Source: Richard Siken, "Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out"

Towards the end of Shadow of the Erdtree, the magnificent new expansion to Hidetaka Miyazaki's fantasy epic Elden Ring—about which I have written here and here—you find yourself in a secluded village. I won't go into detail about it: if you haven't played the game, it won't signify anything, and if you have played the game, you either don't want me to spoil it for you or you already know its significance. But what matters about this village is: it is peaceful, it is a carefully-guarded secret, and it came from an era before this one. An era before the history books were written, so to speak. And while this village offers very few hints at what existed before the world you know, those few hints remind us that there was a past—and they remind us, too, that the past is no longer. There's no way of knowing what it contained, what it was like, how it mutated and became the present that we know today. Barely anybody remembers, and those few either can't or won't speak of it.

It's practically become a Miyazaki tradition that his games' expansions introduce narrative lore that contradicts or defies the main game's stories. The mysterious scraps of evidence that hint at the world you belong to gradually, bit by bit, assemble themselves into a bit of a narrative. You get a sense that you understand the world you're living in. You develop some idea of what's known and what isn't; you form theories about the bits that aren't clear. When you hear that new story is coming, you brace yourself for your theories to be confirmed or denied. But you're not handed the missing puzzle pieces you were hoping for. Instead, you're handed pieces to what feels like an altogether different puzzle, each one ripping apart your sense of certainty, your feeling that you understand what this is. And while new theories form in their place, you can never escape the unsettling feeling that what once felt like sturdy, solid ground now feels loose and uneven, and liable to collapse at any time.

Perhaps it's for thematic reasons that Elden Ring casts this sense of uncertainty in a new light. While Miyazaki games have played with notions of tarnished nobility before—divine pantheons hiding mortal flaws; fallen kingdoms whose glory days weren't glorious—Elden Ring codifies this in the most literal sense possible. The Elden Ring is not a physical artifact: it's a series of interwoven laws that prescribe the nature of the world. It was bestowed upon humankind by the Golden Order, which refers both to an era of history, an empire devoted to its ideals, and—we learn eventually—an outer god who imposed its sense of righteousness and justice upon the world, eliminating what came before in the process. The story of Elden Ring is a story of restoring this world's order, and of understanding why that order was shattered in the first place; to the extent that you shape its story, it involves your asking whether this order ought to be restored at all—and what, if anything, you could replace it with.

Your first vision of The Lands Between is the gargantuan golden tree which shines through the realm, night and day. The Erdtree is visible from virtually any place you go; its beauty and its grace imposes on you a sense that this truly is a noble land, and that the tarnished state you find it in is a corruption of its pure and noble values. It, like George R. R. Martin's other famous work, suggests a dualist notion of medieval nobility: the glorious sense of heroism and justice that is all-too-easy to be seduced be, accompanied by the nihilistic carnage that seems to make up the fabric of the world. As in A Song of Ice and Fire, the difficult question at the core of the work is: are we looking at a perverted and broken version of the world that ought to be—is it worth believing in that heroic vision, in other words—or is this senseless brutality the only real truth of the world, and the heroism just a lie to keep us complacent or hopeful before the horrors take us?

Complicating this question is the narrative's refusal to give us straightforward answers of who the "real" heroes and villains of this world are. Martin and Miyazaki share this love of moral ambiguity: the atrocities you discover are omnidirectional, often reflecting intricate chains of wrongdoing and vengeance. Everyone—well, most everyone—has a claim that they're the righteous ones, and that they're only persecuting those guilty of committing genuine horrors. Shadow of the Erdtree complicates these perspectives further, by revealing horrific deeds committed by the original game's most obvious victims, and by introducing new atrocities committed by factions we previously thought of as merely morally conflicted. It's tempting to try and play the impartial judge, weighing each crime against the others to determine the ultimate culpability of every party involved. But here's where you run into that shattered past, that all-but-completely eroded sense of history. What few hints you do receive don't point towards a resolution: they merely remind you that there's no way of reaching the end of this story, and that what you've discovered amounts to the shallowest crust of what really happened in these times. The truth lies beneath, unreachable, unremembered, dead.

