In Elden Ring, the Struggle Feels Real

In the last two years, the pandemic has brought us many works of art that have tried to definitively capture humanity’s struggle. There was that movie with Leonardo DiCaprio turning pink as he shouts at the top of his lungs for people to look up at the comet hurtling toward Earth. It was so on the nose that it provoked little thought: Yes, we are divided, likely doomed. What of it?

No medium has come as close to perfectly encapsulating Our Situation as video games. In the beginning, when many of us were in lockdown and baking mediocre sourdough, we played Animal Crossing, which involves finding comfort in simple tasks like fishing and gardening while stranded on an island. This year, we are playing Elden Ring, a ruthlessly difficult game that gets only harder the more you play it. That about sums up what it’s been like to live in a pandemic.

Elden Ring has a story that has something to do with a ring, but more important is its design: It’s an open-world game, meaning you can do whatever, whenever you want. Players will ride a horse through a poison swamp, sprint across molten lava and traverse a crumbling bridge surrounded by tornadoes, fighting or evading enemies along the way.

No matter what you choose to do, you’ll probably die again and again trying to do it, sometimes for hours. That’s because the slightest mistiming of a button press will make you fall to your death or open you to attack. Even the most experienced gamers will die dozens of times in a dungeon before reaching the boss — the main villain at the end of a game level.

None of this makes Elden Ring sound like a crowd pleaser, but the video game — a collaboration between the creative director Hidetaka Miyazaki and the “Game of Thrones” author George R.R. Martin — is on track to become the best seller of the year, with 12 million copies sold within a month of its release in February.