This essay discusses details from the entirety of the plot of Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree and Bloodborne.
We knew that Elden Ring contained a lie. It wasn’t a secret in the end. It broke Goldmask. Facing it made the children go mad in their own ways, all cursed. And we had to fight it there at the end: hanging Marika made Radagon, swinging a hammer.
The reveal of these two-yet-one was a revelation. It was given as lore, analyzed in the texts, taken to alchemical roots and treated as the seed of genealogical investigation. Empyreans have these qualities. Gods have these others. The children, born with their curses, could find their way to the seat of power if they followed the rules that lorehounds tracked back to first principles. We were all made to act like Gideon the All-Knowing in our own right, poring over the pages and explaining the snippets of truth behind all of these characters who were related in god knows what ways.
A Fromsoft game always demands this, and the cottage industry in explainers is big enough that the ambiguity of Elden Ring and its siblings get treated like a resource all on their own. You need the imprecision so that there’s value in combing through and cutting these things apart. There is an economic imperative at work—Fromsoft as job creator.
Fromsoft games love a revelation. They are convenient closure. You play in these worlds, for dozens or hundreds of hours, and then there is something that you might learn there that changes you. You might need an accented young man to intone the truths to you online, but they were there the whole time, waiting to be uncovered by you as you hacked your way through skeletons once more.
Shadow of the Erdtree goes back to this fertile ground. Queen Marika, perhaps always Radagon as well, was once simply a person who lived in a village. Her and her people were changeable in some way, and that was taken as divine. They were sainted via compression and configuration, their flexibility of being taken as a true virtue, and so they were crammed into large pots and amalgamated into abominations with regularity. This was until Marika said no. She reached out, somewhere, and received a power that meant she would not share the same fate. Maybe no one else ever would. She strode out of her village, went to the Divine Gate that makes one a god, and began her eternal shackling to power.
Later, she made war on those who harmed her, and the war was so troubling, so sacrificial, so destructive to the minds and bodies of everyone who fought it that the queen sealed it away in another realm.
The mechanisms here are those of revelation—“finally, we know what happened”—but they are a revelation of the past. This is a curious and well-worn maneuver in the Fromsoft tool chest:
You are a hero on a journey to repair the world, but the city of the gods is abandoned and you’re stuck in a trap that remakes an ended world again and again. The stately king of the fantasy kingdom killed a world across the ocean and brought their most prized treasure back with him, damning his subjects. A dead god washes up on the beach in a small village and humanity’s elites horde and harness it, poisoning and warping everything they loved.
This final one, which is the the heart of the backstory of Bloodborne as detailed in The Old Hunters, seems to me to be the previous Fromsoft game that Shadow is most in conversation with. In both, the past is so difficult to deal with, and the pain of violence so overwhelming, that it needs to be contained in another realm. The primal sin of Bloodborne, the beginning of blood ministration that eventually pays out in the becoming-wolf, becoming-bug, becoming-alien of everyone in Yharnam, is that a dead god washed up on the shore and an opportunity presented itself: take its unborn child and learn to yoke the Outside. And they do it.
When Marika reaches out to something, anything, for help with her people’s plight, she receives the same kind of opportunity. Will you accept a benefit without knowing what you will have to pay for it? Is there any cost that will nullify the initial gain? In Bloodborne, it blows up the world. In Elden Ring, it gives Queen Marika the world, and then it grinds her children to dust, collapses her world, and chains her to her power.
When we meet her she is hanging limply. When we meet her she is hanging. When we meet her, we cannot imagine how long she has been hanging. A stone, hanging from a rip in reality.
And by all measures, it was worth it, this deal with Another. To be a conduit for a greater power, a Greater Will, came with the ability to make the world right. Marika was able to bend the world into Order, and who wouldn’t want it, given her people’s destined location as undifferentiated mass in a cauldron. She could see what a world made right would look like, and she took the opportunity, whatever the cost.
I wonder about the Fromsoft storytelling strategy here. I wonder about the great sin, always hidden, and I think about the use of revelation to juice up a player who needs to dig to find the truth. Importantly, it’s dug up, excavated, pulled from the materials that were already there the whole time—they are presented as facts of the past rather than storytelling maneuvers of the present.
Elden Ring is, in many ways, a greatest hits of Fromsoft ideas. I do wonder if the hits are beginning to ring hollow as the same storytelling, the same archaeological truths, get dug up time and time again. Of course, there are glimmers of wonder—Queen Marika grasping the thin strands of gold for the first time in the story trailer—and that wonder is in contrast to the method of finding wretched history beneath all accomplishment. Her triumph, obtained by screaming into the void, made into nothing by the ruin that followed. And the point is for you to learn how. The only way to end is to learn the vanishing point origin of the past and fix it into a known truth.
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Cameron Kunzelman is a critic. You can follow him on Twitter or listen to his game studies podcast. You can read his book on speculation and video games.