One of the main criticisms of Miyazaki's style of game design is that it unilaterally revolves around violence. There are virtually no forms of interacting with the world except through violence; nearly every "person" you encounter in his games will immediately, wordlessly, attack you, forcing you into a hostile relationship with all but a handful of the characters you meet along the way. Your very presence in this world is treated like an intrusion; there are no other ways of relating to others, no way of approaching the situations you find yourself in, than to kill before you are killed. The few non-hostile encounters you have with others usually revolve around their deaths; half the time, you're the one doing the killing, whether intentionally or unintentionally or in self-defense.

This reflects a criticism of George R. R. Martin too, whose books have been condemned as nihilistic or as torture porn. To some extent, I agree with the criticisms—and I don't think the filmed versions of his works do him any favors there, either. I don't find his books pleasant to read, for the same reason I struggle to read Cormac McCarthy (who I'll acknowledge is absolutely brilliant). But I don't think that the violence in Martin's novels is senseless—or rather, I think its senselessness serves a purpose. His protagonists attempt to overcome that senselessness; their chief struggle is not the viciousness of their enemies, but the brutal and meaningless losses that they endure along the way. At what point do they begin to despair? How many hard-earned efforts do they need to see shattered in mere moments before they conclude that they're fools for even trying? Is it possible to play along with the amoral and sadistic games of power and dominance without becoming amoral and sadistic in the process? What, if anything, is this all for? We may finally see an answer when Martin concludes his series, presumably sometime after 2060.

Miyazaki's games are rarely as bleak as Martin's, in part because they all give their players limitless chances to overcome their own deaths and fight their grueling way towards victory. But there's always a sense of uncertainty to those victories; it's hard to tell whether you've "won" anything at all, or whether your achievements have truly changed anything. When you do get to make changes, it's dubious whether they're for the better—which is another way of saying that most of those changes are openly horrific, and require mental contortions to justify them as the moral choice of action. Whatever personal satisfaction you feel in overcoming endless hardships is balanced out by a grim sense that, in pushing forward, you have become yet another reflection of this world's truest nature: not a hero so much as yet another idealist who eventually succumbed.

It's not a simple inversion of morality. The message is not that you were the monster all along, or that you've unwittingly done great evils. The feeling is subtler and more elusive than that: an uncertainty as to whether you've differentiated yourself, whether you've succeeded in giving this world what it needed, or whether you've merely become a part of the world. On a deeper level, the question is whether you were ever anything different, or whether you were always, by your own nature and by the world's, doomed to exactly this fate. The game's restrictive mechanics play directly into that feeling: you are literally capable of only this, and the lack of other options can feel, at times, like a lack of illusions. One way or another, you must reckon with exactly who and what you are.

The question, then, is whether "who and what you are" has inherent or redemptive meaning to it. Is this world little more senseless violence and recurring bloodshed? Are nobility, order, and justice little more than a myth, stories we use to justify brand-new flavors of persecution and oppression? Who, if anyone, is allowed to answer that conclusively? And how can we possibly know, when we'll never know the full story, and when we can't reclaim our visions of the past?

In the original Elden Ring, the Golden Order confronts us constantly. We are either carrying out the instructions of the Greater Will, or we are defying it. All that we see, all that we have heard of, flowered from the Erdtree; it defines justice and injustice alike. And we are made aware, crucially, that this Greater Will is a being, not just a philosophy: it landed here, it shaped the world, it taught us its notions of right and wrong. There are some interpretations that the Erdtree is in fact a parasite, which invaded its host body and eventually replaced it. I don't love this reading—it's a bit too literal and a bit too confident—but it comes from this awareness that something came before, and that we are nonetheless told to think of this Will as the incarnation of everything true and good and right in the universe.

