Elden Ring fed me a heaping dose of humble pie, and it tasted pretty good. I predicted this might happen at the end of my last journal entry. I wandered into the desolate region known as Caelid, wary of the dangers to come after dominating many challenges in the previous area. Caelid proved my concern was apt, as all kinds of scary monsters found ways to repeatedly kick my butt.
As a refresher, this is my diary as I play through the game. My goal is to reflect on the experience as it changes over time and to tell the stories that naturally arise from the many secrets and surprises of the world. In addition to my most recent entry mentioned above, check out the rest for my expectations, first impressions and adventures through the starting area.
In this entry, I’ll talk about my time in Caelid and the nearby DragonBarrow. I haven’t seen much of the latter yet, but if you’re playing the game yourself and don’t want to know the details of either area, now is the time to jump ship and come back when you’re ready. I’ll be discussing spoilers.
The hero’s abyss
The archetypal hero’s journey always has a moment of utter despair. This moment usually happens in the lead up to the climactic battle. Everything seems lost, and then the hero perseveres and becomes stronger than ever. I doubt I’m actually close to the end of Elden Ring, but I’ve certainly had my moment of despair.
To be fair, that’s kind of what I was hoping for, and it’s definitely what I signed up. In fact, I was a little worried after cruising through Liurnia, the previous region, that I was too powerful. I thought I’d leveled my character too much for the game to give me sufficient pushback.
I worried about the same thing coming into the game, because I thought my experience with the company’s previous titles would give me too much of an advantage. I really need to learn to relax and trust these excellent designers. I should enjoy my surges of power when I experience them knowing full well that my reckoning approaches. It happened with the very first boss of the game for me. Then I got powerful, and then it happened again as I journeyed through Caelid. The exhilarating roller coaster continues.
Screenshot by Andrew Gebhart/CNET
Caelid is filled with giant decaying birds that swoop down to peck you to death. It has creatures that sit halfway between a dog and a raptor. It has poison swamps and angry skeletons. It has sentient flowers that shoot deadly goop at you. I died repeatedly and did so despite running away from some obviously big challenges like an ancient, dust colored dragon.
I still progressed enough to fight the boss of the region: General Radahn. The castle surrounding this boss had very few enemies. The save point was right next to the start of the fight and the approach included an epic cutscene. I was worried. The game was signalling in all kinds of ways that this would be a doozy. It was.
To that point, I’d beaten several bosses in a row in a couple of tries at most. Again, I was on a roll in the previous area. With this game, I generally think I’ve had an easy time with a boss if I can win in five tries or less. With Radahn, I was on my fifth attempt before I landed my first hit.
To be fair, I’m a melee character, and Radahn is seriously deadly from range and starts out on the other side of a huge battlefield. If I tried to close the distance quickly with my horse, he’d shoot me down with a homing arrow. I had to stay low and mobile and ready to dodge. I had to run into the face of danger, across this huge battlefield, dodging deadly salvos as the music swelled.
It was awesome, and the effect wasn’t lessened once I reached the General. He has huge, vicious melee strikes when you get close. When you get him to half health, he leaps into the sky and crashes back down in the form of a deadly meteor. If you’re somehow still alive after all of that, he resumes his melee barrage only with more potent magical strikes.
After hours of repeatedly trying and failing to kill him one on one, I embraced what the game was nudging me toward. This fight was called a war game by various side characters. I’d met several nonplayer characters on the way in who were also itching for their chance to battle this famed war hero. Spread across the arena, you can see the symbols to summon all of them to fight by your side.
Once I did that, the fight became even more epic and more crazy fun instead of despairingly difficult. I still died a few times, but at the start of each attempt, I got to charge back in at the head of this army of mighty ants intent on bringing down a mountain. Radahn could still kill any one of us with one or two hits, but I kept at it. Eventually, the ants won.
Thorns everywhere
While struggling with Radahn, I tried to take the advice that I’ve given to friends playing this game and explore elsewhere to gain power instead of continuing to bang my head on the unmoving wall. While doing so, I found a cave where I’d been imprisoned earlier via surprise teleportation.
Now much higher level than I had been, I enjoyed the return trip and turning the tables on those formerly formidable foes. Then I reached the well hidden boss of the cave and got my butt kicked.
I went off in a different direction. I climbed a steep tower in a high level area looking for secrets, but I kept stumbling into ordinary minions and getting wrecked. I journeyed north across a seemingly peaceful plateau before a dragon crashed down from the sky in front of me. You’ll never guess how that one turned out.
I’d struggled with dragons before in the game, so I was especially cautious when sneaking through this high level area called the Dragonbarrow. I took cover by this large stone structure to try to peak at the landscape ahead. I spotted more than one dragon in the distance and figured it was time to retreat when the structure next to me started to move.
I turned to see what was happening and noticed with dismay that the structure I was hiding behind wasn’t a structure at all, just another much more massive dragon roughly the size of a football field. It saw me and bellowed in my face as his smaller buddies circled near and I heroically screamed in terror before fleeing as quickly as I could in equally heroic fashion.
It was terrifying and magical. That’s how I’d describe my experience with most of this game, actually. I look forward to the time when I’m strong enough and brave enough to ride with speed back toward that mighty beast, greatsword drawn and at the ready.