Part 1 can be found right here.
The first thing Elden Ring asked me to choose was what kind of character I wanted to be. I chose to be an astrologer. It was only eighty-odd hours later that I caught a hint of why the stars might matter.
Video games have a significant narrative tool which other mediums lack: their uncertainty. Linear stories have to choose what to reveal to you and when; when they ask questions, they either need to provide you with answers, or they need to justify not giving them to you. Artists' attempts to get around this have yielded some of the most fascinating stories in existence: Vladimir Nabokov, for instance, famously liked to write literary masterpieces that doubled as almost childlike puzzles, concealing layer upon layer upon layer of literal meaning to his stories, so that your third reread of Pale Fire might yield a clue that would lead you, upon fourth reread, to a brand-new understanding of events. Mysteries are inherently an attempt to play with pockets of uncertainty, so that the delicate art of the mystery is to provoke curiosity while concealing answers in plain sight. (J. K. Rowling, for all her various talents, is at her core a mystery writer, and her gifts for constructed mystery is the singular reason why Harry Potter was gripping enough to form its audience on every other front.) But in the end, a book or a movie or a play lays itself out before you, and you are left with a determinate number of puzzle pieces which add up to a satisfying vision or not.
Games alone can circumvent this, because games are fundamentally spaces for possibility. Why are sports so gripping that entire cultures form around individual leagues and teams? Because there is no predefined outcome: the rules allow for tremendous suspense. I was fortunate enough to introduce a girlfriend of mine to football by means of Super Bowl LII, in which our "home team" (the Eagles) played off against a "shit team" (the Patriots) in an incredibly tense game that was up in the air till the very end. She was opposed to sports culture in general and football in particular, had no particular feelings about the Eagles, had only the mildest issues with the Patriots, but by the end she was screaming at the TV like the rest of us. Because none of us knew what was about to happen—and that included the players themselves. I understand people who can't stand books but never miss a game, even if I'll never be one of them; there is something profoundly vital in games that art and literature will never touch, even if the opposite is equally true.
What does this mean for video games as a medium? The honest answer is: we're still trying to work that out. Some games clearly want to be taken as seriously as film—an ambition which I find inherently funny, given how recently cinema was finally "permitted" to be art—and achieve this by pre-scripting events which players "experience" rather than merely watch. Other games go the opposite route, offering not only variable endings but genuine randomness, in which outcomes occur which might never have been intended by the developers themselves. The fact that there's a question as to how video games might tell their stories is itself fascinating, but the answers developers have come up with largely remain dissatisfying.
It's been a decade since The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was released, so it feels a bit cheap to bully it a little bit more, but Skyrim feels like a reasonable comparison point to Elden Ring, because it too was an attempt to tell a story across a vast and immersive landscape. I have invested thousands of hours of my life into that terrible game, which I despised from the very start; a major frustration is that, as I described it to friends, Skyrim feels like a Disney World reimagining of The Lord of the Rings. There are many gorgeous cities, and various epic quests, but all of them feel like they're putting on a show for you: you arrive at a place, and a dumb little theatre bit unfolds for you, feeding you lines which you must compulsively read back, at which point you're told you have "immersed" yourself into the lore. The fact that some quests take you across these cities doesn't make those cities any more immersive, because even if you arrive at one to continue three separate quests, the quests themselves never intersect; the closest you get to genuine depth is when characters reveal themselves to be bit players in stories you hadn't realized they had lines for, which feels a bit like hearing your most boring "friend" reveal to you, after ten years, that they've been collecting unusual pennies all this time.
In the ten years since Skyrim, it feels, unfortunately, like mainstream game development hasn't made significant leaps forwards. Titles like Red Dead Redemption and The Last of Us have received acclaim for the quality of their writing—though "quality" here is graded on a significant curve—but they're still fundamentally creating set pieces for us to wander through, providing us with "depth" and "richness" in the manner most TV shows do, which is to say: they present us with visceral experience and neat little plotting tidbits, and expect these to gradually accumulate into something that feels like a meaningful experience. I don't mean to say this dismissively—I like those TV shows!—but in terms of innovative use of their medium, these games don't hold impressive ambitions. (Which is not to dismiss the genuinely brilliant progress they've made in terms of art direction, gameplay design, and, yes, quality of writing. 1920s films are conceptually limited compared to the films we make today, but they are still capable of beauty, poignancy, sophistication, and depth.)
I was uniquely spoiled, as a gaming enthusiast, by playing Ice Pick Lodge's astonishing Pathologic shortly after it came out in 2005. Pathologic is, to this day, the high-water mark to which I compare all ambitious video games; 17 years after it came out, it still feels a decade ahead of anything else—even Elden Ring, which I promise I haven't forgotten about. It understood (and understands) gaming as a medium more profoundly than anything else I've encountered, and taught me more about what games are and can be simply by existing than any of the many books I studied when I made it the subject of my undergraduate thesis.
One of Pathologic's central innovations is simple to the point of crudeness, but also shocking in the fact that it works: at the start of the game, you choose one of three people to experience the story as, and each person experiences a completely different world. All three live in the same town, but makes their home base in one of its various districts, prioritizes a different subset of individuals, and even sees things roaming the streets that the others cannot. Beyond that innovation, Pathologic's storytelling is leagues beyond other games', in the complexity and interiority of its characters, in the depths of their histories and the veritable mythology that explains how this town formed in the first place, and more than anything in the way their lies are vast and often not revealed, but blend together with the fact that they often think they're speaking the truth, and merely prioritize different facets of the truth, or else are themselves working on incomplete data. None of that, however, compares with the experience of completing a 40-hour game, starting it up as someone new, and immediately encountering contradictory information that makes you realize that every conclusion you pieced together in your last epic detective saga is suddenly entirely suspect.
