The simple combat in Souls games works because the enemy placement works in tandem with the layouts of the levels to constantly push you into slightly different situations; combat is more than just interaction with enemies, it’s interaction with the levels themselves. Anor Londo, for example, isn’t *just* as iconic as it is because of its grandeur, or because you fight lots of knights in cool armour - it’s also because of the freakish situations it puts you in, unlike anything the game’s thrown at you before and unlike anything it’ll throw at you again.

Elden Ring’s levels are the opposite - areas forgo their predecessors’ tightness and break themselves into open spaces that facilitate uninterrupted combat, at worst almost feeling like sets of connected ‘combat rooms’. And it doesn’t matter how smooth the animations on your sword-knights are or how bitingly difficult they are to kill (probably by virtue of their perfectly-crafted rollcatches) when this all feeds an extreme focus on the *least* interesting part of the gameplay. You'll instead engage with the level layouts almost entirely during out-of-combat exploration, which is interesting for a while - Stormveil already has you jumping around and edging through a lot of tight spaces. But any neat ideas it has get run dry far too quickly by a tendency to re-use them and an inability to expand past them, meaning areas that *should* feel strikingly different all end up blending together a bit too much.

It's a shame, because the game occasionally dares to show promise. The pair of Leyndell and Shunning-Grounds sticks out to me - Leyndell falls slightly into the 'combat room' trap, but has an immense sense of scale and varies itself an impressive amount through its runtime to offer enough gameplay variance while bringing interesting environmental storytelling. Shunning-Grounds, on the other hand, is a much tighter souls-like level that still brings enough unique ideas to set itself apart from other Souls areas (though it does invoke Depths quite a bit). But I'm calling in my replay after Castle Sol - basically feeling like Redmane Castle but with enemies pulled from Stormveil and Volcano Manor - and when I look back, there's hardly any areas in the game I can say I liked *except* for those two.