. Whereas Dark Souls 3 relied on imagery and ideology from previous entries to invoke soul memory with (intentionally) cheap referentiality, Elden Ring instead chooses to loop over itself many times over in order to play new games with your mind. There are many ways in which the game achieves this, and if you've ever griped about "reused content", you probably know the kind of thing I mean - fortresses reappearing in different states of decay and ruin; enemies returning again and again as if pursuing you through the Lands Between; the souls of wolves and trees and tree-avatars haunt the earth; the same dungeons and dragons in different locations, sometimes appearing as battlefields of the present, sometimes appearing as sites of historical importance - Great War memorials on a school field trip. The game even deigns to reference the wider From Software cosmology (I am using every word in my vocabulary to avoid typing the term "Soulsborne"), but interestingly chooses to place a lot of these capricious callbacks in dank, dirty, decaying swamps - they are deemed to be hollow, undead references. In a sense, it's a game so vast that it's able to create nostalgia for itself.

For me, the most interesting way the game exemplifies soul memory is in its boss battles. In our realm, the bosses of Elden Ring are something of a contentious topic - out of some 150+ battles that put grand old names above life-bars, only five in the whole game are wholly unique. "How could the developers be so lazy as to do this?!" is the rallying cry of the passionate masses who are seemingly unwilling to afford From Software any artistic agency or intentionality of design. In a series/franchise/whateverthisis like the Souls games, isn't the whole point that you're prepared to die, over and over again, in the same battles, just like the demigods that you seek to surpass? You're in battle against spiritual and physical elements of the universe itself! The Fallingstar Beast appears twice in the game, but you didn't fight him twice, did you? I'm willing to wager you fought him five times, ten times, twenty times, maybe many times more. Why delineate by encounters in space when you can just as easily use time? Was each death and rebirth just "reused content", or was it an intentional part of an experience that the game's developers wanted you to live through? The game's named after a big old circle, for crying out loud!

This isn't an attempt by me to reframe the reuse of content as a purely artistic choice - of course it was done to gild the game's vast size and ensure every crevice of the world map had some experience of some form for the player, but practical compromises made within the constraints of development can be moulded, with appropriate care, into art. We can challenge From's tendency to rework frameworks, but aren't they trapped in their own never-ending cycle by capital, working to the drumbeat of 100 million sales? You may rankle when yet another boss pulls off the iconic Scarlet Aeonia (itself a reference/homage/repetition of a Magic the Gathering card ), but it's all in aid of your personal character development and the development of the game's characters and their relationships in the Lands Between. While I certainly wouldn't call any of my many, many, many battles with Malenia and her acolytes art in and of themselves, my memories of these multi-faceted repetitions tie back to an essential theme of the Souls series - overcoming the greatest boss of all: yourself.

It would be trite of me to spend a ton of time telling everyone about a universal human experience and how it applies to a series of video games that have sold enough copies to make them almost universal gamer experiences, so instead I'll just share a soul memory of Elden Ring that I think embodies this value of repetition and self-mastery. The Subterranean Shunning-Grounds (the names in this game rock lol) is essentially the final dungeon of the game, a terrible theme park of sewer content that long-time fans of these games will immediately recognise - pipes, poison, basilisks, curses, rats, little fucked up gargoyle dudes. It's essentially all the most annoying things about playing a Souls game in a single package, ramped up to 11 by twisted virtue of the fact this is the final area in a 100-hour game that stands at the end of a path of six other 100-hour games with similarly wicked ideas. 11 years after giving up on Dark Souls, I was once again a half-health freak up to his knees in rat shit. Indeed, it is a punishingly difficult experience to be a half-health freak up to his knees in rat shit - even with a high-defense build, certain enemies can take you out in a hit or two. And if they aren't capable of taking you out in a hit or two, they have almost certainly been carefully positioned next to a giant pit that can take you out in a single hit. It's an infuriating area, yet entirely optional. You don't have to do it to yourself, but at this point, it just feels right that you should pursue whatever nebulous reward that the Shunning-Grounds harbour. And what is the final test at the end of this dungeon? A dragon? An army of the undead? Another cosmic deity? No! It's a jumping puzzle in a tomb of skeletons and corpses piled to the ceiling - an incredibly tricky test of wits that combines your physical dexterity with an eye for problem-solving. It took me dozens of tries to master, and memories of the hallways leading from the bonfire to the puzzle chamber have now been seared into my mind. A video game challenge that made me scream out in pain for the first time in years... Fuck that bullshit!!! And at the end of it all, what is your reward for completing this task? No runes or swords or armor. Just a spell called Inescapable Frenzy, an incantation that sends the minds of humans towards madness. Let it never be said that From Software do not have a sense of humour! No wonder some players choose to enter into a covenant with Chaos a few moments later...

"try jumping" is a message you see a lot in Elden Ring. One of the oldest pranks in the Souls fan playbook, it's a nasty little trick that encourages the freshly chosen undead to leap from high places with promise of some unknowable reward. Inevitably, it always leads to one thing - a painful, costly death. Why do players take the time to encourage people they'll never meet to commit suicide, and why do so many people mark these messages as helpful to others? Probably for the same unknowable reason that people tell each other to kill themselves via other mediums of the internet. Ugly as "try jumping" may be, it has always fit comfortably with the artistic notions of Dark Souls as an analog for the neverending battle against depression and misery, the difficulty that comes with suppressing one's urge to die, to give up, to leave it all behind. One of Elden Ring's first concessions to new players is to finally explain this meta-mechanic - if you fall for the very first "try jumping" message that the game places before you, you end up in a tutorial area. Hopefully you won't make the same mistake twice now. From Software know that the Internet-at-large is one of the most lethal enemies their games have to offer, and I fought against that wicked foe by making a point of putting down some "no jumping ahead" messages while on my journey.

The online component of these games has always existed, but has never really been explicitly acknowledged within the game-world beyond a few experimental instances like The Ringed City's Spear of the Church. As the ostensible herald of a new age Elden Ring takes the first steps toward acknowledging ours, supplementing a mechanism with a metaphor. To avoid beating around the bush - I think the Roundtable Hold is the Internet. A realm inaccessible by horse nor foot, where the people of the world meet up to sell shit, trade stories, gossip and fuck around, all under an oath of no physical contact. Per Varre's comment, the Roundtable is "a place for has-beens trying to look important but unable or unwilling to actually take any action". Sound familiar? There is a place in Leyndell Royal Capital that looks exactly like the Roundtable Hold, but no one is there - the Hold is, in effect, a virtual, imagined space; a simulation in parallel existence to reality. It's a trick that From has pulled before, but characters and their occupation of parallel space-times with differing persona spells out that this is, in some classic weird-ass cosmic FromSoft way, a digiverse within a digiverse.