I mention Pathologic because the key to its brilliance lies in an unexpected place: Ice Pick Lodge, its developers, understood that narrative in gameplay isn't just a temporal construct. It's also a spatial one. Where you are and where you go defines who you meet and what you hear; the times you show up somewhere dictate what you encounter and what you take away. Most significantly, "choice," in a video game, doesn't just mean picking a path when you're offered a fork in the road: it means that the simple act of living in a place, the act of your life putting you in certain places at certain times, defines what you think the narrative is in the first place. Plot, in a video game, is the pebbles we pick up as we journey through a dark and unknown wood; at the end, we lay them out, and it tells a story of where we've been and how we came to where we are, but we are fooling ourselves if we think we hold the whole forest in our pocket.
Just as literary and cinematic attempts to break linearity make for some of the most interesting books and films, ludic attempts to play with space and time make for the video games that excite me the most. I mentioned Outer Wilds and its delightful Möbius strip of a plot already, which only works because Outer Wilds, too, is driven by a meticulous obsession with your location in space and time. But I also think a lot about Majora's Mask, a childhood favorite, in which you're literally given a notebook with which to track characters' movements across three days, and experience different parts of their stories based on when and where you encounter them, and how your actions modify what they are and aren't able to get away with. And my favorite game since Pathologic, the similarly-ahead-of-its-time else Heart.Break(), takes place in a world that's literally hackable, with locations stored in a repository that you can break into and teleport yourself to, including places you can only find by breaking into them, or places you can only get yourself to by pinpointing their locations. else Heart.Break() gives you a vast amount of noise to sift through, leaving writings and diary entries literally stored on floppy discs strewn about apartment complexes, which means that your narrative progression has less to do with "playing the game" than with learning how to filter down the world you're given, targeting points of genuine meaning, uncovering bits and pieces that the developer genuinely might never have wanted you to find.
At some point in else Heart.Break(), I programmed a teleporter to leap me to random locations across a vast and largely-inaccessible map; eventually, these random stabs landed me by something I'd never have seen otherwise, corroborating a secret journal entry by a person who, it seemed, must be exploring this world through similar methods as myself. Which led to an encounter with her that literally couldn't have happened any other way: a narrative unfolding less "earned" than "chanced upon," as if the world I was living in held far more tales than I'd uncovered, any of which might only exist as cryptic hints of something bigger or might abruptly reveal themselves, in fact, to be brand-new worlds and games and stories, enormous pockets of possibility visible only through the narrowest cracks in the wall.
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There is only one mainstream game designer whose approach to narrative is as consistently intriguing as these strange, flawed works of art. Predictably, given the game I'm writing about, it's Hidetaka Miyazaki himself.
A cornerstone of Miyazaki's evolving legend is that, as a child, he was drawn to books written in English that he could only partly understand. The experience, for him, was only partly the experiences that those books intended; the other half was the unpredictable ways that his understandings of those books faded in and out, leaving him with pockets of uncertainty, places where he was compelled to draw his own conclusions, with some of those conclusions proving to be sounder than others.
Dark Souls exemplified his approach to narrative, which is to create a similarly ambiguous blend of certainty and uncertainty to his plots. It's never easy to figure out which mysteries will never be answered, which will be hinted at enough for you to draw your own conclusions, and which will be given surprisingly literal form. Making this trickier is the way that the game almost never asks you to be invested in these mysteries, and never bothers pointing them out to you at all. Which parts are open mystery, and which parts simply haven't been talked about in your presence? There's no reason to care, since the narrative of the gameplay itself leads you almost-silently to a conclusion that's almost all physical rather than narrative: defeat these demigods, confront this fallen hero, and take his place—though "take his place" is itself not particularly clarified, and whether or not you ask questions about it comes down to whether or not you've started to suspect that your interpretation of that duty matters more than your undertaking of the task itself.
At times, the truth that's being concealed from you is almost stupidly vast—so big that you barely dare imagine you're living through a lie. Dark Souls is cleaved into two larger realms: the overgrown, sunken world that you begin at, and the gleaming city of Anor Londo, accessed halfway into the game, watched over by the goddess Gwynevere, who beamingly assigns you a heroic duty. It is the one noble place in all of Dark Souls, and your one encounter with a genuine member of the divine family who breathed life into this world. So why on earth would you think to throw a knife at Gwynevere? Do it, though, and something unnerving happens: Gwynevere isn't wounded or killed so much as revealed to be entirely non-existent, an illusion propped up alongside, as it happens, the entirety of Anor Londo itself. Put simply, attack her and the lights go out. The gleaming sun winks out of the sky, the valiant knights go missing, and the whole city abruptly reveals itself to be a grave.
It would be misleading to call this "a part of the story," since nothing about your playing of the game requires you to take this step. Furthermore, this action isn't remotely suggested to you by any source. The most you get by way of hint has to do with an obscure item you pick up, one of hundreds, whose description suggests that Gwynevere left this realm a long time ago with her husband. Even that description, however, says nothing else: it simply hints that she may not really be here, though it hints it in a way that makes it wholly plausible that she'd have returned at some point.