A trickier question, and a trickier approach than merely inverting things and declaring the Golden Order to be perverse and evil and wrong, is: even if it's arbitrary and externally imposed, is it right? Can you trust in a vision of a better world, can you persist in having ideals, when they no longer come directly from God's mouth? Are our only two options God or nihilism? Or is it possible to lose faith in a divine being's divinity without rejecting its world order wholesale? These are questions that arise in every faith, in every notion of nobility or justice or rightness or good; it is said that the strongest faith doesn't reject doubt but is instead borne by it, and Elden Ring feels at its core like it's a tale of doubt and faith struggling to reconcile with one another.

But Shadow of the Erdtree takes place in a realm beyond the Golden Order. A place where that order literally does not exist. Here, the most active proponents of the Order are flat-out genocidal: they are determined to annihilate anything that exists outside the Order, which means most everything in this new land. The game offers two contradicting views of the forces responsible for this; it gives you one perspective from which Queen Marika, who is more-or-less the emblem of the Golden Order and all it stands for, condemns and disapproves of this slaughter, and another perspective from which she effectively demands it. You're not asked to determine which of these perspectives is the "right" one so much as you're asked to reconcile the fact that both are true, however impossible it feels that each could exist alongside the other. Just as it's unclear whether Marika rejects the Order or upholds it, and appears that she does both at once, you are given two views of this new world and asked to allow for both of them simultaneously. The contradiction doesn't obscure the truth: it is the truth, in every way that matters.

The motif of one being split into two equally-authentic selves recurs, both in the main game and in this. The "sides" you are confronted with are, in many ways, one and the same. (Does it matter which forces are opposed to which if all of them attack you on sight? Does it matter that there are two ways of interpreting what's going on, when the game itself doesn't allow you to act on either interpretation?) But beyond the mystery of how, exactly, both versions of the story can be true at once lies a more obvious truth, which is that this land is simply too convoluted, and contains too many buried secrets, to ever yield the easy explanations that you're looking for.

When I first wrote about Hidetaka Miyazaki's games, I opened with a description of a castle whose multifaceted nature endlessly reveals itself to you. Elden Ring, by and large, replaced the intricacy of these closed spaces with a land so big that merely choosing which direction to explore created that same sense of gradual revelation: every option yields discovery after discovery, and presents you with choice after choice, so many times that you inevitably miss pockets of the world along the way. It was a brilliant inversion of the old formula, just as it replaced tightly-packed pantheons and their buried secrets with a narrative of gods and demigods so sprawling that it effectively gave you the same experience of revelation and revisitation and reinterpretation.

Shadow of the Erdtree squares the circle, and presents us with a sprawling realm that is also a twisting, interconnected, foreboding mystery. Vast sections of its map are visible but inaccessible, hidden behind strange doors, approachable only by means of obscure paths that are seemingly located very far away. It's astonishing just how much of the game there is: long after you've convinced yourself that you've seen more vistas and taken in more extraordinary realms than seemed fair to expect in the first place, the game still reveals land after land, domain after domain, secret after secret. And more than maybe any other Miyazaki game, each of these places is deeply strange: rather than creating a sense of familiarity, each new discovery feels as unnerving and unexpected as the last. Their natures don't feel disconnected from one another, but that's exactly why they're so discombobulating. Each one seems to imply things about all the others that makes you re-examine what you thought you knew, and re-evaluate whether you understand what you're seeing at all.

Why is it that, when we're confronted with a certain kind of mystery, we react not with wonder but with horror? When does our curiosity, our excitement at having new things to explore, turn into a frantic desire for there not to be anything further? When does the world, in its infinite magnitude, start to feel oppressive rather than inviting? Perhaps it's when we start to feel our sense of it slip away, drifting further and further beyond us even as we try to clutch at it. Perhaps it's when we start to sense that there won't be a definitive answer: that the puzzle wasn't a "puzzle" at all, but a kind of entity that will forever exist beyond our capacity to comprehend it. In Miyazaki games, hostility and aggression mean nothing: we not only anticipate it, we know we have an eternity to overcome it. But what if there's nothing to overcome? What if our toolbox offers us nothing that will help? What if, in the end, we're confronted with something unknowable, unsolvable, unactionable? What if this world doesn't revolve around us, doesn't have a place for us, and isn't concerned with our desire to understand it? For it not to care about our lives is one kind of horror; for it not to care about our need to know is another, perhaps harder-to-reconcile one. Maybe we'd rather die in pursuit of the truth than live and realize that the truth will never be ours.

