Elden Ring

Developer FromSoftware

Publisher Bandai Namco

Format PC, PS4, PS5 (tested), Xbox One, Xbox Series

Release Out now

We’re sure this map used to be empty. Sixty hours in, though, it’s every bit as cluttered as your average Ubisoft collectathon. In the far northwest, we’ve dropped a marker to remind us that thar be dragons – and that one of them is five times the size of the others. In the deep southeast, an aide-memoire for a boss battle we knocked our heads against for two days before taking the hint. Elsewhere there are dungeons to come back to when we’re stronger, merchants to revisit when finances are more liquid, places we can see but not yet reach, and questgiving NPCs to return to down the line. Mostly, though, our map is full of markers to remind us of the many, many things we’ve either died to or run away from. In traditional open-world games, developers plaster their maps with icons to show off just how much there is to do. In Elden Ring, you daub your own onto blank canvas, to stand as permanent reminders of your many failures. How thoroughly FromSoftware.

So is the whole game, naturally. This is the purest expression yet of Hidetaka Miyazaki’s widely imitated, yet still inimitable philosophy, the culmination of the journey he and FromSoftware have been on since the 2009 release of . But the map is the star in many ways, and of all the ideas on show here, the one most likely to be pilfered by FromSoft’s aspirant peers. If imitators don’t quite-style level, here called a Legacy Dungeon? Or something else? There is only one way to find out.