I know I’m not alone when I say that Elden Ring has become one of my favorite pieces of fantasy literature, in the same spirit as the first time I read The Dark Tower or the Hobbit under a pile of blankets. Message and multiplayer systems aside, it’s been an unexpected time machine for me, transporting me back to a bubble of adolescence where reading was an escape and I eagerly, hungrily, entered these worlds alone.
Growing up, there was nothing quite like going to a second-hand bookstore, moving toward the fantasy section full of yellowed, dog-eared paperbacks with hope in your heart and $5 in your pocket. It wasn’t so much about finding a “good” book, as finding one to spend time with—a rich, layered companion ripe for peeling while you were ensconced in bed or in a favorite chair or on a train somewhere. Elden Ring has taken the experience of getting absorbed in old-school fantasy literature and translated it into something special: flawed and imperfect, like all art, but a perfect analogue for the inherent solitude and emotional resonance of reading a transportive fantasy novel.
When I talk about going into Elden Ring alone, what I’m really doing is paraphrasing an approach by writer Warren Ellis, who in recent times has been exposed as a systematic abuser and groomer of women. Some of his older non-fiction has remained stuck in my brain as I continue to digest the sociopathic failures of one of my once-favorite writers. “We all enter comics on our own,” he wrote in a December 1999 installment of his then-recurring CBR column. “Moving into the fictional world of a graphical novel is not a group pursuit. It is the act of one reader, with one copy of one comic. We all come in alone.” This makes sense. After all, you can’t really huddle around a comic the same way people gather around a TV or a board game. Ellis spoke of engaging with comics as a marginalized medium where “I create for you a world that you enter into as a solitary reader of a form cut off from the cultural conversation. You come in alone.”
In 2022, it’s impossible to apply this general idea to mainstream comics, much less videogames. The cultural conversation now includes Marvel movies and TV mainstays as well as games like Fortnite and Minecraft, but most topics for discussion revolve around money, influence, and intellectual property rather than the finer artistic points of each respective medium. Even fantasy as a genre has found new purchase as Big Nerd, as a brand and identity that's become an absolute cash cow for companies who value the spending power of a truly formidable demographic of readers.
But the approach of entering a world alone—a concept that Ellis did not invent but simply articulated well enough to survive as a seed in my ravaged attention span—is a concept that I’ve found uniquely resonant with Elden Ring. This is the first FromSoft game I’ve played online, and yet for all my enjoyment of its thoroughly memeable, even delightful multiplayer features, it’s fundamentally a game that deserves to be experienced by yourself. For From veterans, it comes as no surprise that Elden Ring asks for its players' full engagement by design. But as FromSoft’s first “approachable” open-world game, it’s taken on a special significance for me as a bona fide piece of traditional fantasy literature—a text that demands an exacting type of individual attention that you can really only experience through the act of reading.
On the surface, the more obvious aesthetic markers are there—the familiar sword and sorcery imagery set against a lush backdrop of fine art inspirations from pre-Raphaelite oils to 17th century Dutch paintings and illustrators like Edmund Dulac. More hellish biomes like Caelid pay homage to a kaleidoscope of surrealists like Zdzisław Beksiński and the more contemporary Wayne Barlowe. Fans have pointed out the gothic fantasy influence of Kentaro Miura’s Berserk manga on previous FromSoft games and Elden Ring is no different. The Dark Tower vibes are also unmistakable. Beyond the whole gunslinger quest, multiworld structure, and circular narrative, the beloved icons of Mid-world are dotted all over the Lands Between: turtle and bear, “beams” of light manifesting as grace, and remnants of an old civilization.
These are imaginative marvels for a first-time reader, patiently mapping a new world through each page. But the effect of Elden Ring’s surrealist/fantasy pastiche goes deeper—it functions as both coded shorthand (thanks, genre fiction) and a familiar fictive framework for how we should read the Lands Between: as a classic piece of fantasy literature, unfolding through a fantastic combination of fragmented lore, obtuse dialogue, and environmental storytelling. The latter rings especially clear through architecture and sculpture—the massive (possibly petrified) demonic heads in eastern Liurnia that draw from various ancestral mask cultures, or the giant skeletal remnants intertwined with old pillars and buildings in northeastern Caelid.
Naturally the idea of a clear linear narrative isn’t really present here. Elden Ring being an open-world game where you can just wander around and explore at your leisure means that each player essentially experiences a unique sequence of the same basic story beats. It immediately brought to mind interactive fiction writer/designer Aaron Reed’s experimental novel Subcutanean, a procedurally generated print-on-demand book that creates a new story—unique to each reader—each time it’s made. Reed calls this style of writing “quantum authoring,” where every possible story permutation needs to be both captivating and consistent.