Ensha, Dung Eater and D are the most vivid exemplars of this idea. Three masked edge, lords who spend their time in the Roundtable acting aloof and cool and above it all; their corporeal forms lashing out with hatred against women in the meatspace of the Lands Between, giving away their Inner Order to pursue violence against Malenia, Fia and - in the Loathsome Dung Eater's case - every woman and child in the known universe. (See also: Gideon/Seluvis and their relationship to the class-conscious Nepheli Loux: Gideon as a gatekeeper who encourages you to overcome your Maidenless status and venerate yourself in the eyes of the Roundtable's men ("the road of champions"); Seluvis as a PUA who tries to involve you in a date-rape scheme.) In the case of D, the game implies the existence of a "twin brother" - an alternate persona - who behaves differently depending on the space-time he inhabits. We see him in reality, unreality and Nokron's post-reality afterlife, behaving more aggressively in each plane until he loses bravado when faced with with the bare-faced truth of inescapable Death itself. The player has the option of giving him back his mask and suit of armour, which ultimately leads to a violent death for "that bitch" Fia, a woman who recognises men possessing a warmth that has nowhere to go. In the case of the Dung Eater, whose mortal form is trapped within the aforementioned ur-Souls palace of the Shunning-Grounds, the connection to our ugly internet personalities is a little more explicit, a seeming admission by From Software of all the ugliness that arises from building one's personality around a nexus of digital souls and swords. If From are shackled on some level to this medium of expression, the least they have done here is develop some self-awareness and critique. At the game's climax, the Roundtable burns out, telling us more or less everything we need to know about the developer's feelings on the Web Between Worlds that we inhabit and the paths we choose to walk in each realm of spirit. Will this Roundtable fall to the mortal ashes of Leydendell too, or is there potential for All to achieve Magga, the enlightened transcendence of Buddhist teaching?

The natural follow-on from this topic is an exploration of the golden Grace, the "maidenless" concept and its real-world implications, but I feel the paragraph above demonstrates why it's unwise to provoke red phantoms in the hold through discussion of certain topics and experiences. Elden Ring is a game where not every path should be taken, and, as I already said like three times before (lol), the same holds true of a review; I'm not sure I have the experience or incantations necessary to step into that toxic swamp, lest I provoke an invasion. Instead, I choose to focus on the light that casts this darkness: Friendship. The golden light of the summon sign is the natural enemy of the blood-red invader, and Elden Ring makes this relationship more explicit than its predecessors by mandating that human invaders can only go after parties of two or more players - the eternal war between the "git gud" and the "git help" is now more aggressive than ever before. By changing the mechanics of the franchise's online component, From Software have peppered their latest instalment with challenges to the sensibilities of try-hard players that remind me most of Sakurai's implementation of the anti-competitive tripping mechanic in Super Smash Bros. Brawl. While I think the omnipotent anger and cultural overpowerment of the "git gud" crowd is perhaps overstated by the fans at large, it's an unfortunate signifier of their ever-presence that after seven of these games I still get second thoughts about asking for help when I need it.

The kindness of strangers is an enduring motif of Elden Ring, a natural tonic to the toxic anger that permeates every environment you journey across. Melina, the thematic emodiment of this kindness, turns your experience and soul memory into strength, a companion who appears to those at risk of stoking personal flames of frenzy as a guide who leads you towards the Erdtree and the Elden Ring. I don't think it's a coincidence that the game gets inordinately tougher to handle by yourself in the wake of her ultimate sacrifice; investments in endgame Rune Levels feel less substantial, less meaningful, than those conversions of experience made while travelling with Melina at RL100 and below. (The Ranni questline, with its literal idolation of a young girl as a peculiar doll the player can contemplate in silence by the fire, dovetails nicely with Melina's death and serves as an interesting pair of endgame decisions the player can take, further compounded by the Roundtable stuff discussed above) The final stretch of the game demands, almost explicitly, that the player look beyond themselves and extend a hand of need to those around them in much the same way one should following a deeply personal loss.

If you did not touch a summon sign or ring a spirit bell or read a fan-wiki after Leyendell, know that I know you are a liar and a punk and you will be judged far more harshly by my council than the guys who spent six hours outside Maliketh trying to bring in a sorcerer called Pigf#cker or whatever other desperate means they chose to undertake in order to realise their ambitions. Everyone needed help to finish Elden Ring; everyone needed help to stave off the Frenzied Flame that the Elden Ring's Golden Order was trying to stoke from within you on your personal path to enlightenment. Fought the Godskin Duo by yourself, did you bro? Well, the Godskin Apostle didn't. He brought in someone to help him. Are you really that stupid? The legend of Let Me Solo Her didn't develop from the tremendous feat of beating Malenia solo - was this noble pothead the first person to ever beat her by himself? Of course not. The legend developed as a veneration of kindness, a manifestation of will and memory and dreams of ambitions, a symbol of those Tarnished who offer their help to those who need it most: Let Me Solo Her is our idealised savior, a breakup bro for the maidenless, a hero who will help you fight your hardest battles and overcome your most painful soul memories. Stay isolated and lost in your past, or find your friends on the path and start living your life.

Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well.

Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really.

How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that.

How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty.

And yet it all seems limitless.

So what of soul memory, the idea I spent so long talking about at the start of this review? Well, that's another thing that's beautiful about Elden Ring - I'm not done playing it yet. Much in the same way I wasn't done playing Dark Souls after I'd put down the pad, Elden Ring has manifested itself in my everyday life and my relationships with the souls and space-time and coffee granules around me. It's difficult to write a conclusive conclusion for an Elden Ring review because it doesn't feel like the game is over yet. I fought the Elden Beast, I saw an ending, I saw the credits, but evidently I can't stop thinking about the game and the ideas and memories and experience it imbued me with. I'm walking on an invisible path in a consecrated snowfield of boundless white, trying to find my noble truth and inner order and greater will by constantly making sense of everything I've seen, heard and felt through, with and in my lives lived, tilting at windmills in the gardens of madness within this life and beyond. You are too. Let's face it together.

𓂀

The seventh soul is Sekhu. The remains.

Considering how cacophonous the platforming genre can sometimes get, hardly do I ever see Jak and Daxter be praised for how quiet and serene it manages to be. Not just within its restrained use of a subdued soundtrack that rarely oversteps the game, but also in its ability to utilize the newly provided power and performance of Sony's new console to create what I can only describe as one of my favorite videogame Zen like experiences.

The non existence of intrusive loading times consists to this day one of Jak and Daxter's biggest selling points, which added to its accessible and leisurable difficulty allows for the traversal of the game from start to finish without much setback or frustration. The lack of challenge would in any other case be a contentious matter regarding the game's quality, but it ultimately matters little when it is done so effortlessly in Jak's shoes.

While not to discredit the game's colorful imaginative world and its set of creative challenges, it's Jak's movement that makes the collectathon venture so much fun. Complementing a generous moveset of both vertical and horizontal options are also number of animations and sound effects that give life and expression to Jak and his comraderie with Daxter, be it running down a hill to roll jump off a cliff or when stopping after a long stretch of running as Jak continues to run in place and the wind blows his hair, an effort that sadly even the sequels would eventually diminish.

