Elden Ring Is Still a Mystery

I have spent a little portion of every night in the Lands Between, swinging a giant flail and riding my horse to misty cliffsides as I meander my way through Elden Ring. I spend much more time there when I’m not playing.

Elden Ring is a video game so big that I can explain it to my future in-laws without much trouble. “Dark fantasy, George R.R. Martin,” is what I mumbled to my fiancé's father after funeral services for my partner’s grandmother. Their family is Jewish and quite religious, and we had traveled to their home to sit shiva. Over a hastily assembled sandwich, my fiancé’s dad nodded, confident that he understood what I was describing. 

And yes, those two frames of reference will pretty much take you there: Elden Ring takes place in the Lands Between, a world where humans have lost the ability to die and now live as pawns of warring demi-gods. It’s a blood-soaked place with inhospitable flora and fauna that kick my ass daily. It’s also a thousand-piece puzzle that I pick at in my evenings, for hours at a time, until something new locks into place. It’s also sometimes like stepping into an oil painting, the light from the illuminated Erdtree diffused through the mist, murky but still bright. Sometimes, it’s a Marx Brothers comedy as my character’s body ragdolls off a cliff. Sometimes, it’s a mythic tragedy as I fell another gargantuan creature I don’t, and won’t, understand.

The world of Elden Ring, like most games developed by From Software, is a place where most of the big events have already happened. It’s a setting, a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, a model village whose tiny train has already been chugging along a predetermined track. Gamers sometimes have a tendency to think of the games they play as alive, as having a ghost in the machine that causes things to happen rather than the game having been designed by a group of people to create a particular experience. I know Elden Ring does not have a ghost in the machine so much as I am animating a body with my actions. Still, there is enough mystery at the heart of this game that I find myself personifying it, in the lack of any specific answers.

I think about Elden Ring non-stop when I’m not playing it. The model village that is this game is detailed in specific ways; its ruin implies that this world was once grand, and the abandoned towns gesture at the idea that life once thrived here. As I ride my horse through dark forests and rocky plains, I think to myself, what was it like to be here when it was alive? What kind of life would you have? What kind of love is possible, what kind of flowers can you pick?

“This looks amazing,” my fiance said. “Have you seen any like, plot yet?”

(This was before we knew that his grandmother hadn’t picked up the phone that evening because she had fallen, and was laying in pain on the ground, and before we learned she was in the hospital and before she suddenly died. Before we had to abruptly change our plans to fly across the country, before I stood beside my partner as he shoveled and shoveled dirt onto her grave. I started playing Elden Ring before all that, when Granny’s presence in our life felt absolute and certain.)

Answering this question was harder than I thought it would be. Yes of course, I was seeing the plot of the game—the plot was what I was doing. I am the Tarnished, I’m making my way to the Erdtree to claim the Elden Ring and become the Elden Lord. But what is Elden Ring about? What am I spending all this time doing and thinking about?

Compared to Game of Thrones, which gleefully proclaimed its themes in its very active plot, the ideas that Elden Ring explores are more esoteric. Compared even to Dark Souls or Bloodborne, two other From Software games that are similar in their approach to story and gameplay, the big ideas behind the story of this game are obscured. Dark Souls is easy to understand as a parable about power and its tendency to corrupt; Bloodborne’s Lovecraft pastiche is twisted up into the familial body horror of Cronenberg’s The Brood. It feels too early to really know what Elden Ring is about in many ways. Famously, understanding the story for Dark Souls took piecing together item descriptions and character dialogue. But even understanding the goals of Ranni, one of the central non-playable characters that you meet over the course of the game, feels impossible.

The story of Elden Ring, such as it exists right now while players are still combing through items and breaking apart the game’s code for secrets, is uncertain. Ranni represents the moon and stars and the chill of night, so unlike the golden light of the Erdtree that you’re basked in as you play. But the Erdtree represents the Golden Order, a rule of law so strict that it commands even the gods. The god of this world, Marika, is popularly depicted as being tied to a stake, her children have turned into monstrosities that, at best, need to be put down. The Golden Order and its clarity also illuminates all these flaws.

For many players right now, Elden Ring is about Ranni, and choosing to follow her despite her vague goals. The Lands Between contain many more mysteries besides this, but as you take her hand she asks you to follow her into the night, into fear and doubt. The sense of uncertainty, of what has happened in this world and what you’re doing, is what makes Elden Ring so compelling when I’m playing it, and especially when I’m not. Belief despite that certainty is the basis of faith in our world, one without a golden order to bolster power in the hands of the powerful forever.