Elden RIng: Shadow of the Erdtree (PlayStation 4) review "It was time to feel something again. "

It’s easy to feel like you’re dead inside nowadays. After all, if you’re in the United States, it’s political season, which means every malfunctioning brain in this country is determined to let you know their opinions on the latest “MOST IMPORTANT EVER!!!!” election in a never-ending series of them. It’s hard to even get a temporary reprieve from all the nonsense. I get on social media and get deluged by random opinions and theories; I turn on the TV and get deluged by one political ad after another to the degree that, as an Ohioan, if I ever hear the names “Sherrod Brown” and “Bernie Moreno” again, I’ll need extensive therapy. It’s unbearable and only gets worse as time goes on.

But over the last few months, I’ve had one sure-fire method to block all that stuff out for hours at a time. A return to the world of Elden Ring thanks to that game’s Shadows of the Erdtree expansion. To simply refer to it as DLC is a disservice to what FROM devised with Erdtree. It’s larger than many full-length games I’ve played and far more rewarding, as well. The minute it was released, I could read the plaintive cries emitting from all corners of the Internet concerning its uncompromising difficulty. Music to my ears, that — I was hooked even before I made the purchase!

As to be expected with FROM expansions, you’ll have to do a lot of work in the base game even to access it. In this case, you’ll have to beat a couple powerful bosses — one hidden in a remote corner of the world. Accomplish this and a return trip to the more secluded foe’s chamber will see you meet a knight pledged to the lost lord Miquella, as well as a portal to another land. Working with that knight, you’ll soon find yourself on a noble quest to rid this land of its tyrannical overlord while helping Miquella’s sworn knights. Assuming things are as they seem, of course. PROTIP: They’re not.

Since this is a FROM game, you can guess how things started. I entered this new land and opened up the map screen to see where the nearest obelisk containing a piece of the map was and immediately headed in that direction. Only to quickly encounter a powerful and agile foe capable of running circles around my BIG MELEE POWER character. It was a spirited battle, but I was rusty due to how it was roughly two years since I’d touched Elden Ring. For the first time, but assuredly not the last, I saw the words “YOU DIED” on my television’s screen.

Having learned a harsh lesson, I simply took a more roundabout path to that map piece and patted myself on the back for avoiding the scary bad guy. Now able to see what that local terrain looked like, I charted a course for a small building located a bit to my west. This place consisted of nothing more than a short staircase leading to the sort of fog wall that we all know means a boss fight. “Time to show this game what I’m made of!”, I exclaimed as I…immediately got blasted by flaming crossbow bolts before a brutally strong knight cleaved the hell out of me with his massive sword. That’s right, “YOU DIED”.

But, hey, progress has to be made at some point, right? Exploring other places allowed me to quell my rage via the slaughter of comparatively non-threatening shadow people and stone birds. And I found ways to strengthen my character. Let’s face it, if you’ve played enough of Elden Ring to get to Erdtree, you’re probably not getting good bonuses by leveling up and it probably takes a lot of effort just to gain those levels. Therefore, FROM hid all sorts of goodies throughout this world that, if you diligently collect them, will give you and your spirit ash summons improved stats while here. No, they don’t carry over to the main game, so you can’t vastly improve your character and then get revenge on Malenia, but they will help you keep pace with the tougher monstrosities this world contains.

And after getting a handful of those, I was ready to tackle a couple of the smaller dungeons and ruins in the area and even move on to the first of Erdtree’s major dungeons. Sure, the scorpion-spider hybrids kind of creeped me out and a greatsword-wielding warrior forced me to see “YOU DIED” a few times, but I was feeling pretty good about myself. And then I ran into the boss — a pair of dudes wearing a lion costume, dancing around the arena and pelting trespassers with various elemental attacks and, you know the drill: “YOU DIED”, “YOU DIED” and “YOU DIED”.

But the great thing about Erdtree is that, like Elden Ring, if you run into a wall, you can just find somewhere else to explore to gain more power. Not that far from Dancing Lion Castle-Town, there’s a mid-sized fortress that leads to the rest of the world. Well, as a veteran of this game, I can tell you there also is a winding path that eventually takes you to a smaller fort that is on the other side of that castle, allowing you to bypass it. Man, I wish I knew that then… I mean, the castle itself isn’t particularly tough, but the dual-sword-wielding soldier-mage running the show? I saw “YOU DIED” so many times I was compelled to check my own pulse. Just to make sure.

I got through that confrontation, though, and it only took me entering a covenant with my new infernal master. Now, with the world opened up, oh, the sights I saw. There were beautiful locations such as the blue flowered coastal place to the south or the ruin-strewn plains up north. My adversary, Messmer, resided at the top of a massive castle towering over the land. And there was also the stuff of nightmares: dungeons littered with fleshy blob monsters, way too many of those damnable spider-hand things, an even more deadly variant of Bloodborne’s Winter Lantern monsters, utterly gigantic golems filled to the brim with burning corpses. I could go on.

And I did. Sure, I’d often see “YOU DIED”, but I made progress. I got more and more powerful and proved to be more than a match for foes that had previously stymied me and ones I met for the first time. I explored every nook and cranny of Erdtree’s world. I reached its final dungeon and mercilessly slaughtered my way up to its final boss. I was powerful. I was unstoppable. I was…brutally massacred by that dude over and over and over and over again. “YOU DIED”, “YOU DIED”, “YOUDIEDYOUDIEDYOUDIEDYOUDIEDYOUDIEDYOUDIED”.

I could blame the game for ending its expansion on such a brutal and unforgiving encounter. I mean, by this point, I was even cruising past Erdtree’s well-hidden secret bosses like the massive dragon living at the top of Massive Dragon Mountain and the frenzy-spewing geezer residing in the mansion deep in Creepy Frenzy Forest, but against the final boss, I was made of paper and he was the inferno. Sure, I had my spirit ashes and there were a couple summons I could call upon, but that dude seemed allergic to the mere concept of being distracted by them, walloping me the instant I dared to lift a finger.

But the fault could have been mine. After all, my guy is BIG MELEE POWER, so for me to be effective, I have to be right up on my opponent, pummeling him and then dodging his reprisal. And that guy? He makes BIG MELEE POWER look like a 90-pound weakling, while at the same time being far more mobile than his size would indicate. Perhaps my choices in character-building served to put me at a disadvantage from the start. And so, I kept seeing “YOU DIED” as my morale faded into nothingness. But then, it happened. During one fateful battle, he got me with a special move and instead of “YOU DIED”, I saw two beautiful words appear on the screen: “HEART STOLEN”.

Damn straight, FROM. Never change.

Staff review by Rob Hamilton (October 31, 2024) Rob Hamilton is the official drunken master of review writing for Honestgamers.