It's tempting to group Jak and Daxter with its collectathon predecessors and analyze it within the context of being at the intersection of old and new gen iterating on a genre already being left behind, but the chill vibe accomplished by Naughty Dog warrants its place in the pantheon of 3D platformers, and even if my heart is with its sequel's identity crisis, I will always gladly spend an afternoon 100% it and zoning out to the tune of another obtained power cell. It leaves me in such a state of contendedness that I can't even hate on that god awful complenionist ending.

Surprised by how little I hate this. On paper, it's pure gunk of a game, all about being a little seratonin plant that stimulates the brain with the fun chemicals by employing the most base level of visual power escalation. It's not just number go up, it's projectile go so Up you can barely see the field anymore. It's all pretty basic stuff, but that's the appeal - a game stripped down to bare essentials, the character arc of a fully-fledged Metroidvania condensed to maybe 30-minute intervals. A thin Roguelite affair with all the trappings that smacks of a Flash golden-era desktop toy. I'm happy to call this game shite, but it's like yelling at a cheap stress ball and I am well aware of the desperate things we do when we have to listen to a podcast. The veneer of Vampire Survivors is pretty hilarious, uses Castlevania's aesthetic right down to stealing monster designs and items and stuff, alongside this unashamed casino spin where you're pulling gatchas from chests and rolling for good pickups. The music and sound effects sound like a pub fruit machine constantly screaming for attention all the while I'm mowing down the devil's legions in gothic castles.

I see the appeal, I really do, but I'm one of those freaks that watches a movie without tearing my eyes off the screen to blink. Stripping down a game to the point where it is nothing but mechanical gratification isn't my thing, I just need the narrative thrust or linear hand-crafted oven-cooked pomp and care or else a game just loses me and I forget it the moment it exits my peripheral. If I was a kid that had to pretend to do work in IT class in the year of our lord 2022 this would probably be my go-to, but I was definitely better off doing the same with Warning Forever.

I'm glad to inform that Inside's dystopic orwellian nightmare is still an effective demonstration of what strong compelling imagery and setting can do for storytelling, acting as spiritual sequel to what was an otherwise meandering experience that indulged on the worst tendencies and trends of the indie "games are art" landscape, trimming out most of the unnecessary fat that would get in the way of the actual meat of the "fragile boy going through a hostile environment" concept.

Beyond the immediately noticeable vast improvement in texture, color, sound design and animation work Inside has over Limbo's amateurish monochrome and blurred style, the addition of depth to its massive and imposing backgrounds that juxtapose with the main protag's railroaded 2D axis manages to instill a sense of bleakness and insignificance unmatched in videogame settings, and utilizing its industrial and desolate landscapes as the core instrument to tell its story, the limited dimension allowed to the player is enough to raise intrigue and curiosity as Inside deliberately ofuscates and limits what you glimpse off its distant and alluring backgrounds.

Tying it all up, you have a seamless and intuitive gameplay experience that manages to rectify the lanky and awkward controls that bogged down Limbo and that instead focuses more on the strengths of the cinematic platformer genre, conveying narrative through the pure act of constant movement. Replaying it again, Inside proves to be a much more exasperating endeavour, as you are stopped dead on your tracks to solve puzzles more often than you would like. Fortunately, the fluid animations and perceptible interactivity keep a brisk pace going and utilize said puzzles to reinforce the themes and narrative of the game with a level of craftmanship that Limbo rarely ever managed to pull off.

These aspects alone put Inside on a pedestal far and above Limbo's artistic aspirations, but it's the finale that elevates it beyond what people ever expected it to achieve all the way back in 2016. The centerpiece of Inside and what the whole game builds towards to, the abrupt shift it takes in its last act is still one of the most incredible and well crafted turns I have ever seen a videogame pull off, feeling simultaneously alien and second nature to control and barrelling its way into a catharsis that recontextualizes what came before it and fills its final note with poignancy by the mere act of taking control away from you for a few secs, as you flick the analog sticks one last desperate time.

Much has already been said about Inside's meta commentary on the nature of player agency and the illusion of control, interpretations that are made evident with the unlocking of the secret ending and the decoding of the game's plot, and while I understand that could lead to some people eye rolling as we get yet another postmodern game using the nature of the medium to exploit these concepts, I think Inside manages to pull it off solely based on the strength of its thematic cohesiveness that brings it all together at the end. And its impressive how Inside is able to balance its prevasive and easily understood authoritarian imagery with more subtle and easy to miss nuances that turn a motionless chick in the background into a masterclass of foreshadowing and establish a simple hidden in plain sight diorama as the game's version of 1984's "boot on a human face".

Regardless, Inside's ability to keep its subtext hidden in its scenery is its biggest strength, running instead on tone and atmosphere alone, telling all you need to know from the first moment you take control of the boy in red, and allowing the player the decision to be invested or not in its world, one you will desperately want to get inside of.

while "puzzle action" was not necessarily a new concept in the late '90s, mr driller decides to literally drop its titular hero into the claustrophobia of a tightly-packed falling-block playfield and let him scramble ever deeper to avoid being crushed. the arcade mode establishes two opposing forces of urgency: an air gauge that decreases with each block you break and the constant threat of unstable blocks succumbing to gravity above you. my first inclination (and I assume that of most new players) was to dig like crazy while making lateral movements in a mad dash to each 500 ft marker. of course this is wasteful and will result in many missed air canisters along the way (which refill your gauge), and eventually my mind began scanning the area below me sussing out the most efficient paths towards the bottom. larger block structures destroyed in a single puff will open long corridors that the player can quickly move through, and on easier difficulties it seems these often will lead to air canisters.

eventually I began to actually slow down and take greater stock of my surroundings, especially when it came to trapped canisters that could be opened up with a bit of careful block trimming in the vicinity. canister acquisition became a much more measured activity where at a moment's glance I needed to determine if a given canister was easy enough to secure or should be left behind as I continued further and further into the depths. however, past a certain point you've seen everything the game has to offer, and it remains an open question on whether you really need to grind for score or increase your maximum depth if there's little variation past trickier canister placement and more traps to enclose unsuspecting players in near-inescapable formations. during the occasional "bonus stage" areas the structures are much larger and more entangled, and it makes it easy to get caught falling with no control for longer than feels comfortable, and it was after playing several of these that I figured I had done my time in the arcade mode and really wanted to move on.

other than a one-life survival mode that parallels the arcade mode, there's the fascinating time attack mode which functions as timed and coherently designed puzzles for the player to solve. rather than air the stages are littered with time reduction items that are generally vital to collect in order to place under the target time and progress to the next stage. finding the optimal route from item to item becomes key, and the structures around them serve as a guiding hand from the developers shuttling you along. unfortunately the window for sliding through some of these obviously-intended pathways is rather tight, and changing the exact blocks you destroy along the way or showing up a bit late can radically change the block layout, generally resulting in accidentally getting crushed. what's particularly annoying that is that showing up early can have the same effect, which seems antithetical to the time attack concept but also intrinsic to the rube goldberg-esque structures in some of these levels. thus these encourage more trial-and-error rather than proper puzzle solving, and it highlights one of the core issues with the concept: it's really difficult to actually manipulate the blocks to fall how you want them given the fast pace of the game, the limited player kit, and the fraility of the avatar. the frenzy that ensues is the strongest drawing point of the title, but it creates a wide gulf in the intermediate zone of play that pushed me off the title given that, as mentioned prior, there isn't enough variety to really press me into continuing to hone my skills.

