Reviewing Games Like Elden Ring Is A Blessing And A Curse

Summary

Reviewing games like Elden Ring can be a daunting and time-consuming experience, with unpredictable deadlines and difficult decisions to make.
The process of reviewing a vast, uncompromising game like Elden Ring can feel terrifying, but also liberating when discovering secrets on your own.
Reviews should be a personal experience and not just a verdict, capturing both the good and the bad in compelling prose.

You might think that reviewing video games is a dream come true. Not only can you play the biggest games before they are released, you get them for free and have a chance to witness exactly how things shift and change in the final hour ahead of anyone else. As someone who has been operating in review circles since my time at university, there is a definite charm to it all, but also✱ plenty of hardship.

There is no way to know when a game will arrive ahead of embargo, how much time you will have with it, and whether you will be in for a relatively smooth experience or one lined with a litany of obnoxious issues. The deadline you’re presented with doesn’t usually change, even if there are issues with the build you have, and you’ll be force♌d to crunch against the clock in order to arrive at the finish line alongside everyone else.

Behind The Scenes Of Reviewing Elden Ring

What kind of game you’re covering also plays a significant factor. A cute platformer or stellar narrative adventure with a defined beginning, middle, and end are easy to work around, but sprawling open-world epics or all-encompassing RPGs can take over your life for weeks at a time. You then have games like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Elden Ring, which is a fascinating review experience, defined by joy, frustraℱtion, discovery, and unexpected collaboration.

Video game reviews are made up of myriad moving parts. It’s easy to assume that press and content creators receive a game, have a certain amount of time to play it, then publish all the reviews and impressions they have once the embargo has been lifted. That’s all correct, but it frequently obscures the amount of time we get with a game, re😼strictions on what content is produced under and so much more. Most of the t🐻ime, an effort is made to conceal these things from the public, or most people simply don’t care and are only after a concrete review score.

There are hostile assumptions to navigate too, and if your impressions are too positive or too negative, it doesn&rsq💯uo;t take long for toxic individuals to crawl out of the woodwork to claim they somehow know better about a game they haven’t played yet. This echoes a sense of entitlement that permeates the medium, and one that media must deal with each and every week. You grow numb to it over time, going through the motions while knowing that daring to be honest or speak up about something that matters will put you in the crosshairs of some nasty grifters.

But enough about the logistics. How does it actually feel to review a game as vast, unpredictable, and uncompromising ꦍas Elden Ring?

Welcome To The Chain Of Pain

In one word - terrifying. I was given a week with the PS5 versꦬion of Elden Ring prior to 💧its embargo, while the PC build I recall arriving just a few days earlier. This isn’t enough time when it comes to finishing Elden Ring, let alone seeing everything it has to offer. From the outset, this leaves you with some tough decisions to make. Do you write off everything in your life for the next several days and cram in dozens of hours with no sleep or interaction with the outside world, or accept that your review isn’t going to be a complete reflection of the game?

I landed somewhere in the middle, and put in roughly 35 - 40 hours before I put pen to paper. I felt like I’d seen enough, knew enough, and was ready to crown Elden Rin🌄g as the masterpiecꦫe it has now been accepted as. But getting there wasn’t easy.

Sekiro- Priest Boss Fight on the Cherry Blossom Bridge

FromSoftware games are daunting, even years after release when fans have spent months building curated Wikis filled with every location, enemy, item, and discovery you might ever need to know abou🍸t. A lot of the time during repeat playthroughs I won’t hesitate to look up where to find a specific item or a boss strategy I may have forgotten, not to mention all the secret optional areas ꦉthat this studio loves to hide within its already massive worlds.

It makes you feel incredibly powerless playing Elden Ring while the internet still knows nearly nothing, and if you get stuck, you’re on your own. But it’s also liberating to know you’ll likely be one of the first people in the world to discover all of these things for y🌳ourself, to get stuck and try to conquer challenges that will soon dominate the lives o💙f millions more.

Make Sure To Take Breaks And Drink Plenty Of Estus Flasks

While I’ve only dabbled in revi🍌ews for Elden Ring and Sekiro in my time, I’m friends with a few other critics who were covering Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls in the past who’ve regaled me with tales of emails between fellow ♈reviewers that they came to describe as the ‘Chain of Pain’ where they could share struggles, come up with solutions, and try to reach the end together, all while chasing a seemingly impossible embargo.

We had something similar with Shadow of the Erdtree, where a number of press from the preview event were💜 sharing updates on their progress and in search of potential t🎀ips.

But no matter how many fellow reviewers you ha﷽ve to confide in or how much time you sink into a game like Elden Ring during a period like this, you aren’t going to see everything. And I found the process far easier to stomach once I’d accepted that eventuality and instead tried to play at my own pace.

Major areas I wouldn’t visit until months later, while servers yet to be switched on meant💛 that summoning help to conquer the hardest of bosses just wasn’t going to happen. It was a joy to share my own experiences and compare them with others, kicking myself about mysteries I’d failed to unearth while salivating at the fact I could still jump back in and see it all for myself eventually anyway.

Reviews aren’t meant to be a robotic verdict designed to tell you whether games are worth buying or not, even if that factors into the overall critique, but instead a chꦕronicle of a sing✨le personal experience and the prevailing thoughts you came away with.

These might be good, bad, or a mix🍷ture of them all turned into 1000 or so words of compelling prose constructed to make you care, and that is so much easier with a game like Elden Ring which will take hold and never let go. Over two years have passed, and it’s an experience I won’t forget, and will happily put myself through again.