For every bit of narrative that comes physically accompanied by a hidden, meaningful action and reaction, there are a dozen that only consists of hints and interpretations. There are hints, for instance, about a third sibling of Gwynevere's, her oldest brother, who committed some blasphemy and was stricken from the history books. (One of those hints merely consists of three statues in a building, one of which has been annihilated; it's easy to assume this is just a typical case of blight and destruction, until you piece together that the brother was likely intentionally destroyed.) For various reasons, I arrived at the conclusion that the brother is none other than your most beloved acquaintance, a valiant knight who tells you he is "seeking his own sun." I later learned that Miyazaki had originally intended another character, and an unexpected one, to be the brother in question; in a sequel to Dark Souls, the brother is revealed, and is all-but-certainly a separate entity altogether, nobody from the original game at all. Yet the ambiguity remains, and my own interpretation means so much to me that I push hard to find reasons to believe it, and Dark Souls is generous enough with its openness that this personal meaning remains a possibility, however vague.
George R. R. Martin's contribution to Elden Ring was a curious one. He didn't write dialogue, and as far as I know he didn't personally create the characters we meet or encounter. He was tasked with writing history: the chronicle of gods and royals, the furtive secret stories that were banished from the official chronicles, the conflicted crisis in which there is no one singular good answer, merely threads that form a weave, interpretations and agendas that muddy the waters of truth and lies, good and evil, right and wrong.
From there, Elden Ring unfolds much like every other Miyazaki game does: you begin with the barest scrap of lore, and learn about the world less through dialogue or written narrative than through architecture and adversity. Things are less explained than shown: the strange, grunting creatures that attack you en masse for hours before they're given names, before you start to notice they operate in hives, before you start noticing the sorts of environments they favor most, and pick up details about the former residents' attempts to fight them off. You don't need to be told about the pilgrimages to the capitol city, because what matters to you are the caravans themselves, hoards of knights and commoners protecting a single, slow-moving wagon which you can loot if you're clever enough—and when you find one such pilgrimage weeping at the city's doors, which refuse to open for them, the story tells itself. Elsewhere, you cross a nightmare landscape, combatting hellishly large dogs and crows, and when you find the soldiers fighting back against them, it takes no language to explain how weary or fearful these soldiers are: you merely have to note the small pockets of them, contrasted against the endless terrors that actively besiege them as you watch. And if you kill the soldiers too, it is not without some empathy for their plight.
The royal family that dominates this story is introduced, too, primarily through architecture. There is the sheer physical fact of their castles and universities, towering over the landscape. There is the way they make their presence known through ownership: the changing colors and banners of their respective armies, signifying not only who controls what but which might be making forays against the others. You see the names of different empires applied, like signatures, to the clothing you wear, the spells you learn, and eventually learn which empire fought which, and which of the names you've heard spoken aloud are attached to which factions. And though the individuals you meet are first distinguished by their voices rather than their identities—the sneering one; the haughty one; the cheerful; friendly one—they gradually reveal their place in this tapestry, though some revelations are misleading at first, or outright lies.
The silence and the slowness of the story sells the intrigue; mysteries arrive, not as abrupt dramas requiring intense focus, but as questions which take their time arising in the first place, your responses to things you learn shifting imperceptibly from apathy to recognition to curiosity to suspense. At first, the royal names mean nothing to you; when you do take interest, it will likely be in the one man who physically exists the closest to you, because his domain surrounds you, and the people you meet often mention him in passing. The rest are just idle abstractions, vague promises of vaguely medieval folktales. At some point, though, you learn just enough to know which questions are significant, because they are questions you have started asking, rather than questions the game instructed you to ask—at which point the revelations start feeling mesmerizing, dreadful, and unsettling.
Similarly, Elden Ring achieves enough narrative density that, for the first time in a Miyazaki game, there comes a moment when the various threads of characters you've met begin to knit together into something gripping. It's hard to tell how much of this is Martin and how much is Miyazaki, but it feels almost as if the various casts of characters in A Song of Ice and Fire were put forth before you, not gradually across a series of epics, but in a single dense snarl whose every component threatens to thrust you in a wholly new direction, and put you unexpectedly at odds with others before you have a chance to realize it. In terms of actual personage, the scale is significantly smaller than what you find in Game of Thrones, but the folds of history are similarly complex: there are less binary oppositions than there is chaos, with ideology giving way to bitter personal emotion, the choices of individuals swaying broad historic moments in ways that feel less like destiny than like a world built precariously on hidden layers of heartbreak, vengeance, and betrayal.
What's all-but-guaranteed is this: you will make choices that lead to blood-soaked bodies staining the floor. You won't always know you're making those decisions; you won't always know the people whose deaths you're conspiring towards, or even that you're conspiring at all. Who you meet and when you meet them matters; there are people you simply won't run into, because you happened to be in one place while they were passing through another. And at certain points, when you do have to choose between one person or another, it's hard to tell whether you know enough to make an informed decision, or whether these are the only two people you could be choosing between, or whether the very fact of making a choice betrays another path you could have taken, another place you could have been.
Miyazaki's games have always been about the end of the world, and the question of who gets to create a new one. The answer to the latter is always "you," which means the real question is: what will you make? Which in turn becomes a question, not of what you'd prefer, but of which things you do and don't know—because that will inevitably be what forms your preference. In Elden Ring, your options are subtler and more multi-layered than ever: the further you go in, it seems, the more you find yourself pursuing a dense web of hidden places and potential nemeses, thrown in a dozen different directions that each seem to offer you a truth so staggering and so unexpected that it feels like it must be the answer to the question you were looking for—never mind those other secret truths, most of which you won't even know about in the first place.
It's a game that feels like it was designed so that you'd miss most of the possible story every time you play it. Only curiosity (whatever happened to that person you met once and never again?) or total accident (how long has this person been hiding here?) will take you to something resembling "the whole picture." And as I write this, just two weeks into the game's release, it's likely that there are stories and incidents and paths that the community as a whole has failed to discover, just as there's a chance that future DLCs will connect pieces that don't yet entirely fit together.