regardless, I do recommend those interested in the title to definitely sit through those first set of ten time attack levels. the difficulty seems so high at the start but quickly becomes approachable; the only one I needed to watch a video for was Mansion and its elevator ride mechanic that requires some rather precise movement to succeed at. reaching a bona fide credits scroll at the end of these felt satisfying, even if I'm not positive that my skills in this mode necessarily transferred over to the arcade mode like I had hoped. there's a set of advanced time attack levels with mirrored layouts and stricter time limits as well, though after trying a couple I think I had my fill and was ready to move on from this title.

addendum: supremely comfy in a handheld format. I played it on my psp but it looks perfectly playable on wonderswan and GBC as well, not that those are any easier to access... (presumably some version of it can be played on 3ds, sanctioned or otherwise). also the soundtrack is an eclectic mix of propellant rhythms with surprisingly synergistic strings on top. I'm shocked the composer (go shiina, also known for his contributions to ace combat, tales, the later tekkens, and god eater) wasn't involved with katamari given the similarities between their soundtracks, down to certain motifs in both works.

I haven't played many shmups, so I can't properly say much interesting stuff by comparing this game with other shooting game references, but ZeroRanger is one of the few games that made me feel astounded by the developer’s vision, even though the game is quite small.
One thing I really liked about this game is that the show-sets, obstacles, level progression, and narrative bits are connected like a monstrous circus train, and it runs at you full-speed with no downtime.
Even though the game’s runtime is around 1 hour (for 1 cc), The game is dense with “interactable” spectacles that are comparable to other lengthy indie games like Celeste. I don’t know if that was the right comparison, but there were so many cases where I thought the game developers grind too much to make every moment explosive and memorable even though they took only 20 or so seconds to move on to the next scene. I can’t pick my favorite scene out of all the transitions and build-ups, but the seamless flow between round 1 and round 2 was noteworthy.
Every section has a different-looking enemy with bullet patterns that work differently, so you must change the positioning strategy and weapon constantly. Unlike Sol Cresta -which is the first shmup I played-, there is no slow-down for changing the weapons, so there are no delays in between bullet swaps, and fitting to this gameplay style, enemies come in horde from 360’ degree. The dynamic flow of shooting down the enemies with fitting weapons and finding the right position to shoot enemies and also dodge the upcoming attacks is almost comparable to Doom Eternal or Ultrakill’s dynamic combat flow which are also my favorite shooter games.
Another thing I want to mention is the unconventional level structure, Sometimes, the levels are working like moving mazes that you have to navigate through carefully. Sometimes you have to navigate horizontally alongside the level that moves in sideways, which is an unexpected thing from a shooting game that looks like a vertical scroller. And thanks to the multiple tools the player has, it was less awkward than I’d imagined but it also provided interesting challenges. In the game, there is a choice related to the secondary weapon option where you have to pick the bullet that goes backward or sideways. A backward shooter is a good generalist problem solver, but the sideway shooter is great for areas full of enemies stick at the side, which are usually located at those “unconventional” sections. That alone made me consider weapon choices because just like other arcade games, you have to try your best to blast through the risky sections to save up the chances for later.
The level design aspect shined in stage 1-4 where you have to go through super-speed vertical shmup sections, then slide through the horizontal gauntlets full of enemies that charge side by side, and then navigate the hive-like structure that is intertwined with non-linear diagonal hallways and awkward (in a good way) enemy placements. Also, the boss in that level somehow mixed the elements of Space Invader and Undertale, which are the things I would have never expected when I hear the term "shmup", and I was genuinely surprised. Even IF they reuse level concepts like the continuation of part 1 and part 2, there were so many changes in the contents that I thought the repetition is just justifiable. And I think “justifiable” is a weak word to describe the great surprises like the new colossus boss fight in 2-2 and the crab chase sequences in 2-3.
I’m still confused about the lore and narrative overall, but one thing I really liked about the theme is that they really dedicate themselves to the theme of repeating suffering and overcoming the suffering. The Buddhism imagery, the quote; “Even the sweetest treats get bitter with each bite”, and the way to see the true ending. Those components work in harmony to create the mindset of “a monk going through a constant ordeal”. It may sound pretentious, but not many punishingly difficult games make me think this way. It is something akin to Pathologic where the suffering in a video game is contextualized so beautifully that I couldn’t stop playing it, even though the punishment is rather harsh thanks to its arcade-like nature.
That said though, deleting the save file to see the conclusion is a little bit too much. Yes, it makes the stake really high, but to get to the past, the player has to beat the teeth-grindingly difficult final boss, and spend all the credits to life bar after the borderline-impossible-to-not-get-hit escape section. That alone is enough to make the situation spicy in my opinion. Not only that but there is also some stuff that seems counter-intuitive in the final section: I had to stand middle in the danger zone where it shoots out bullets. I was kinda salty about this because I failed two long runs because of this cursed section, but then again, that is just my taste, and I don’t want to condemn it like a massive design failure. It was true to the concept, and just like the other elements in this game, it made me feel good at the end. I hope this is a great kickstart for my journey through other shmup games, and I’m glad that I ate a great orange as an appetizer.

in contrast to it's reputation in some circles as a sophisticated and unapproachable masterwork that only the most capable in the medium can dare claim to have really conquered, revisiting dark souls in 2022 has the same essential feel as revisiting elric of melnibone in the same year. dark souls is pure pulp fantasy, absolutely lascivious in it's enthusiasm to play the hits and delight in the playing of them. there's no attempt to hide the basic moods and beats the game is playing, instead it simply enjoys the classics with an infectious delight. about the only thing that isn't pulp about dark souls' fantasy is the sexism, which is mostly just deeply boring and conservative instead of being as weird and outrageous as a lot of those old paperbacks could be.

undead burg. darkroot basin. lord of light. the abyss. the dark. fire. the sun. demon ruins. Big Hat Logan. fuckin blighttown. it's deeply mundane in a way that really works. there's no Tarnished-esqe straining towards the illusion of novelty when there is none, none of the worldbuilding has any facade or pretense to it, it is what it is on the tin, which is exactly the spirit of a pulp novel that promises swords and legends and tits and proceeds to deliver exactly that, but with a visual artistry and methodically slow pace that all but forces the player to take the time to appreciate why we like these base concepts in the first place. getting Cursed in The Depths and having to spend not-inconsiderable time on a grueling backtrack up to The Undead Parish to talk to Oswald to get it cured is not a traditionally "fun" or "novel" journey but it is one that invites consideration of every step of that journey. it is sophisticated appreciation of "junk food" art, and that is just quintessential Video Games to me.

