Elden Ring: Beautifully Designed, Escapist Trash

Elden Ring

What a tragedy! The amazing artwork, design, music and sound, all desperately trying to hide the lack of narrative, themes and ideas. Its huge success and popularity are, to put it mildly, alarming. This is escapism in its most true, yet ugliest form. It is cunning, slithering like a snake between the coils of the mind, and strangles the philosopher, the analyst, and the confronter, while it soothes their desperate cries with its comforting, bedeviling hisses.

After I played the game for the first few hours, I had mixed feelings, as I was stunned by the amazing art design, yet incredibly surprised by the serious lack of narrative and actual characters. And things went only downhill from there. There was no sense of purpose, you just meaninglessly dwell around in that dull puddle of 'worldbuilding'. A few hours in, and I had to fight my first bosses, I wondered why they were so hard, and where the difficulty settings were -- there were none. I wanted to get on with the story, if there was any, and after that frustrating, tedious experience, I decided to quit the game, as it felt like an absolute waste of my time and money.