![]() ![]() One day I simply removed the Dark Souls disc from my console, pressed it back into its box, and set the box gently in my kitchen trash can. To this day I could not tell you what comes after those two skeleton archers. Approximately 20 playing-hours later, I had been killed by the same pair of skeleton archers roughly 300 times, and had respawned in the same exact small room 300 times, and had advanced maybe four percent of the way into the game, and absolutely no part of it had been anything that I would ever dare to describe as "fun." I progressed through several entire and intense emotional stages while trying and failing for hours at a time to defeat the two completely anonymous skeleton archers, sometimes cackling in disbelief, sometimes spiking my controller in a rage into a nearby sofa, often coming jarringly close to actual sobs of frustration. The setting of Dark Souls is unrelentingly bleak, which in general is not something I love, but I was assured that I would find the challenges of the game rewarding, even exhilarating. I once tried to get into FromSoftware's Dark Souls game, back in 2011, on the recommendations of several trusted video game pals. ![]() This can be perplexing and even infuriating to a person who is looking for something else-mondo kill streaks, bright colors, a bumpin' soundtrack, endearing characters, a breezy playing experience-like you have been duped into paying money for something that is overtly hostile to the very idea that you might expect to have a good time while playing a game. The games are expertly, meticulously crafted to be exactly what they are. ![]() This is not due to shortcomings in game design or world-building or storytelling. They're insanely challenging, for one thing, and their worlds are dark and gloomy and overwhelmingly hostile, and the stories are minimal and obscured. However interesting Turtle Pope might be to a knower of the lore of Elden Ring, he is supremely interesting as an incomprehensible artifact of a world I absolutely do not understand at all.Ī very cool thing about the FromSoftware games, and specifically the so-called "Soulsborne" series of games, is that they are not at all constructed to be manageable, or even approachable, for casual gamers. Turtle Pope suggests the existence in the Elden Ring universe of a whole turtle catholic hierarchy Turtle Pope's sober bearing while discussing the fidelity of his religious belief with a wanderer in a wildflower meadow suggests a possible Turtle Pope–in-exile situation. ![]() Listen weird religious animals wearing clergy hats is my thing ok /rpPVr1CuNa- Web3 Henry Dubb March 6, 2022 But since I am not playing Elden Ring, information and context can only ruin the delightfully surreal experience of happening utterly at random upon an image of what appears to be the Turtle Pope. If I were playing Elden Ring and thus subjecting myself to dozens of hours of being owned mercilessly by skeletons, I would need the plot and characterizations and lore to sustain my attention, which after all would be occupied for dozens of hours. I have found that following Elden Ring from afar-watching random clips on social media or absorbing deranged late-night Twitter threads-is roughly one thousand times more fun than I ever had playing its predecessors in the FromSoftware collection of video games. I would like as little information as possible about the substance of this game. If this impression of Elden Ring is wrong in any way, I absolutely do not want to know about it. On the rare occasions that you are not owned by any skeletons at all, usually it's because you wandered off a cliff or were eaten by a bear. Other times you run away from a large skeleton and are suddenly owned by an ambush of several small skeletons. Sometimes you defeat one small skeleton and then are instantly owned from out of nowhere by a huge skeleton. Other times you creep along a precipice and are owned by a normal skeleton. Sometimes you ride a horse across a sunlit field and are owned by a large skeleton. Elden Ring, best I can tell, is a video game about running around in any direction until you are savagely owned to hell by malevolent skeletons of varying sizes. ![]()
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