the game's writing is (mostly) wonderfully unpretentious, in stark contrast to it's most ardent fans, fans who have done a tremendous disservice to the game's narrative by archiving it in the form of videos and wikis that tear it from the aforementioned pacing and stunning visual direction that brings it life and meaning. a lore wiki about the primorial serpent kaathe and his darkstalkers in the abyss would read like the rote fantasy claptrap that it ultimately fundamentally is, but the way the game deploys it, the way it hides Kaathe and what he has to say from the standard progression of the journey of the Chosen, the way the Abyss and the Dark is depicted as a literally blank void, a Nothingness that exists totally apart from our conception of the world as we can possibly conceive of it, that is what makes these concepts compelling.

though admittedly, the game hardly does itself any favors in the honestly quite weak DLC, which recasts the Dark from a compelling evocation of the unknown, and literalizes it as a Spooky Cave with a Fucked Up Guy inside that spreads Corruption Juice that turns people into Monsters. dark souls works because it puts in the work to make concepts like this visually and poetically compelling, but the dlc is much more traditionally interested in the exposition of Lore as a beginning and end, and demonstrates the very thin line between Compelling Pulp Fantasy and Drearily Rote Pulp Fantasy. artorias of the abyss, for better or worse, for good or ill, feels completely haunted by the future of Fromsoft, and feels at odds with what I found so loveable about dark souls upon this revisit.

the story and world of dark souls is nothing you haven't seen before if you're even lightly read in fantasy and mythical literature. but because it deeply invests in the presentation of and love of these things without pretension or subversion, through the delightfully shonky and functional UI and the warm PS3 sheen, it works. dark souls knows that sometimes, we just want to read about elric of melnibone, the eternal champion, brooding on his ruby throne while the Lord of Dragon Cave scowls from across the court. i don't think i'll ever love it like i love it's younger, weirder, rougher, moodier sibling, but it'll always make me smile.

Recommended by turdl3 as part of this list.

BABA IS YOU

Back when I was in high school, my campus offered a Computer Science course as an elective of sorts, and I remember sitting in that classroom with six other kids while our teacher explained the basics of programming.

"Think of programming like a logic puzzle. You have a set of rules you always have to abide by, and you need to figure out a solution to each problem by working within those rules."

Obviously, this is a very reductive way of approaching the subject, but I bring it up because I recognize that same programming mindset is at the core of Baba is You. The game's main mechanic of moving Nouns, Operators and Properties around to change the logic of the world is basically a programming language in and of itself. The internal syntax logic remains consistent, and each level in Baba is You is always centered around working within the logic of a level to achieve the same goal of making some variation of X IS WIN. It's just up to you to figure out how.

BABA IS MOVE AND OPEN

Despite that simple goal, Baba is You is a very difficult game in practice. Baba is You is always introducing a new Modifier or Property to experiment with well into the endgame, making sure that every area is constantly reinventing the wheel in a way that ensures that the player retains that sense of wonder the game held from minute one. But even with this unrelenting avalanche of ideas and mechanics, Baba is You remains accessible through its incredibly free-form approach to progress. The branching path level structure always gives the player options to progress, with completed levels unlocking other levels in an immediate radius instead of a linear fashion. The player is only asked to complete a relatively small fraction of an area to have it marked as "complete", meaning that even if you are truly stumped, you only need to complete the bare minimum to see the game through. The final level is even unlocked once you complete about third of the game, meaning that at any time, you can stop and clear the game if you have the smarts. Baba is You may be rigid in its puzzle structure and logic, but it's sense of progression is anything but.

BABA IS LOVE

Above all else, Baba is You is delightful. It's adorable aesthetic and endless innovation kept me going long after the ending was waiting for me, and even though the game could potentially be beaten after an hour or so, I put off that final level until the very end just to see what other tricks Baba is You had up its sleeve. Even in the final areas, puzzles were still wowing me with their creativity and putting a smile on my face even as I slammed my head against a wall for hours on end trying to figure out the solution. Baba is You is a truly one of the most creative puzzle games in recent memory, and its clear how much passion was put into its creation by the people behind it, and it's a game I highly recommend if you love a good brainteaser.

Despite how my taste has evolved over time to prefer gamey-games rooted in arcade sensibilities, I still really struggle with sticking to many older arcade games. They're usually games that I'm able to appreciate and have fun with from time to time, but am always intimidated by in some way or another. Nevermind the fact that I've never been any good at them to begin with, being stuck in a never-ending loop of repetition to test my endurance has never been my preferred way to play (this may also be why I've been really into shmups lately to scratch my arcade itch, their difficulty is nigh impenetrable at the start, but after some practice, runs usually become 30 minutes to an hour at most). Even in more modern games that encourage score-chasing like Bayonetta, I love how inviting they tend to be to pick up for an afternoon and try to get the best rank on a level or two.

Now I don't want to be dishonest and say that none of this applies to old arcade games, that just wouldn't be true. Take the original Pac-Man for example: I can rarely get past the 6th level (let alone make it to the kill screen) without floundering and losing all my lives, but I'd be lying if I said the act of trying to beat my personal best wasn't invigorating. I understand the appeal of a game that can go on forever if you're skilled enough, I just personally lack the dexterity and mental fortitude to push my runs just that little bit longer for more than a few runs at a time. I think this is part of why Pac-Man Championship Edition is so innately appealing to me.

The most obvious change in Championship Edition is the addition of a hard-set time limit, something that undoubtedly changes the fundamental flow and pace of the game, but one that makes it easier to crack into for a more casual player like myself. It's way easier to justify starting a run of an arcade game when you know definitively that an end is in sight, and that it's easy to attain. In the case of CE, it means that each run becomes far more sharp and focused in the short-term, compared to the long-term goal of the vanilla game potentially being shot down and erased in a few quick mistakes. Aforementioned failure just feels better when runs aren't super draining.

More impressive is the way CE adapts and modernizes the original design document of Pac-Man without feeling like a completely different experience. Less pellets on screen at once that are compressed together means progress is snappier and less time is spent traversing through empty lanes, the ever evolving layout prevents runs from becoming tiresome and makes it harder to autopilot, and only refreshing one half of the maze at once means that players are forced to move back and forth constantly with meaningful intent. All of this under the pressure of a time limit and the ever-present yet obfuscated scaling speed of the game makes each run a frantic test of your ability to juggle a dozen different tasks at once. As a good example, in vanilla you may want to camp the maze and line up every ghost next to an Energizer to maximize your points, but in CE you don't have time to waste so you should frequently just take whatever chance you can get to use it. But if you ever do line everything up correctly it feels far more satisfying to achieve in a timely manner. Same goes for chaining energizers for a long ass combo, I don't think I've felt anything as electrifying as managing to gobble up 10 ghosts in a single combo in quite some time. Every little adjustment feels simultaneously tasteful to the original intent of the game while still acting as the perfect bullet point on an already arguably perfect game. How many games like this can you think of that only subtly iterate on the original and end up feeling definitive? That'd be like the 2D Mario games feeling conclusive after New Super Mario Bros. or something, I can't think of many examples where this has happened outside of this.

