Elden Ring is a game that has a reputation for pretty much one thing: being hard. I will not bother you by restating that fact. Instead, I want to push aside the title of this post and talk about why Elden Ring is good anyway. Today, I explain why I chose to willingly subject myself to dozens of hours of torture.

Initially, I played the game because in a way I felt like I had something to prove. I had told several friends that I was playing the game, and to be completely honest I had come down with a serious case of sunk-cost fallacy from the $40 that had gone into the purchase. As the hours crawled on I struggled to “get” it, wondering why the game had received such critical acclaim. At one part a friend at a party noticed it in my library, and with nothing better to do he started watching my play. He gave me some tips, told me some obvious things I’d been missing, and with his careful guidance I eventually managed to beat the first boss in the game. This is probably the first moment where I started to see the grind become rewarding – the satisfaction of beating a boss that was already harder than pretty much any boss I’d ever beaten in any video game.

As I continued on my journey, this mentality began to guide me. I was excited to beat the next boss, not so much to do anything else. But as I kept playing, I became more and more excited to sit down and play for as long as I could. This was by no means a linear process, sometimes I would play every day for a week and sometimes I would go months without so much as opening the game. That being said, no matter what game I played, Elden Ring was always hanging in the background. I got excited to try new things, to explore new areas and become more and more powerful. The feeling of accomplishment never went away, but it stopped being the only thing motivating me to see the game through to completion. As I set down my controller, hands shaking, “GOD SLAIN” plastered across my screen, I thought back to the emotion I felt two years ago, sitting in front of the screen with my friend sitting next to me. A lot of time has passed since then. I’ve graduated high school, moved to a different state, gone through trials and tribulations, but the memory of this game stretches across all of these moments of the past two years, transcending however life may have been going in those past moments.

I don’t think I’m done with this game yet. My backlog has other entries but I can absolutely see myself coming back to take on Malenia, dive into the DLC, or finish off the 20-odd achievements I managed to miss. I thoroughly enjoyed this game for reasons that are very difficult to articulate, but I hope my late-night ramblings will at least get the idea across.

What’s Next?

This game took me around 85 hours to beat, spread out across an off-and-on period of two years. Next up on the list is the much shorter Doom: The Dark Ages. I’ve previewed this one a bit and I think it will be a very enjoyable break from the more hardcore Elden Ring experience.

Here’s a full list of the games on my backlog along with the amount of time I’ve already played and the estimated “how long to beat” times. You can view the full list here. Next blog post should be coming soon, hopefully in the next two-ish weeks.

• Doom: The Dark Ages: 15 hours
• Fallout 3: 10/22 hours
• Red Dead Redemption 2: 50 hours
• System Shock: 2/17 hours
• Callisto Protocol: 10 hours
• Armored Core VI: 17.5 Hours
• Control: 2/11 hours
• Remnant 2: 18 hours
• Robocop: Rogue City: 12 hours
• Metal Eden: 8 hours
• Armored Core 3: Portable: 4/12 hours.