As a long-term enthusiast of fiction in general and fantasy in particular, who from childhood was losing himself in the worlds of Tamora Pierce and the hypothetical realms of various D&D campaign scenarios, I struggle to explain just how thrilling this is—how gripping it is to be in a world this rich that has little interest in explaining itself to me. It's thrilling to be in a world like this, not just as a tourist, but on my own two feet, free to come at it from any angle, and be met by a world that's alive enough to hold up no matter which direction I pursue it in. It's thrilling to have a history this robust and this sinister reveal itself to me, not in any calculated or measured way, but as a response to my broader travels and more piercing explorations. It's thrilling to take part in a plot whose twists upend, not just one narrative, but my perception of the entire world. And it's thrilling that I don't know what I have and haven't seen: that there are realms I scarcely comprehend, that there are people whose dimensions I don't yet know, and that the further I go in, the more I work out what I want to be investigating, the more I'm met, not with simplicity, but with density, as if I'm only now seeing beneath the tip of the iceberg, as if the story on the surface was just a glimpse of what's to come.
Here is where the game's difficulty, its unrelenting resistance to my attempts to make it yield morsels of the truth, begins to feel similarly vital. It's an obstacle, not for stubbornness's sake, but to explain something to me: this is why the stories never add up, this is why nobody knows everything, this is why people are separated both physically and emotionally. Narrative details that would have been lost five paragraphs into a character's monologue in a typical fantasy game are instead revealed singularly and one-at-a-time, each one a precious new addition to my storehouse of knowledge, each one given room to resonate and reverberate. I meet a man who I've heard about for days, and the shock of seeing him for the first time tells me volumes that none of the stories could, and tells me things about the people who told those stories: which ones glorified a monster, which ones were shaped and defined by their fear of him, which ones offered brushstrokes that wholly failed to capture the breadth of his cruelty? I hear contradictory stories, and know full well how significant each one would be if it were true. And as I form my list of unanswered, ominous questions, a deeper question remains: which of these questions will be answered, and which will I be left to merely speculate at? And, worse, which ones will I leave convinced were left to speculation, when there was an awful truth right in front of me, waiting for me to uncover it the right way?
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I have more to say about this game, and more to say about its gameplay; in truth, I wouldn't know what to say yet even if I wanted to say it. This is still not about the what of Elden Ring. It's about the way of Elden Ring: the reasons why the way it is what it is are so important, the things it does that feel not only compelling but groundbreaking, not only for video games but for fantasy, and maybe for storytelling as a whole. This is a story that could not be told in any other way, in any other medium, using any other technique. It is a story, not only about what happens (and what might happen), but about the world in which things happen, the world responsible for every possibility before you. It is a fantasy whose most fantastic elements exist, not simply for the sake of wonder, but to explain how things became what they became, so that everything which at first glimpse is delightful and curious and frivolous slowly reveals itself to be part of a creation myth, a tale of how the universe was born and how much of that birth was rooted in human tragedy and folly. The gods, you are told, are human too, and because the gods shaped the world you walk on with their own hands, the world itself is human: its peaks and valleys, its rivers and forests, are scars and romances, wearinesses and hopes, upon which walk a new generation of humans, each hoping, in big and small ways, to remake the world in their own image, to contribute to the gods' grand design or to destroy it, and destroy the gods with them, and become as gods themselves.
To that end, the words spoken and the events which unfold are themselves a part of the landscape, an architecture of past and present and future interlaced. They are not unilaterally the tale of how your journey unfolds—they are just another layer to the world you wander. These words are there, not to be listened to, but to be climbed and delved into, to make homes inside, to be abandoned in fright or wanderlust or resignation. The things which happen are just possibilities, but possibilities that reveal, variation by variation, the shape of the whole, the way Bach's variations on a theme revealed at once a song's core and its progressions, the core enabling each progression, the progressions unearthing the music's heart and soul.
I dearly admire the writer Robert Coover, who at age 90 is still writing astoundingly playful and unexpected pieces. Coover, whose work anticipated digital storytelling long before video games were a thing—and who embraced electronic literature the moment he could—likes to break archetypal stories down into the equivalent of playing cards, with each possibility, every moment along every potential branch, isolated from all the rest, and from the branch which bore its fruit in the first place. Then he plays card tricks with you, showing you moments out of order that could not possibly be connected, except that you know the story well enough to know what's happening anyway, where you would be if you were anywhere, even as characters flip from life to death and back again, arrive at certain destinations without leaving other ones, every sinister and silly and sexy and loving and horrific variation on display all at once.
Coover knew, well before we had the electronic capacity to demonstrate it, that all stories are systems, that the game and its pieces matter as much as each specific possible outcome. We may want a storyteller to reach the single most satisfying conclusion, but even then, it's because we want them to do their own story justice. Why are disappointing football games disappointing? Not because of who wins or loses, but because of whether or not manage to do interesting things within the game they're given. So what happens when you're given, not just one outcome to a given story, but every outcome, with even the build-ups and tensions replaced with a litany of out-of-order moments? You experience, not one given tale, but an accumulation: a stress test of what this tale could be, which you take in not as an evaluation of one story but of whatever led to this story's telling in the first place.
I wonder what Coover, who has made a career out of vivisecting fairy tales and fables, would make of a game like Elden Ring, which is more of a fable waiting for its player to do the vivisection. Here, more fully than we've ever had before, is a living, breathing world. Your every footstep is an incision. Is this the story of your scalpel, of the flesh you slice and the tendons you accidentally sever, the veins you don't know better than to make a mess of, or is this the story of the living thing you'll come to know, even as the intimacy of your budding relationship with it conspires to bring about its end? Trick question, of course. You know it's both.