Despite being a little dry on content, Pac-Man Championship Edition is a game I can tell I'll be playing for a very long time, and might just be my first meaningful breakthrough into the original game. Nothing substantial was removed from the transition from vanilla to CE so skills acquired in one should theoretically carry over from one to the other for me. I think the sign of a truly masterful iteration is one that smooths out the original experience without completely invalidating it. One that feels modern while still keeping it's old soul in one piece. CE won't stop people from playing vanilla, hell it won't even stop Namco from continuing to make Pac-Man games, but as it stands, I think this is the most impressive mic-dropping moment in the gaming industry, and I don't foresee this being more than a once-in-a-generation moment.
Seriously though I have no clue why it doesn't at least include an optional endless mode, that alone would likely justify this as the definitive Pac-Man game and would genuinely make everybody happy. There's no reason it shouldn't be there. What the hell man. Port this to Steam so somebody can mod it in Namco!!!

edit: yeah so apparently this is getting ported to steam and new platforms in like a month and i had no idea lmao, y'all better buy it when it drops just saying

Disempowerment is nothing new in videogames. Over the decades, many have dabbled in the art of taking stuff away from the player, usually as narrative device that reflects through interactivity the lowest point of a character's story arc or as a tool to instill a sense of tangible dread as you no longer have access to familiar mechanics that would otherwise quickly solve the issue, but rarely do those moments ever extend past their unwelcoming phase into frustrating territory before quickly bursting into power fantasy catharsis. Some games in recent years have managed to do so to great effect, like Rain World or Death Stranding, but none to my knowledge have achieved the apex that Pathologic has on that particular stage.

Much can be argued in favor of the original Pathologic's outright repulsiveness, inherent to its ugly look, unintuitive UI and disruptive euro jank, that would inevitably compound over what was already an antagonistic game filled with mechanics solely devised to hurt you, but I believe the greatest achievement of its reimagining, Pathologic 2, is in its ability to eliminate that pretense of subjectively interpreting what could easily be attributed to financial and time constraints and instead being a much more inviting play, shining the spotlight solely on the geniously crafted and designed tragedy that unfolds before and around you at the center of it all. This time around, you will not be able to blame the game.

How does it feel to not be the hero of your own story? Surely we have all experienced this idea in some shape or form with storytelling in media, and in some ways we live it everyday in our daily lives, but have you truly ever been put on the act of such conundrum? Videogames pride themselves in allowing a level of choice and emergent storytelling not possible in different mediums, but hardly do we ever realize how truly shackling freedom can be when explored to its fullest, as games have conditioned us to believe there is always a more righteous and intended path if you manage play "better". It isn't until you are crawling through the night streets of Pathologic 2 frightfully murdering people in despair for their possessions, ignoring the call to adventure and letting important events die out because there are more pressing personal matters at hand like not starving to death, that you realize how ridiculous the conceit of videogames are.

The brilliance of Pathologic 2, beyond its imaginative world and intrigue filled story and manipulative cast of characters, lies in the way it predicates the survival of its town with the player's own, creating a much more engrossing and transcendent narrative inbetween the dialogue filled NPC interactions, where you are making deeply and engaging life affecting existential choices such as deciding if you continue to walk slowly to a destination that will consume your ever dwindling limited time, or if you risk running to it and filling your thirst and exhaustion meters with no hope of depleting them. That constant tug and pull in turn ends up informing your decisions and outlook of Pathologic 2, has you quickly learn that no, you cannot save everyone, and how could you, when you have yourself to worry about?

Pathologic 2 consistently reminds you of its nature as a videogame, mocking you at any chance it gets and correctly predicting how you will be deceived next in an attempt to dissuade you. And yet that constant 4th wall breaking only ends up having the inverse effect of drawing you further into its world. You want to win against the machine, you have played this game many times before. And it will continue to break you down until you play by its rules, to the point of even taking away from you the relief of death. Settling into a path of choices you can feel confident about is an utopic wish that videogames have exploited for most of its existence, and Pathologic 2 being able deform that expectation, gamefying it into a tough provoking exercise that puts you in the front row seat of a misery drama, presenting the human condition by the mere act of forcing you to sell a gun to buy a loaf of bread, is some real shit that you will never experience in any other piece of work.

With two campaigns short of being complete, Pathologic 2 is already a masterpiece of game design, a true testament to the possibilities of the artform and how much higher they can aspire to. Transcending beyond its russian heritage, it demonstrates the hardships of the individual vs. the world, and like a great novel, the more you look into it, the more it unravels and reveals about itself and yourself. You will always feel like you have missed some crucial aspect about it, and that you could have done things differently to better solve it. And that's the point.

If you have played Dark Soul 1, you would have had this experience.
When you started the game, you could enter three or four dangerous places except for one "normal" route,
and after being beaten hard in these places, you would think, "How do I break through these reviving skeletons and pass through the graveyard?" or "Do I really have to go through that ghost-ridden path?" something like that.
Then, you'll play on a route along the path of weaker enemies, and as you proceed with the level,
player character's stat will grow, and at the same time, you will also acquire "knowledge" and "tools" that can handle skeletons and ghosts.
And later, it can be used to break through dangerous areas. This is the part I liked in Dark Soul 1.
Even though it seems kinda irresponsible to let players go to the dangerous places, but there was a sense of trust from the developers that players would avoid them, learn the game, and return on their own later,
And based on the bits of knowledge, it is possible for experienced players to create crazy builds or weird game progressions on their own.
This "opened" structure can create a form in which players can actively draw variables. Personally, I thought such an element was a unique value from FROM.
But after Dark Souls 1, this design method was hard to see again because the later games were somewhat linearized. And I'm really glad to say that Elden Ring reintroduced the design method. On a huge scale.

Elden Ring is full of roadblocks that motivate more explorations. The element stretches from Limgrave to the hidden levels that will come out at the end.
The most representative example is Margit, who is comparable to DLC bosses in the early souls-game in terms of difficulty. And for most normal players, he is the first proper main boss, since the grace checkpoints are leading to him.
It might be insane to think that FROM introduced Artorias on crack as a first main boss when most people don't even know how to use combat options properly early on, but if you search through other areas of Limgrave, not only your character's stats will grow up, but you can also find an item that is borderline-cheating for the boss fight, and a spirit summoning system that can be helpful for AI distractions.
You can even find a route that can bypass a whole Stormveil castle early on so that you can go to the later area early on. (Although it is recommendable to beat Stormveil castle early for the leveling and the great rune)
Exploration will always give multiple answers for the roadblocks, and that's why I can clearly say that it has a structure that is closer to traditional non-linear RPG compared to all souls-borne games.

