A game that defined 2022 and re-sparked my love of video games. Elden Ring reminded me why I fell in love with video games and presented me with a fun, challenging experience while allowing me to experiment with different ideas until something worked. Endgame areas are tuned a bit weird, but it is still and excellent experience.

Full review:

https://usishield.com/37789/features/elden-ring-rekindled-my-faith-in-the-video-game-industry/

Top tier exploration, top tier atmosphere, top tier enemy variety, top tier level design, and probably my favorite visuals of all time. The way the world keeps surprising you with how much bigger and more varied it gets, and how amazingly cool it all looks, is absolutely unmatched.

In so many ways it's the best game From has ever made, and one of the greatest games of all time, but it also has serious shortcomings. The visual variety in the world itself is amazing, but the majority of the caves and mini dungeons (equivalent to shrines in BotW) have very little visual variety, and they wear out their welcome even without doing all of them. Despite the amazing build variety, the overall structure of the game makes it the least replayable out of all of them - it's best experience in long playthroughs, as opposed to short ones where you skip 90% of the game and are underpowered as a result. There are a lot of amazing boss designs, but the sheer size of the game makes it impossible to avoid reusing them in ways that sometimes make them feel less special. Sometimes less is more.

For me this stands alongside VtMB as a perfect example of a deeply flawed masterpiece.