Elden Ring is a hard game that trusts you to get lost. FromSoftware’s action RPG sends the Tarnished into the Lands Between, a realm ruled by demigods, and asks one thing: repair the shattered Elden Ring and become the Elden Lord.
Queen Marika Shattered the Ring
The setup is clean. Queen Marika kept the Elden Ring, a force that showed itself as the physical concept of order. She broke it and vanished. Her demigod children fought over the pieces in an event called The Shattering. Each holds a Great Rune, and each is corrupted by it.
You play a Tarnished — one of a group of exiles summoned back after The Shattering. The world is open. There is weather, a day-night cycle, dungeons, secrets and bosses. The structure is looser than Dark Souls, and that loosening is the point.
Hidetaka Miyazaki and George R. R. Martin
Hidetaka Miyazaki directed. George R. R. Martin contributed world-building. The pairing sounds like marketing and is not. Martin gives the demigods a family history worth digging through, and Miyazaki’s team buries it where it belongs — in item text and ruins.
| Dark Souls series | Elden Ring | |
|---|---|---|
| Structure | Interconnected, tighter | Open world, more open-ended |
| Exploration | Constrained paths | Vast, with weather and day-night cycle |
| Setting | Various | The Lands Between |
The Lands Between Is the Best Character
The realm does the work the script usually does. It is interconnected, full of secrets, and it never explains itself twice. You learn the demigods by walking into their territory and finding out what they did there.
The bosses are formidable, and the game knows it. What separates Elden Ring from its predecessors is that you can leave. A wall you cannot climb today sits beside three directions you have not tried.
A Film Is Coming
A24 has an Elden Ring film scheduled for the United States on March 3, 2028. Alex Garland wrote and directed it. The cast includes Kit Connor, Cailee Spaeny, Ben Whishaw, Nick Offerman, Tom Burke, Havana Rose Liu, Sonoya Mizuno, Emma Laird, Peter Serafinowicz and Jonathan Pryce.
| Release | Date |
|---|---|
| Elden Ring (video game) | February 2022 |
| Elden Ring (film, US) | March 3, 2028 |
The film’s premise is the same shattering, the same corrupted demigods. That is a lot of lore to carry in two hours.
Where the Difficulty Actually Lives
The challenge is real but it is not the whole story. Elden Ring is difficult in the way a map is difficult — the hard part is deciding where to go. The combat punishes you, then hands you an exit you did not see.
That design is why the game holds up. It respects the player enough to let them fail and wander, and it fills every direction with something worth finding.
The film will have to choose. Elden Ring’s strength is sprawl — the sense that the Lands Between continues past whatever you are looking at. A movie cannot sprawl. It can only pick a thread and pull.
For now the game stands on its own. It takes the Dark Souls formula and opens it without losing the weight. The result is one of the best RPGs of its decade.
Score: 9.6 of 10.
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