The challenges you'll find during your explorations are greatly varied. In most recent action-focused titles such as Bloodborne, Dark souls 3, and Sekiro, while there were different types of enemies, most of the special encounters were grounded-combat-focused and didn't bring other game elements to spice up the adventure aspects, such as level hazards or puzzles.
(Except Forbidden Woods & Mensis Nightmare in Bloodborne, or the Archive in Dark souls 3. Those were memorable levels.)
Elden Ring introduces puzzles, platforming challenges, several types of traps that can bamboozle the players to change the phase of the game significantly.
Some might be easier to solve compared to the others, but you have to admit that your experience of Elden Ring can't be boiled down to combat after combat.
Even the special combat encounters are extremely varied in the open world.
Some groups of enemies are engaging in war with each other, so you can find an opportunity to deal with some sneaky attacks on the distracted AI.
Giant enemies can deal damages to their allies, so by utilizing positioning and baiting, you can make the grouped giants kill themselves.
Most field bosses are located on uneven terrain, so not only do you have to watch their movesets, but you also have to care about the levels surrounding you.
Do you see what I mean? This game is full of encounters that can break the mold of traditional action parts for your creative or perceptive gameplay, which is awesome.
Even though the early part provides only a handful of small mediocre dungeons, once you go to the other areas, the types of challenges will be varied significantly. So if you love risky adventures, I bet you'll lose nothing by playing this.

And there are main dungeons or so-called Legacy Dungeons. These are working like Dark souls 2 DLC levels where there's one clear path to a boss room,
but finding the path requires some perceptive skills and there are a large number of different paths that lead you to hidden items or special challenges.
Even though I prefer the loop-maze structure where you have to navigate through a maze-like level with one checkpoint, the legacy dungeons are still the best part of the game, thanks to the vertical structure, sadistic enemy placements, and traps.
They also made some areas impossible to run through without thinking, thanks to the narrow corridors, enemy placements, and level hazards.
Because of that, Stormveil Castle and Royal Capital have almost flawless level designs in terms of dungeon design perspective.
The only thing I can criticize about Legacy Dungeon is that, while the player's progression inside the dungeon can be non-linear, it's still contained in one dungeon, unlike Dark Souls 1 where the dungeons and other places are interconnected like webs.
Which is a lost opportunity, because I think there were enough rooms for that, thanks to the massive size of the dungeons.

However, if you look at this game with pure combat perspective, things can be messy.
Let's look at the good part first. Not only does this game bring back Power-Stance from Dark Souls 2, but Weapon Arts are also customizable in normal weapons.
This element alone can create depth that no other FROM games could have provided, and if FROM is actually caring about content updates about multiplay, it will have the best PVP scene in all souls-borne history.
But my gripes are coming from the enemy design. Especially the elite ones and the late-game bosses.

Souls game is on the passive, or reactive side if you compare them to other well-made action games, but this series always gave positive feedback about proactive positioning.
Some enemies could use tracking attacks or delayed attacks, but they didn't go full-magnet so you had opportunities to position yourself without heavily relying on timed-dodge movement, especially if you lock-off.
Dark souls 3 might have been criticized by some gamers for being a "dodge-roll festival", but there were bosses like Demon Prince, Sister Friede, and Midir where you can try out different positioning approaches for your own benefit thanks to their clear pattern chains, consistent damage area, and windows for clear weakness.
This series might incentivize passive actions, but as you learn the patterns, you could find more options to engage in the fight even as a monotonous melee build.
(Like back-stabing Sister Friede or charge-attacking Orphan of Kos)

If you are gonna try out pure-true-to-heart melee build -the "traditional" way- to deal with Elden Ring's enemies then be sure that you won't find a lot of windows to be proactive this time around.
(Of course, some people will find the exploits, but for most gamers, they won't likely find that, myself included.)
Most of Elden Ring's elite enemies and bosses have an off-beat combo that can rapidly change their chains depending on the player's position and 99% of their melee moves track horizontally like a magnet.
And as if those weren't enough, the jump attacks and even some simple melee attacks can shorten the distance between them and players with no fixed movement speed.
The worst-case was the final boss's first phase where he can position himself in front of you with simple melee attacks no matter how far you try to distance from him.
Not only does this look awful because it feels like the boss is riding skates rather than actually using his footsteps, but it also reduces the options for players to be safe from him.
There are only timed dodge and very passive poking left in this fight if you are playing this as a melee build. The only thing different from Sekiro's ultra-passive combat loop is that dodge direction matters, but that's all. (And I have to say, I would have prefered Sekiro's approach if they were gonna boil everything down to timing-game anyway. At least there were "fun" to have while obliterating bosses by chaining the consecutive deflections and using the prosthetic tools)
Another worst-case scenario is an infamous duo gargoyle battle. These bastards can use 360' degree windmill slash and poison AOE whenever they want no matter the position of players, and every normal attacks track you.
Because of this, only a frustrating waiting game remains in that battle.
And here's a thing. I wouldn't mind this kind of enemy behavior if this was Nioh2 or any stylish combo-based action game where you have much more proactive and reactive moves as a baseline.
But the thing is, the player character is -even with the inclusion of jump attack and swappable quick step - working like Dark Souls 3. It's a blatant unbalance when it comes to basic options on the player's part.

Though, This is a part where the character-build variety shines. Since the pure melee builds are designed to be rather frustrating, the bleed/frozen status effects are significantly more useful than before, and magic, ashes of war, and summonable spirits that you can acquire during the exploration are almost mandatory when you can't build specific melee build that can shred enemies to pieces.
And these additional options have their own gameplay depth too. Aside from the edge cases, many enemies have limited attack distances so the positioning matters when you are casting.
Some enemies can evade your spells so you can't always spam that. so there is a need for a timing check for using spells, unlike previous games.
Ashes of War aren't definitly monotonous or filler-ish like weapon arts in DS3. They can be a useful ranged option, but also be a great positioning tool, like Hound Step. With Hound Step, I could have a better time with this melee combat system thanks to it's large movement range and larger i-frames. I would have a better time with this game IF the main dodge system was as lenient as this skill, but it's a viable option at the end, and I'm glad with this inclusion.
Summonable spirits have clear pros and cons depending on the type, and this alone can incentivize using different spirits, thanks to the different types of enemy encounters I mentioned.
The best and the most interesting one is a mimic tear, where you can summon a direct copy of yourself.
If you have made a mage-knight build like me, you can summon them and let them use the spell casting from far while you are dealing with enemies with melee.
This alone shows that there are many possibilities in strategy perspective when you know how to utilize summoning.
However, considering that this is still an action game, you might feel less satisfied with using this method, since once they are summoned, they choose a random target, then choose a random position, and then choose a random attack string.
They are completely out of control, and even if the end was victorious, it wouldn't be as satisfying as soloing.
But you have to know that some later bosses are literally designed to be borderline impossible to solo with certain builds. (Like Malenia. I can't imagine consistently beating her solo unless you have a god-send parry skill, +10 great shield, or a min-maxed bleed weapon)
I would have much preferred if every boss in this game incentivized using players' base options for a proactive approach so that every build is "theoretically possible" to solo the bosses without being too defensive.
And spirit summoning could have stayed as a diegetic difficulty option instead of being a mandatory helper.

