I'm not built for this. This game makes me feel like I have a 60-hour work week.

This is my first Soulsborne and I want to love it so bad because it is actual peak when there's little between me and a tough set of enemies or a boss to figure out. (Most of) the bosses feel like that right exact balance of difficult but studyable that made me fall in love with games like the Mega Man series or Ultrakill and it felt incredibly gratifying to do things like manage to defeat the Tree Sentinel while probably underlevelled for it or finally defeating Margit.

At first the open world seemed like a stroke of genius for a game like this because if you encounter something that feels too hard you can just leave, go somewhere else, and come back when you feel better equipped for it. But in practice the difficulty curve is all over the place, wildly fluctuating between relatively mindless enemies to sudden boss monster that I barely do any damage to and kills me within seconds. And before you know it I'm sitting here with 9 visited but unfinished mini-dungeons because I'm constantly feeling ill-prepared for stuff. And then I get stuck in a conundrum of having my money (nearly enough for a level up) be stuck in a boss chamber so it's either I ram my face into this boss until I eventually win, or just forfeit it and leave.

My final session of this game was the fourth in a row where I've made no real progress. I've gone to new places but I've still hit brick walls and acquired no items and lose my money too frequently to level up anywhere resembling a regular basis, especially as the rune requirement keeps going up. Even the gratification for when I do manage to beat a difficult boss stopped coming because I'd stress keeping my money so bad only to lose it and have the rune reward for a boss be less than what I went into the dungeon with, and the actual item reward is a spell I can't use.

Dropping Runes hardly feels like it's an encouragement to get better so much as it just enabled my worst habits until eventually my loss-aversion monkey brain makes me do something that gets me killed before I can grab them back. It got to a point where eventually whenever I got anywhere even mildly close to a level-up, I'd stop what I'm doing, avoid areas I've not been in yet, and just farm the relatively easy but still high-value enemies like battle mages or the centipede dudes just to be absolutely sure my money isn't going to be stolen from me for the dozenth time. It just encourages me to play like a coward. Never be going anywhere unless I'm crouching and sneaking. If I take even a little bit of damage when I've barely left a site of grace, I'm resting at it again. It is a single solitary mechanic and yet it makes the whole rest of the game too stressful to actually participate with properly. Like, I'm genuinely certain this is a game I would enjoy a lot more if it wasn't for the hole-in-your-pocket mechanic. My mind isn't on studying the enemy's patterns and tells anymore so much as it's stressing about getting my money back to a site of grace.

This game is so cool and I'm very jealous of all my Soulshead friends that say this game changed their life and I wish I could enjoy it properly but I just feel mentally incompatible with it. I enjoyed my time with it to a point but it eventually just started feeling too oppressive that specifically wreaks havoc on my stupid mental illnesses and I don't think it'd be good for me to keep playing. Just, whatever. Fallingstar Beast is the final boss of Elden Ring. To me. I might try it again one day, I might not.