Recent reviews by Surprise Reformation

"I doubt you could even *imagine* it..."

No other game before or since has so magnificently captured the 'epic' in the Epic Fantasy genre as Elden Ring. The game takes the Dark Souls formula, adds a few quality-of-life perks to make it easier to swallow, and throws it into a sprawling, fascinating, and beautifully executed open world.

The best paean I can give to Elden Ring is the sheer number of moments from the game that will live in my head forevermore. The incredible trek through the first legacy dungeon, Stormveil Castle, the first time I went down a well in the Mistwood and found an entire starry-skied underworld lurking beneath my feet. The ominous magnificence of Leyndell, and finding what things were beneath it that should have been left well alone. Ending up in a strange and timeless place upon doing something that could not be undone, and the sheer transcendence of facing the final boss with all of the skill and might you've amassed along the way.

Elden Ring isn't just an engaging game due to the journey, though: it represents the furthest refinement of the Dark Souls formula that FromSoftware has put out to date. While it still has some stuffy and annoying "From-isms" (such as clunky elevators that are anomalously located over endless death pits), much of the fat has been trimmed from the formula here. Making a build can be as simple as finding a weapon and armor set you like and going to town, or as complex as carefully managing each part of your kit and strategically minimizing certain stats to pump others. And of course, the enemy and boss design remain excellent, at least in the base game. The challenge is firm but very fair, and it feels great to overcome the Lands Between and its challenges with the toolkit you are offered.

The game is not perfect: some areas shine with a noticeably brighter sheen than others, and the game is not quite as fun upon a replay as it was the first time through. But the game's size, scale, and ambition cannot be denied, and for the magnificence of what Elden Ring accomplishes when it hits its highs, I cannot but recommend this to anyone who enjoys action, fantasy, RPGs, and anything in-between. Do yourself a favor and experience Elden Ring at least once. You won't regret it.

Some classic and important games, like Super Mario 64 or Final Fantasy 7, ultimately get overshadowed by their successors. They walked so that the genre could run; and their fans qualify their praise with statements like “it was revolutionary for its time”.

It’s therefore the highest accolade I can give to both Thief Gold and Thief II: The Metal Age that they remain essentially unsurpassed as 3D stealth games. Even 25 years later. Other such games have done great things in this space, notably Dishonored (which has a great deal of Thief DNA in it), but none get the whole experience so consistently right.

One of the best things about the Thief games, too, is that your experience doesn’t need to end with the base game. The Thief community has been making incredible fan content for almost as long as the game has existed. They have done things with the concept and the engine that could scarcely have been dreamed of in 1998.

Thief is a gift that keeps on giving. If you play any retro PC game, make it this one.

I began my FromSoft journey 10 years ago with the initial (and heavily criticized) release of Dark Souls II, which I loved and still love. I believe this indicates that I’m willing to give controversial or unpopular content by FromSoft its fair chance.

Elden Ring is perhaps my favorite FromSoft title, right alongside Bloodborne. I have hundreds of hours in this game and intend to put many more in. I awaited the release of this expansion with extreme eagerness.

So it is with surprise and heavy regret that I have to pass a negative judgement on it as a whole. I *wanted* so desperately to like this DLC, and it *does* still contain incredible content, but taken as a whole I cannot recommend it to all but the most committed fans.

What the DLC does get right is its ingenious approach to open-world exploration. It fuses Elden Ring’s open world with a more restrictive, Dark-Souls like sensitivity for rewarding exploration and creating a tightly interconnected space. It works fantastically: the Realm of Shadow is a joy and a challenge to navigate. The only shortcoming here is that some areas feel clearly less favored than others in terms of detail lavished on them. Physically speaking the game is as beautiful as ever as well. The DLC also adds a varied and interesting arsenal of new spells, weapons, and ashes of war. Many of them feel off-beat compared to the (slightly) more grounded arsenal of the base game, but this is typical of FromSoft DLC decision making and feels fine in context.

But the DLC fumbles what I think were perhaps the most important things for it to get right: its dungeons, its bosses, and its lore.

Having begun my From fandom with Dark Souls II, perhaps my expectations for dungeons were too high. But even compared to the base game, which wouldn’t rank particularly high in dungeon design compared to the publisher’s other titles, none of the legacy dungeons in the DLC feel particularly accomplished. Most aren’t offensively bad, and one feels downright competent, but they are simply far shorter and less memorable than they could have been.

The bosses in this DLC, however, are a different story. Excepting 2-3 of them, the bosses here represent the apotheosis of all of the worst elements of boss design philosophy in Elden Ring. They are absurdly aggressive, high-concept spectacles first and enjoyable experiences second. Maybe even third. This isn’t just a matter of “gitting gud” as the thousandth smug fan will insist. I am willing to “git gud” when a boss fight feels engaging to, well, engage. Malenia is legendarily difficult, with absurd strengths, but she has just enough cracks in her façade to make persisting against her feel worth doing. You can sense that your game is improving with each death at her hand. By contrast, when after hundreds of attempts I finally beat the DLC’s particularly inexcusable final boss (which I will not hesitate to condemn as one of the lowest experiences I’ve had in a SoulsBorne game), all I felt was relief and a desire never to need to go through that unfulfilling ordeal again.

Lastly, while this is the most subjective point of all, I can’t help but feel disappointment with what the DLC did for our understanding of the game’s lore. This is largely an issue of presentation rather than substance. The DLC felt oddly unpolished in this department; some of the most intriguing figures, such as the penultimate remembrance boss, feel like they literally show up out of nowhere, while some of little overall significance, like the first, get their own cutscene but remain uninteresting in the scheme of things.

Overall, while we did get a huge amount of content with this DLC, much of which was spectacular, I cannot but feel disappointed that this is the last we’ll see of Elden Ring.

Makes 17th century Swedes look like Bear Grylls and 17th century Palatine Germans look like farmers with pitchforks.