Elden Ring is a massive open-world game that focuses on overcoming difficulty, action, and unconventional storytelling. It's got a unique multiplayer model that helps you feel like you're part of a massive community, whether you're struggling with a difficult boss alone or playing together with your friends. While the enemies and challenges in Elden Ring can be challenging to overcome, the game's gigantic world is full of tools that you can utilize to change things up and imbalance the playing field in your favor.

Elden Ring is a spiritual successor to Dark Souls. Created by From Software, the team behind Dark Souls, Sekiro, and Bloodborne, the story of Elden Ring was written in collaboration with George R. R. Martin, the author of A Song of Ice And Fire. Like other From Software role-playing games, Elden Ring has an unconventional multiplayer model. When other players die, their bloodstains show up in your world, giving you a hint of upcoming danger as you watch the actions their characters took before meeting their demise. Additionally, players can be summoned to your world to assist you during difficult encounters, and you can even invade the worlds of other players and attempt to fight them directly as they try to progress through the world.

Elden Ring is a fantasy role-playing game in which you play as a hero. Shortly after launching the game, you meet Melina, a mysterious woman who gives you a spirit horse and asks you to take her to the foot of a giant tree. The world of the game is very, very big, and the horse is a welcome addition that gives you the ability to run quickly between places, double jump, and even partake in mounted combat. You can use weapons like swords and lances, cast spells, and even use items on horseback.

As you progress on your travels through the Lands Between, you'll gain the ability to level up your hero, upgrade your weapons and equipment, and learn new powerful spells and abilities. In addition to the sorceries and incantations of previous games, Elden Ring allows you to use special skills called Ashes of War with your weapon. These Ashes can allow your strong melee fighter to stomp the ground and send out shockwaves, shoot giant cones of fire, or coat their sword in blood for more damage. In other words, you don't need to use magic to access powerful abilities.

 The way that stories are told in From Software games is somewhat unique, and Elden Ring is no exception. Rather than spoonfeeding you expository dialogue at every corner, Elden Ring gives you a hint at a grand tapestry through item descriptions, snippets of dialogue, and the occasional cutscene. This helps create verisimilitude, a sense of wonder, and a rich and complex story with plenty of room for interpretation. It's a lot of fun to get the last piece of a puzzle and finally realize what an item description means or what an NPC meant when they told you something.

 Perhaps most importantly, Elden Ring is designed to be difficult. The sheer scope of the game and the tools you have access to allow you to mitigate this difficulty, but the game deliberately puts challenges in your path and asks you to overcome them. This gives you an incredible sense of accomplishment when you finally get that difficult boss down or you finally figure out that puzzle. Due to the open nature of the game, however, it's very possible to run into challenging late-game encounters very early in your playthrough. When this happens, it's up to you to realize that you might be better off doing things in a different order and coming back to this challenge later, after you've picked up some equipment.