The first thing Elden Ring asked me to choose was what kind of character I wanted to be. I chose to be an astrologer. It was only eighty-odd hours later that I caught a hint of why the stars might matter.
Video games have a significant narrative tool which other mediums lack: their uncertainty. Linear stories have to choose what to reveal to you and when; when they ask questions, they either need to provide you with answers, or they need to justify not giving them to you. Artists' attempts to get around this have yielded some of the most fascinating stories in existence: Vladimir Nabokov, for instance, famously liked to write literary masterpieces that doubled as almost childlike puzzles, concealing layer upon layer upon layer of literal meaning to his stories, so that your third reread of Pale Fire might yield a clue that would lead you, upon fourth reread, to a brand-new understanding of events. Mysteries are inherently an attempt to play with pockets of uncertainty, so that the delicate art of the mystery is to provoke curiosity while concealing answers in plain sight. (J. K. Rowling, for all her various talents, is at her core a mystery writer, and her gifts for constructed mystery is the singular reason why Harry Potter was gripping enough to form its audience on every other front.) But in the end, a book or a movie or a play lays itself out before you, and you are left with a determinate number of puzzle pieces which add up to a satisfying vision or not.
Games alone can circumvent this, because games are fundamentally spaces for possibility. Why are sports so gripping that entire cultures form around individual leagues and teams? Because there is no predefined outcome: the rules allow for tremendous suspense. I was fortunate enough to introduce a girlfriend of mine to football by means of Super Bowl LII, in which our "home team" (the Eagles) played off against a "shit team" (the Patriots) in an incredibly tense game that was up in the air till the very end. She was opposed to sports culture in general and football in particular, had no particular feelings about the Eagles, had only the mildest issues with the Patriots, but by the end she was screaming at the TV like the rest of us. Because none of us knew what was about to happen—and that included the players themselves. I understand people who can't stand books but never miss a game, even if I'll never be one of them; there is something profoundly vital in games that art and literature will never touch, even if the opposite is equally true.
What does this mean for video games as a medium? The honest answer is: we're still trying to work that out. Some games clearly want to be taken as seriously as film—an ambition which I find inherently funny, given how recently cinema was finally "permitted" to be art—and achieve this by pre-scripting events which players "experience" rather than merely watch. Other games go the opposite route, offering not only variable endings but genuine randomness, in which outcomes occur which might never have been intended by the developers themselves. The fact that there's a question as to how video games might tell their stories is itself fascinating, but the answers developers have come up with largely remain dissatisfying.
It's been a decade since The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was released, so it feels a bit cheap to bully it a little bit more, but Skyrim feels like a reasonable comparison point to Elden Ring, because it too was an attempt to tell a story across a vast and immersive landscape. I have invested thousands of hours of my life into that terrible game, which I despised from the very start; a major frustration is that, as I described it to friends, Skyrim feels like a Disney World reimagining of The Lord of the Rings. There are many gorgeous cities, and various epic quests, but all of them feel like they're putting on a show for you: you arrive at a place, and a dumb little theatre bit unfolds for you, feeding you lines which you must compulsively read back, at which point you're told you have "immersed" yourself into the lore. The fact that some quests take you across these cities doesn't make those cities any more immersive, because even if you arrive at one to continue three separate quests, the quests themselves never intersect; the closest you get to genuine depth is when characters reveal themselves to be bit players in stories you hadn't realized they had lines for, which feels a bit like hearing your most boring "friend" reveal to you, after ten years, that they've been collecting unusual pennies all this time.
In the ten years since Skyrim, it feels, unfortunately, like mainstream game development hasn't made significant leaps forwards. Titles like Red Dead Redemption and The Last of Us have received acclaim for the quality of their writing—though "quality" here is graded on a significant curve—but they're still fundamentally creating set pieces for us to wander through, providing us with "depth" and "richness" in the manner most TV shows do, which is to say: they present us with visceral experience and neat little plotting tidbits, and expect these to gradually accumulate into something that feels like a meaningful experience. I don't mean to say this dismissively—I like those TV shows!—but in terms of innovative use of their medium, these games don't hold impressive ambitions. (Which is not to dismiss the genuinely brilliant progress they've made in terms of art direction, gameplay design, and, yes, quality of writing. 1920s films are conceptually limited compared to the films we make today, but they are still capable of beauty, poignancy, sophistication, and depth.)
I was uniquely spoiled, as a gaming enthusiast, by playing Ice Pick Lodge's astonishing Pathologic shortly after it came out in 2005. Pathologic is, to this day, the high-water mark to which I compare all ambitious video games; 17 years after it came out, it still feels a decade ahead of anything else—even Elden Ring, which I promise I haven't forgotten about. It understood (and understands) gaming as a medium more profoundly than anything else I've encountered, and taught me more about what games are and can be simply by existing than any of the many books I studied when I made it the subject of my undergraduate thesis.
One of Pathologic's central innovations is simple to the point of crudeness, but also shocking in the fact that it works: at the start of the game, you choose one of three people to experience the story as, and each person experiences a completely different world. All three live in the same town, but makes their home base in one of its various districts, prioritizes a different subset of individuals, and even sees things roaming the streets that the others cannot. Beyond that innovation, Pathologic's storytelling is leagues beyond other games', in the complexity and interiority of its characters, in the depths of their histories and the veritable mythology that explains how this town formed in the first place, and more than anything in the way their lies are vast and often not revealed, but blend together with the fact that they often think they're speaking the truth, and merely prioritize different facets of the truth, or else are themselves working on incomplete data. None of that, however, compares with the experience of completing a 40-hour game, starting it up as someone new, and immediately encountering contradictory information that makes you realize that every conclusion you pieced together in your last epic detective saga is suddenly entirely suspect.