From these horrors and these uncertainties arise our pursuit of noble truths in the first place. This is the birthplace of justice, or our attempts at justice. It's also the birthplace of dogma and zealotry, misplaced "righteousness," and convictions that were better left unpursued. These new adherents of the Golden Order commit genocide, not because it is wrong to exist beyond it, but because existence beyond the Golden Order calls the Order itself into question. The existence of another world, another order, and the massive, fractured Scadutree that looms over it... this doesn't challenge the Golden Older in the sense of rivalry. It challenges it in the sense that it suggests that maybe the Golden Order could never lay claim to what it wants so dearly to claim. In that classic Martin-esque sense, this is not a struggle between rival nations, or rival gods. It's a struggle between divinity and nothingness.

The demigod at the heart of this new story, the perpetually youthful Miquella, seeks a world of love and peace. He pursues it at the cost of his own selfhood, abandoning both his physical flesh and his abstract convictions as he travels through the land. The question is asked: what is lost in this pursuit of godhood? Is control over the universe, control over the fabric of being, valuable enough to make up for what's forsaken along the way? Shadow of the Erdtree suggests that its gods are caged creatures: that to forge the Elden Ring, to establish the Golden Order, to serve as its living incarnation, is to trap yourself within it forever. And while it is not directly a story about Queen Marika—who, here as in the original game, exists largely at its fringes, as a goddess about whom nothing is known except that she became a god, at some point—every facet of this new world holds implications about who she must have been, who she is, what she became, and what she shed along the way.

Which brings us back to this secluded village, peaceful and remote, hidden away even within this already-hidden realm, locked behind doors whose very existence suggests their own new stories of what this place is and what it means.

I can't and won't say more about it. Its story means nothing without the story of where it's found, which is a story you can't understand without roaming this world, unearthing its secrets, all the while unaware of what lies directly in front of you. What you find in it is powerful and moving in ways that can't easily be described, not because of its vastness, but because of its quietness and subtlety. The most extraordinary moment in this game—perhaps the most extraordinary moment across this series of games—revolves around a single, simple word, unremarkable in any other context, remarkable here only because there's no reason it should be used, no reason it should exist. Through this word, something new is glimpsed. And in the moment that you glimpse it, you realize also that this glimpse is all there is, that nothing more lies beyond this, and that what lies beyond is suddenly the only thing you'll ever care to see.

A seed has been planted here, so to speak. What was planted, and who planted it, and why they planted it here, of all places, speaks volumes. In it lies a great sadness, and a tremendous loss of two varieties, and also—possibly—a hope. It is a vision of a world: not a world that is, perhaps not a world that ever was, but a world that might someday be. Perhaps you, too, will share in its hope—but if you do, you must also accept that you will never see this world, that you cannot and will not realize it, that you don't know who, if anybody, ever could. Perhaps that hope, too, is little more than an impossible dream. Perhaps. You will never know that either. You will never know what can be, or what could be, or what is yet to come.

All Miyazaki games end this way, it seems: on the cusp of a new world that you will never personally set foot in. What have you birthed? What new reality have you awakened? What vision is yet to come? Others see it, but you never will; all you can do is wonder what you've done, what it means, and whether you would have acted differently, had you known what would ensue. You are not, it seems, the only one. Ours is a camaraderie of uncertainty, a fraternity of doubts, a kinship of never being sure what is noble and what is atrocity, what means change and what means little, if anything at all. Some act with desperate conviction, others with gentle faith, others with despairing senselessness, and still others without any awareness or remembrance at all. It's not that there is no answer—it's that the answer will never be known. And in these strange thickets, in this foreboding and unrevealing land, you eventually come to find yourself at home.