Elden Ring, the latest RPG from FromSoftware, has been a massive commercial and critical success at launch. That success has been fueled by the loyal ‘Soulsborne’ fandom.
I went into Elden Ring a bumbling yet earnest rookie. I cleared out Stormveil Castle after much death and despair; so I set out to adventure, and shortly found myself atop a tower, next to a chest. Someone who had come here before me had helpfully left a message: treasure ahead! I opened the chest, got sucked through a portal, and woke up in a nightmare region of the game, full of misery. It was the moment that something clicked for me; I suddenly felt like I was in on the FromSoftware experience. Elden Ring is one of the biggest titles of the year, with over 12 million copies sold as of March 2022. The game has proven to be both a commercial and critical success, and while developer FromSoftware filed off some of the harshest edges from previous titles, it’s still very familiar for long-term fans of the studio. FromSoft has been tinkering with many of the same mechanics and design principles for years, and the scale of Elden Ring’s success is largely thanks to the fan base the Japanese developer cultivated through earlier releases. And it’s this very same community that not only got me hooked on Elden Ring, but also fueled my interest in both playing FromSoft’s previous games and digging deep into their lore. FromSoftware is perhaps best known for the Dark Souls series. Demon’s Souls, a 2009 release that would later be remade as a PlayStation 5 launch title in 2020, was a cult hit. The Dark Souls trilogy would be released over the 2010s, along with Victorian gothic horror Bloodborne in 2015 (hence the term “Soulsborne” many fans use, a way to casually refer to the developer’s catalog). FromSoft also released the Sengoku-era adventure Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice in 2019, which departed from familiar elements like the persistent, troublesome Patches. Dark Souls also impacted game design more broadly, with “Soulslike” becoming a shorthand for identifying a certain game ethos and set of mechanics. There are Soulslike games that, on the surface, appear nothing like the majestic, terrible settings of FromSoftware. But creators of games like Tunic have cleverly learned from FromSoftware and interpreted the developer’s mechanics through their own lens. I’m the kind of player who loves digging into lore, finding out little secrets about the world and its characters. At first, I missed much of this in Elden Ring, until I began paying attention to the flavor text on item descriptions. Much of the world is up for debate, spread across little riddles and unreliable narrators.