I mention Pathologic because the key to its brilliance lies in an unexpected place: Ice Pick Lodge, its developers, understood that narrative in gameplay isn't just a temporal construct. It's also a spatial one. Where you are and where you go defines who you meet and what you hear; the times you show up somewhere dictate what you encounter and what you take away. Most significantly, "choice," in a video game, doesn't just mean picking a path when you're offered a fork in the road: it means that the simple act of living in a place, the act of your life putting you in certain places at certain times, defines what you think the narrative is in the first place. Plot, in a video game, is the pebbles we pick up as we journey through a dark and unknown wood; at the end, we lay them out, and it tells a story of where we've been and how we came to where we are, but we are fooling ourselves if we think we hold the whole forest in our pocket.
Just as literary and cinematic attempts to break linearity make for some of the most interesting books and films, ludic attempts to play with space and time make for the video games that excite me the most. I mentioned Outer Wilds and its delightful Möbius strip of a plot already, which only works because Outer Wilds, too, is driven by a meticulous obsession with your location in space and time. But I also think a lot about Majora's Mask, a childhood favorite, in which you're literally given a notebook with which to track characters' movements across three days, and experience different parts of their stories based on when and where you encounter them, and how your actions modify what they are and aren't able to get away with. And my favorite game since Pathologic, the similarly-ahead-of-its-time else Heart.Break(), takes place in a world that's literally hackable, with locations stored in a repository that you can break into and teleport yourself to, including places you can only find by breaking into them, or places you can only get yourself to by pinpointing their locations. else Heart.Break() gives you a vast amount of noise to sift through, leaving writings and diary entries literally stored on floppy discs strewn about apartment complexes, which means that your narrative progression has less to do with "playing the game" than with learning how to filter down the world you're given, targeting points of genuine meaning, uncovering bits and pieces that the developer genuinely might never have wanted you to find.
At some point in else Heart.Break(), I programmed a teleporter to leap me to random locations across a vast and largely-inaccessible map; eventually, these random stabs landed me by something I'd never have seen otherwise, corroborating a secret journal entry by a person who, it seemed, must be exploring this world through similar methods as myself. Which led to an encounter with her that literally couldn't have happened any other way: a narrative unfolding less "earned" than "chanced upon," as if the world I was living in held far more tales than I'd uncovered, any of which might only exist as cryptic hints of something bigger or might abruptly reveal themselves, in fact, to be brand-new worlds and games and stories, enormous pockets of possibility visible only through the narrowest cracks in the wall.
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There is only one mainstream game designer whose approach to narrative is as consistently intriguing as these strange, flawed works of art. Predictably, given the game I'm writing about, it's Hidetaka Miyazaki himself.
A cornerstone of Miyazaki's evolving legend is that, as a child, he was drawn to books written in English that he could only partly understand. The experience, for him, was only partly the experiences that those books intended; the other half was the unpredictable ways that his understandings of those books faded in and out, leaving him with pockets of uncertainty, places where he was compelled to draw his own conclusions, with some of those conclusions proving to be sounder than others.
Dark Souls exemplified his approach to narrative, which is to create a similarly ambiguous blend of certainty and uncertainty to his plots. It's never easy to figure out which mysteries will never be answered, which will be hinted at enough for you to draw your own conclusions, and which will be given surprisingly literal form. Making this trickier is the way that the game almost never asks you to be invested in these mysteries, and never bothers pointing them out to you at all. Which parts are open mystery, and which parts simply haven't been talked about in your presence? There's no reason to care, since the narrative of the gameplay itself leads you almost-silently to a conclusion that's almost all physical rather than narrative: defeat these demigods, confront this fallen hero, and take his place—though "take his place" is itself not particularly clarified, and whether or not you ask questions about it comes down to whether or not you've started to suspect that your interpretation of that duty matters more than your undertaking of the task itself.
At times, the truth that's being concealed from you is almost stupidly vast—so big that you barely dare imagine you're living through a lie. Dark Souls is cleaved into two larger realms: the overgrown, sunken world that you begin at, and the gleaming city of Anor Londo, accessed halfway into the game, watched over by the goddess Gwynevere, who beamingly assigns you a heroic duty. It is the one noble place in all of Dark Souls, and your one encounter with a genuine member of the divine family who breathed life into this world. So why on earth would you think to throw a knife at Gwynevere? Do it, though, and something unnerving happens: Gwynevere isn't wounded or killed so much as revealed to be entirely non-existent, an illusion propped up alongside, as it happens, the entirety of Anor Londo itself. Put simply, attack her and the lights go out. The gleaming sun winks out of the sky, the valiant knights go missing, and the whole city abruptly reveals itself to be a grave.
It would be misleading to call this "a part of the story," since nothing about your playing of the game requires you to take this step. Furthermore, this action isn't remotely suggested to you by any source. The most you get by way of hint has to do with an obscure item you pick up, one of hundreds, whose description suggests that Gwynevere left this realm a long time ago with her husband. Even that description, however, says nothing else: it simply hints that she may not really be here, though it hints it in a way that makes it wholly plausible that she'd have returned at some point.