Now let's talk about some positive stuff. Even though combat can be messy, the legend bosses in this game are mostly highlights, even more so than late-FROM games. (Still, none of them are comparable to Ludwig, but that's my preference.)
This one includes most main bosses, so please skip this paragraph if you haven't played it till the end.
Margit and Godrick were great early bosses. Sure, they have some tracking attacks and long combos, but thanks to their slow movement, you can find good positioning options to deal more damages even as a pure melee.
I really loved Godrick fight, where the jump counter was actually viable for the quake attack patterns. They were both challenging but fair as 1v1.
Moon Queen is one of those "weird" boss fights in FROM's boss library, but the first phase's stage structure is much more interesting than the one from Deacons of The Deep, and the second phase really tested players' movement options (like running). I liked that fight.
Radahn is also a "weird" boss fight but in a different manner. He can be dealt with 1v1, but because of his massive size, health pool, and absolutely broken AOE patterns, only specific builds that can use fast-long-reach weapons can have a good time with this fight as 1v1.
For the others, they can utilize the gimmick of the boss field, -the ever-regenerating summonable NPCs conceptualized as a festival-. With that, you can find an opportunity to attack him behind the back.
In a sense, he is like Yhorm, but with more nuance in the combat options. It would have been a tedious boss without these options, but thanks to the level gimmick, and the theme surrounding Radahn's backstory, this fight still remains as one of the most memorable boss fights in Elden Ring.
Rykard is a classic FROM's "storm ruler" boss, but the power-fantasy value of this boss fight was extreme beyond measure. Come on, you are literally swinging a 70-meter giant spear in a god damn Souls game. Also, this fight isn't a joke like other "storm ruler" bosses.
You have to read the distance and the boss's animation to actually obliterate him. And the second phase, dear god. FROM's creature design really shined in this phase. And the chaotic bullet-hell pattern made me really panic about the situation, combined with the hellish OST and the visual.
The Ancestor Spirit was on the easier side, but this is supposed to be a "feel" boss like Sif. So I really liked that as a pure experience. I wish they didn't include this boss in the trailer so that it could have been more surprising.

There were two hidden legend bosses I wanted to call "masterful works"
One was Dragonlord. Unlike the other fast ever-tracking bullshit bosses, This boss is built upon clear AOE patterns and players' positioning options. The lightning attack has a clear sound and dodge window, so you can handle the off-camera attacks even while attacking.
The fire AOE is large, but once again, thanks to his consistent actions, you can either run away with a fixed amount of distance or find the right place to hide and punish him.
And there were some weird patterns where you have to utilize camera movement. He can teleport away and dive bomb you from the off-screen, so you have to track him by rotating the camera manually.
I would be mad if this boss was a rampaging-beast type of boss, but since his off-screen attacks are fairly telegraphed with slow movement, I didn't mind that at all. It was a fun fight.
Another one was Mohg. This one is working similar to Margit -A rather slow giant humanoid boss with off-beat combos in his sleeves-.
The nice thing about this boss is that his attacks leave traces in the boss arena, so not only do you have to read the attack chains, you have to care about the field hazard so it's not just another roll-dodge game.
And here's a thing. His melee attacks are visually readable thanks to his wide and slow animation. And the field hazard is working as glass shards rather than a giant hammer that one-shots you, so there are interesting choices about damage-trading or safe-play.
Although the health drain gimmick in the phase transition seems a little bit bullshit, the rest part was fun so I didn't mind this fight as 1v1. Probably the best humanoid boss fight in this game.

Though, aside from the bosses I mentioned as positive, there were some bosses that went too far and came off as overkill rather than a fair game.
One is Malenia. Whoever designed the triple anime-slash combo attack in this boss fight should not join as an action-designer part in FROM's design department ever again. Seriously, who thought it was a good idea?
Another one is the final boss, or should I say, final BOSSES.
I mentioned the final boss as a worst-case about pure melee for a reason. If I could use a summon for the first phase, I wouldn't be that mad since that can be seen as a viable option to distract him.
But the fact that the second phase is an entirely different, conceptually disconnected boss fight that NOBODY would disagree to separate it as a different boss fight, and if you have used the summon in the first phase, your summons will die instantly thanks to their ABSOLUTELY nonsensical bullet patterns made me angry. Like, really angry.
Like, I didn't understand that design decision in Sekiro, but WHY DO THEY COMBINE THE ENTIRELY DIFFERENT BOSSES FOR ONE BATTLE?
This isn't like Ludwig or Sister Friede because, in those fights, they were conceptualized as the same entity from the beginning till the end.
This final boss feels like they connected them together because THEY FUCKING WANTED THE FIGHT TO HAVE "AcTHuallY-FOUR-PHASES".
FROM should remember that even a mono-phase boss fight can be interesting and challenging. You know, like fucking Artorias.
Oh yeah, the final-final boss is a trash fire.
The first final boss is an overkill that devalues the positioning options, but when you roll at the right time, you can negate the area damage(which is still stupid because even though they are CLEARLY ground-pound, you should roll through them because some AOE can catch your jump for some fucking reason), and it is possible to use fewer health potions than the other fast bosses thanks to his rather "readable" animations.
However, the second final boss is a camera-eating monstrosity, an unreadable-bullet-hell, and a run-away-boss at the same time.
Like, I actually liked the character design of them, but I don't know who thought it is okay to put ever-following missile and un-jumpable wave attack simultaneously while the boss is actively distancing from you.

Yeah, I'm back to the negative vibe. So let's talk about the negative aspects of the "lessor" bosses.
I bet there weren't many QA checks for these little bosses, since the mini-dungeon-bosses are either too easy or an-ever-tracking monstrosity that is somehow confined in a small room.
Even if there are some good bosses like Deathbird, Godskin, and Commander, the bosses get repeated in the other dungeons and lose their value as a unique entity.
And the multi-enemy bosses in this game are the worst in the whole series of souls-borne. It would be an insult to compare them to FROM's previous well-designed multi bosses such as O&S, Ruin Sentinels, Demon Prince, and Shadows of Yharnam.
Not only they don't have a clear role distribution or attack timing as a part of multi-bosses(maybe except Godskin duo), because of the melee combat issue I mentioned earlier, you either have to play it really defensively or use summons and DPS build to shred them to pieces.
These might work as solid roadblocks that can test your builds, but as an action game, they only left a sour taste in my mouth.

So yeah, I wrote really long review/critique about this game. It was a tiring journey, but it would be a blatant lie if I ONLY had a bad time with this game. If I didn't like it, I would have dropped the game during the playthrough and didn't even put a star on this (I only rate the games I finished)
The potential for the player-oriented story in this game is infinite, and the exploration, adventure aspects alone can make other souls-like games cry in shame. This game deserves to be loved by many, from casual players to hardcore souls veterans. 80 hours on this game aren't wasted to void.
But I have to say. For me, as an action game, It didn't jump over the Bloodborne's hurdle again.