During my freshman year of college, I was introduced to “Elden Ring”. It was a game that had just recently come out, and a few of my friends  got me into it. For a little background, “Elden Ring” is the latest installment in a video game genre called the “Soulsborne” genre, which are notorious for being very challenging and incredibly punishing for wrong decisions. Up until playing “Elden Ring” I had only ever played various Nintendo titles, and other games that are known to be on the easier side, like “Minecraft” or “Mario Kart”. These games are primarily made for children and teens, after all. To say that I had a bit of whiplash going from Nintendo titles to a Soulsborne was an understatement. It was nothing like what I have played in the past, in so many different ways. Since “Elden Ring” is widely recognized as the hardest game in the Soulsborne genre, this is arguably one of the hardest games ever made. I distinctly remember spending over eight hours on one of the beginning bosses (Godrick the Grafted) on my first playthrough.

However, I stopped playing this game after a while, maybe after six months or so. Until recently, when I got back into it over this past summer. I spent the first little bit of time in the game refreshing my muscle memory and got into the swing of things pretty quickly. Except this time was different. I knew that there are loads of bosses in “Elden Ring” and I wanted to beat all of them. There are just under 240 bosses in the main game, and I embarked on a mission to do every single one. This is known as an “All Bosses Run”, and is not easy by any means. As I write this, I am currently just under 50 hours into the run, and I’ve only done around 45 bosses. I’m spending an average of over an hour on each boss. Normally in a challenge like this, I would have given up by now. But there are several things I’ve learned along the way that keep making this playthrough exciting and fresh.

One of the first things I’ve learned from this run is that “Elden Ring” is not only one of the hardest, but probably one of the best games ever made. “Elden Ring” is an open-world game, which means that the game does not force you into a linear storyline, and that you can explore wherever you want. Open-world games have gotten much more popular in the last decade, and I think there are a couple things that separate a good open-world game from a great one. Most importantly though is the amount of content in your open world. “Elden Ring” is so full of life and has so much to explore, the map is massive and chock full of things to do, questlines to progress, enemies to defeat, and items to collect. The replayability is off the charts as well, since most different weapons and items have a unique playstyle, making “Elden Ring” almost infinitely replayable with any number of unique items and weapons. 

Another thing I’ve learned from “Elden Ring” is persistence and how to turn that into rewards. “Elden Ring” may be very tough, but this makes any little success so much more enjoyable. Every time I defeat a boss that I’ve spent an abnormally long time on, I find myself breathing a huge sigh of relief, often accompanied by a shout of excitement or happiness. Bosses often have huge pools of hit points and complex and unique attack patterns to memorize and apply counter-measures to. “Elden Ring” makes you work for your victories, and they feel so much more satisfying that way.

I watched a video essay on YouTube recently about what makes video games intuitive for beginners. In the video, the narrator has a bunch of people who don’t play video games at all take a dive into “Elden Ring”. This same guy has done the same thing with a bunch of Soulsborne games, and has had little success with any of the test subjects. However, when testing this for “Elden Ring”, his test subjects were doing extraordinarily well. Still not great compared to people who have hundreds of hours in the game, but very good for complete strangers to not only the genre, but video games as a whole. The mechanics made it very easy to pick up and run with, combined with the fact that the game has enough weapons and armor to be good for almost every playstyle. I began relating this to my own experience playing “Elden Ring” for the first time and found myself noticing similar details.

“Elden Ring” is highly intuitive, not as hard as other Soulsborne games to pick up, and I think might be one of the best (and hardest) video games ever made. I cannot recommend it enough to anyone who wants a challenge in their lives, having a challenge like this is very fun to play through. “Elden Ring” can be bought for PC, PlayStation, and Xbox.