For every bit of narrative that comes physically accompanied by a hidden, meaningful action and reaction, there are a dozen that only consists of hints and interpretations. There are hints, for instance, about a third sibling of Gwynevere's, her oldest brother, who committed some blasphemy and was stricken from the history books. (One of those hints merely consists of three statues in a building, one of which has been annihilated; it's easy to assume this is just a typical case of blight and destruction, until you piece together that the brother was likely intentionally destroyed.) For various reasons, I arrived at the conclusion that the brother is none other than your most beloved acquaintance, a valiant knight who tells you he is "seeking his own sun." I later learned that Miyazaki had originally intended another character, and an unexpected one, to be the brother in question; in a sequel to Dark Souls, the brother is revealed, and is all-but-certainly a separate entity altogether, nobody from the original game at all. Yet the ambiguity remains, and my own interpretation means so much to me that I push hard to find reasons to believe it, and Dark Souls is generous enough with its openness that this personal meaning remains a possibility, however vague.
George R. R. Martin's contribution to Elden Ring was a curious one. He didn't write dialogue, and as far as I know he didn't personally create the characters we meet or encounter. He was tasked with writing history: the chronicle of gods and royals, the furtive secret stories that were banished from the official chronicles, the conflicted crisis in which there is no one singular good answer, merely threads that form a weave, interpretations and agendas that muddy the waters of truth and lies, good and evil, right and wrong.
From there, Elden Ring unfolds much like every other Miyazaki game does: you begin with the barest scrap of lore, and learn about the world less through dialogue or written narrative than through architecture and adversity. Things are less explained than shown: the strange, grunting creatures that attack you en masse for hours before they're given names, before you start to notice they operate in hives, before you start noticing the sorts of environments they favor most, and pick up details about the former residents' attempts to fight them off. You don't need to be told about the pilgrimages to the capitol city, because what matters to you are the caravans themselves, hoards of knights and commoners protecting a single, slow-moving wagon which you can loot if you're clever enough—and when you find one such pilgrimage weeping at the city's doors, which refuse to open for them, the story tells itself. Elsewhere, you cross a nightmare landscape, combatting hellishly large dogs and crows, and when you find the soldiers fighting back against them, it takes no language to explain how weary or fearful these soldiers are: you merely have to note the small pockets of them, contrasted against the endless terrors that actively besiege them as you watch. And if you kill the soldiers too, it is not without some empathy for their plight.
The royal family that dominates this story is introduced, too, primarily through architecture. There is the sheer physical fact of their castles and universities, towering over the landscape. There is the way they make their presence known through ownership: the changing colors and banners of their respective armies, signifying not only who controls what but which might be making forays against the others. You see the names of different empires applied, like signatures, to the clothing you wear, the spells you learn, and eventually learn which empire fought which, and which of the names you've heard spoken aloud are attached to which factions. And though the individuals you meet are first distinguished by their voices rather than their identities—the sneering one; the haughty one; the cheerful; friendly one—they gradually reveal their place in this tapestry, though some revelations are misleading at first, or outright lies.
The silence and the slowness of the story sells the intrigue; mysteries arrive, not as abrupt dramas requiring intense focus, but as questions which take their time arising in the first place, your responses to things you learn shifting imperceptibly from apathy to recognition to curiosity to suspense. At first, the royal names mean nothing to you; when you do take interest, it will likely be in the one man who physically exists the closest to you, because his domain surrounds you, and the people you meet often mention him in passing. The rest are just idle abstractions, vague promises of vaguely medieval folktales. At some point, though, you learn just enough to know which questions are significant, because they are questions you have started asking, rather than questions the game instructed you to ask—at which point the revelations start feeling mesmerizing, dreadful, and unsettling.
Similarly, Elden Ring achieves enough narrative density that, for the first time in a Miyazaki game, there comes a moment when the various threads of characters you've met begin to knit together into something gripping. It's hard to tell how much of this is Martin and how much is Miyazaki, but it feels almost as if the various casts of characters in A Song of Ice and Fire were put forth before you, not gradually across a series of epics, but in a single dense snarl whose every component threatens to thrust you in a wholly new direction, and put you unexpectedly at odds with others before you have a chance to realize it. In terms of actual personage, the scale is significantly smaller than what you find in Game of Thrones, but the folds of history are similarly complex: there are less binary oppositions than there is chaos, with ideology giving way to bitter personal emotion, the choices of individuals swaying broad historic moments in ways that feel less like destiny than like a world built precariously on hidden layers of heartbreak, vengeance, and betrayal.
What's all-but-guaranteed is this: you will make choices that lead to blood-soaked bodies staining the floor. You won't always know you're making those decisions; you won't always know the people whose deaths you're conspiring towards, or even that you're conspiring at all. Who you meet and when you meet them matters; there are people you simply won't run into, because you happened to be in one place while they were passing through another. And at certain points, when you do have to choose between one person or another, it's hard to tell whether you know enough to make an informed decision, or whether these are the only two people you could be choosing between, or whether the very fact of making a choice betrays another path you could have taken, another place you could have been.
Miyazaki's games have always been about the end of the world, and the question of who gets to create a new one. The answer to the latter is always "you," which means the real question is: what will you make? Which in turn becomes a question, not of what you'd prefer, but of which things you do and don't know—because that will inevitably be what forms your preference. In Elden Ring, your options are subtler and more multi-layered than ever: the further you go in, it seems, the more you find yourself pursuing a dense web of hidden places and potential nemeses, thrown in a dozen different directions that each seem to offer you a truth so staggering and so unexpected that it feels like it must be the answer to the question you were looking for—never mind those other secret truths, most of which you won't even know about in the first place.
It's a game that feels like it was designed so that you'd miss most of the possible story every time you play it. Only curiosity (whatever happened to that person you met once and never again?) or total accident (how long has this person been hiding here?) will take you to something resembling "the whole picture." And as I write this, just two weeks into the game's release, it's likely that there are stories and incidents and paths that the community as a whole has failed to discover, just as there's a chance that future DLCs will connect pieces that don't yet entirely fit together.
