Elden Ring
A marvelously expansive, deep, and satisfying open world dark fantasy RPG. The tone, fleshed out with the help of George R. R. Martin, is very dark indeed. If we compare it to Breath of the Wild, then it's like Hyrule ... but if Ganon won. I've experienced so many moments of awe, delight, and sheer terror.
It features an approach and emphasis that is markedly different from other such games in the genre in ways that can be refreshing but also disappointing. Mainly, don't expect epic quests or significant NPC interactions. There are a few side quests but they are obscure, shallow, and very fragile. Forget about progressing through them without a wiki: easily the worst designed quests I have ever experienced in an RPG. The Witcher this is not. The story, likewise, is barely there. But the weakness of quests is eclipsed by the strength of character progression, loot, combat, and magic systems, which are all very deep and reveal an obsessive care for detail and balance that FromSoftware has been iterating on for years.
In a way the marginalization of quests can be a good thing. The lack of "quest objectives" on the map makes Elden Ring feel like a true sandbox in which you can go in any direction, explore, experiment, and carve your own path. This freedom extends to your character build, loot selection, and even and especially combat strategies. It's not "cheesing" when you find a way to use the environment against an enemy's weakness: it's you being clever and one of the intended ways to play the game. Discover your own personal choreography for this challenging dance. In its openness Elden Ring is again more like Breath of the Wild and less like those Ubisoft quest-marker grind-fests.
The game is also quite different in how it establishes stakes, i.e. the balance of risk and reward. So much has been said about soulsborne games being extremely difficult, but actually here the exact level of difficulty comes with a lot of wiggle room. Players for the most part don't have to tackle any enemy they don't want to tackle, at least not until they feel ready. There's always so much other stuff to do. In most cases you can ride past any enemy, and anyway the vast majority of them are entirely optional. Look up their loot online and decide for yourself if it's worth the challenge.
So, yeah, you famously die a lot. It's intentional, intrinsic to the game loop, and embedded in the lore of the world itself. Death is for you to learn and practice. In fact the game's first major enemy is intentionally way out of your league when you start, quite a shocking way to teach you that lesson. That's not to say that this conceit can't be frustrating. Save points are usually conveniently close to big challenges and reloading is fairly quick, but sometimes they are deliberately distant, an incredibly petty way to punish you for failure. More frustrating is that the price of death can be that you lose your progress because you drop all your accumulated XP when you die. If you can grab it before you die again, great, but this is a game in which a lowly rat can kill a level 100 character and a wrong move can send you falling off a cliff. Strategizing around this risk causes constant anxiety. If you have a lot of XP but not enough to level up, what should you do? Risk losing it all by exploring? Or go "farm" XP by grinding easy enemies until you can level up? Of course many level-based RPGs have this problem, but it's very pervasive here.
And then it must be said: Elden Ring is a technical disaster, at least on PC. Do you prefer to play single-player, like me? You still need to be online to play (!!!). You are still capped at 60 FPS because of multi-player fairness, even if your PC can do much more (!!!). Only you'll wish it were really 60 FPS because you'll have major frame drops no matter how powerful your PC is (!!!). Those drops are really fun when they happen during a stressful boss fight... not. All of these would be dealbreakers if everything else weren't so awesome. And then there's the usual bugginess that we've come to expect from big titles: enemies that can attack through walls, a camera that sometimes does not cooperate, finicky 3D platforming, etc.
My last big complaint is that the game does a miserable job with teaching itself. There's simply no way I could have understood and played it without the help of tutorials and guides from the community, especially as a FromSoftware noob. The convoluted menu UI also doesn't help. This is not an "install and play" game. It demands research.
But enough complaining! Ride your ghost horse around its faults and Elden Ring is an utterly gripping and vast experience. The superbly designed world begs exploration, which is almost always rewarded (except when your curiosity breaks a quest, like it did for me), and is crammed with diverse content and virtually no filler.
It's rare that I want to replay games, especially as big as this one. But I'm just itching to one day try to tackle every enemy again with a different build (I focused on dexterity and basically no magic) and find a new way to dance.