Translated into the meandering narrative framework of Elden Ring—like its predecessors, a game meant to be played and replayed with different character builds and strategies—I’ll never organically experience the same story twice; “organically” here meaning that I immerse myself in the fiction of wandering as a stranger in a strange land without knowing exactly what comes next. After nearly 90 hours of play, I haven’t met Patches once, I know I’ve missed out on a huge chunk of Blaidd’s storyline, and I’m pretty sure there are more non-playable characters waiting in the wings for me, somewhere on the map.
Being able to absorb these worlds alone has a critical impact on one’s experience in said worlds, even more today than in the past as we become increasingly attuned to constant connection, constant feedback, and constant noise. Some players resent the frustration in figuring out where to go or what to do as part of the experience, a problem that has been largely defeated by the internet. To a degree, the relentless noise of games media discourse, as well as the structural and behavioral conventions of the games industry, make it difficult to fully indulge in this age-old joy—the joy of full conceptual immersion in a fiction that demands an equally full degree of attention.
With all of the grimdark brooding and obtuse storytelling, Elden Ring also pays homage to an important part of fantasy literature that’s integral to a lone reader’s experience: humor. My playthrough has been marked with plenty of brief, fleeting moments—snatches of dialogue, mostly—that echo the kind of silliness you might get from Moorcock’s Elric of Melniboné books or a bit of Pratchett’s Discworld. Humor also comes from player messages, a beloved part of the From experience that several designers have fondly described as a form of emergent in-game narrative; you’ll find messages bickering over the supposed existence of a “dog,” or messages denouncing liars for claiming there’s a hidden path.
While some feel like they detract from full immersion in the Lands Between, one way to approach these messages is as marginalia you might find in secondhand books, punctuating a situation or highlighting something weird and surprising. Some are practical warnings, but there’s also a lot of nonsense—a way of leaving a sign of humanity (in all its idiocy) behind for the next lone person to come along. That is to say, the idea of going into Elden Ring alone doesn’t demand complete solitude. Instead it mirrors the independence and resilience of lone literary protagonists, or lone literature readers, left to decipher or ignore these small enigmas as they see fit.
The overall result is simple: Elden Ring, in mimicking the conventions of fantasy literature, imbues the player with the agency of myth-making usually reserved for the fantasy author. Instead of presenting the player with a neat linear narrative, fully-cooked lore, and relevant exposition, Elden Ring plays with both vagueness and vagaries in ways that are surprisingly empowering. Where the act of reading is inherently solitary, so is the act of writing. On its minimal map, the act of putting down your own coded markers is a cartographic act of authorship. When players take handwritten notes and keep Elden Ring journals to organize their thoughts around the game or leave an impermanent message for others, it’s all an extension of age-old storytelling traditions that gave rise to the fantasy genre in the first place: oral histories, fragile scrolls and parchments, literal scraps of notes passed around between merchants.
Armed with these tools, the idea of embarking on a new fantasy journey alone doesn’t need to feel daunting, and while single-player games still have a loyal demographic, things have changed since the days of calling hint helplines and scouring web 1.0 pages for a benevolent soul with time on their hands to write informal guides and tips. Attention spans and market demands have changed, to the detriment of our ability to fully engage with a piece of narrative art. When I think about Elden Ring, I think about my own sad, decaying relationship with reading. (I can barely finish a novel now without actively pushing myself unless it comes with a work deadline.) Exploring the Lands Between as a work of literature, though, has resurrected a part of me that I thought had evaporated years ago.
At its core, Elden Ring requires the same care we bring to the finest traditions of escapist fantasy. Its wholehearted insistence on time and attention is a rarity. You can’t doomscroll while playing Elden Ring, at least not without (probably really funny and remorseless) consequences. There’s no pause button, but that doesn’t mean you can’t just get up and walk away—you just need to find creative ways to stop what you’re doing. The idea that the game suffers for lack of this one feature exhibits a painful lack of imagination. That a game would demand so much of your attention and care isn’t actually that surprising when you think about the experiential and mental parallels it has with fantasy reading. And the idea that this sort of thing is an anomaly in open-world multiplayer games that are more often than not, due to their scale and upkeep, designed around busywork and sunk cost rather than discovery is, frankly, pretty depressing.
The idea of going into a world alone is at once alarming and old-fashioned to those who would see us tethered to always-online features. Elden Ring would admittedly be a far different experience without co-op and messages, but these features are so carefully implemented that they largely feel secondary to the solitary journey that defines the experience of the player. After all, the faint phantoms they show are clearly of another time and place, and we’re merely seeing an echo of past deeds. These messages and co-op players are, if anything, a reminder of the asynchronous collective empathy we can cultivate from the individual experience of reading, and hardly distract from the dark, quiet delight of stumbling upon a cave or hidden treasure in the most unexpected places. It all brings me back to my most formative years of reading—huddled under a blanket, buried deep in a world that I came into alone.
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Alexis Ong is a freelance culture journalist, a neo-luddite, and a cat simp. She mostly writes about video games, internet things, and technological oddities; you can find wretched things on Twitter at @steppinlazer and professional things at www.alexis.work.