As a long-term enthusiast of fiction in general and fantasy in particular, who from childhood was losing himself in the worlds of Tamora Pierce and the hypothetical realms of various D&D campaign scenarios, I struggle to explain just how thrilling this is—how gripping it is to be in a world this rich that has little interest in explaining itself to me. It's thrilling to be in a world like this, not just as a tourist, but on my own two feet, free to come at it from any angle, and be met by a world that's alive enough to hold up no matter which direction I pursue it in. It's thrilling to have a history this robust and this sinister reveal itself to me, not in any calculated or measured way, but as a response to my broader travels and more piercing explorations. It's thrilling to take part in a plot whose twists upend, not just one narrative, but my perception of the entire world. And it's thrilling that I don't know what I have and haven't seen: that there are realms I scarcely comprehend, that there are people whose dimensions I don't yet know, and that the further I go in, the more I work out what I want to be investigating, the more I'm met, not with simplicity, but with density, as if I'm only now seeing beneath the tip of the iceberg, as if the story on the surface was just a glimpse of what's to come.
Here is where the game's difficulty, its unrelenting resistance to my attempts to make it yield morsels of the truth, begins to feel similarly vital. It's an obstacle, not for stubbornness's sake, but to explain something to me: this is why the stories never add up, this is why nobody knows everything, this is why people are separated both physically and emotionally. Narrative details that would have been lost five paragraphs into a character's monologue in a typical fantasy game are instead revealed singularly and one-at-a-time, each one a precious new addition to my storehouse of knowledge, each one given room to resonate and reverberate. I meet a man who I've heard about for days, and the shock of seeing him for the first time tells me volumes that none of the stories could, and tells me things about the people who told those stories: which ones glorified a monster, which ones were shaped and defined by their fear of him, which ones offered brushstrokes that wholly failed to capture the breadth of his cruelty? I hear contradictory stories, and know full well how significant each one would be if it were true. And as I form my list of unanswered, ominous questions, a deeper question remains: which of these questions will be answered, and which will I be left to merely speculate at? And, worse, which ones will I leave convinced were left to speculation, when there was an awful truth right in front of me, waiting for me to uncover it the right way?
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I have more to say about this game, and more to say about its gameplay; in truth, I wouldn't know what to say yet even if I wanted to say it. This is still not about the what of Elden Ring. It's about the way of Elden Ring: the reasons why the way it is what it is are so important, the things it does that feel not only compelling but groundbreaking, not only for video games but for fantasy, and maybe for storytelling as a whole. This is a story that could not be told in any other way, in any other medium, using any other technique. It is a story, not only about what happens (and what might happen), but about the world in which things happen, the world responsible for every possibility before you. It is a fantasy whose most fantastic elements exist, not simply for the sake of wonder, but to explain how things became what they became, so that everything which at first glimpse is delightful and curious and frivolous slowly reveals itself to be part of a creation myth, a tale of how the universe was born and how much of that birth was rooted in human tragedy and folly. The gods, you are told, are human too, and because the gods shaped the world you walk on with their own hands, the world itself is human: its peaks and valleys, its rivers and forests, are scars and romances, wearinesses and hopes, upon which walk a new generation of humans, each hoping, in big and small ways, to remake the world in their own image, to contribute to the gods' grand design or to destroy it, and destroy the gods with them, and become as gods themselves.
To that end, the words spoken and the events which unfold are themselves a part of the landscape, an architecture of past and present and future interlaced. They are not unilaterally the tale of how your journey unfolds—they are just another layer to the world you wander. These words are there, not to be listened to, but to be climbed and delved into, to make homes inside, to be abandoned in fright or wanderlust or resignation. The things which happen are just possibilities, but possibilities that reveal, variation by variation, the shape of the whole, the way Bach's variations on a theme revealed at once a song's core and its progressions, the core enabling each progression, the progressions unearthing the music's heart and soul.
I dearly admire the writer Robert Coover, who at age 90 is still writing astoundingly playful and unexpected pieces. Coover, whose work anticipated digital storytelling long before video games were a thing—and who embraced electronic literature the moment he could—likes to break archetypal stories down into the equivalent of playing cards, with each possibility, every moment along every potential branch, isolated from all the rest, and from the branch which bore its fruit in the first place. Then he plays card tricks with you, showing you moments out of order that could not possibly be connected, except that you know the story well enough to know what's happening anyway, where you would be if you were anywhere, even as characters flip from life to death and back again, arrive at certain destinations without leaving other ones, every sinister and silly and sexy and loving and horrific variation on display all at once.
Coover knew, well before we had the electronic capacity to demonstrate it, that all stories are systems, that the game and its pieces matter as much as each specific possible outcome. We may want a storyteller to reach the single most satisfying conclusion, but even then, it's because we want them to do their own story justice. Why are disappointing football games disappointing? Not because of who wins or loses, but because of whether or not manage to do interesting things within the game they're given. So what happens when you're given, not just one outcome to a given story, but every outcome, with even the build-ups and tensions replaced with a litany of out-of-order moments? You experience, not one given tale, but an accumulation: a stress test of what this tale could be, which you take in not as an evaluation of one story but of whatever led to this story's telling in the first place.
I wonder what Coover, who has made a career out of vivisecting fairy tales and fables, would make of a game like Elden Ring, which is more of a fable waiting for its player to do the vivisection. Here, more fully than we've ever had before, is a living, breathing world. Your every footstep is an incision. Is this the story of your scalpel, of the flesh you slice and the tendons you accidentally sever, the veins you don't know better than to make a mess of, or is this the story of the living thing you'll come to know, even as the intimacy of your budding relationship with it conspires to bring about its end? Trick question, of course. You know it's both.