Elden Ring as Puzzle-solving
My experience with every Souls-‘Borne-‘Kiro-Ring after the first has been almost identical. The first, though, was wholly unique unto itself. There are precisely two Souls games—your first, and every game afterward. My entry into the series with Bloodborne was, in a word, cinematic. It was also a lot like learning to ride a bike.
When fans toot the horn of the Souls series’ love-it-or-hate-it difficulty, we’re actually describing an experience of unlearning far more than we are learning. In their mechanics, Souls games are brutally simple. Sometimes compared to a rhythm game, the flow of combat is determined by an enemy’s machine-like, predictable move set. Your responses are ultimately reducible to either attacking or avoiding. From the stony, unforgiving surface of these games, you chisel your way through each encounter in pursuit of perfection only accomplished in flawless play. Defeating enemies and especially bosses without so much as a hair on your head being whiffed away by the swing of a Hollow’s pustulant fingernail bestows the player with a sense of ownership over the environment like no other.
What I’m saying is that learning to play Dark Souls is taking a penny and leaving another. As iterative spinoffs and homages like The Surge and Nioh II chose to flirt with the character-action spectacle of Devil May Cry or drop tables more complex than Diablo and the grindiest MMO combined, Dark Souls stuck to its guns. A genre unto itself, like DotA was to the DotA-like, Dark Souls takes any player expecting hack-‘n’-slash or action RPG off-guard and demands rigorous, craftsman-like patience and execution. ‘Gitting gud,’ you find out, means forgetting what makes you good at other games. Aggression or button-mashing—these tactics will fall to pieces like they were nothing at all.
The first FromSoft game released after I got into Souls through Bloodborne was Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. If I want to capture exactly what makes Elden Ring such a paradigm shift, I have to open a conversation about expectations. I’ll start by suggesting this: every true-blue Souls vet comes to these games for the bosses. Let me take my claim much, much further. Anyone who justifies their love for Demon’s Souls or Dark Souls I, early entries not at all as renowned for their bosses, with anything except for Maiden Astraea and Knight Artorias, bosses, is lying to themselves. Let me justify myself by telling you a story.
I platinumed Sekiro less than a month after its release on April 11, 2019. I still remember it clearly. To the tune of Quelle Chris’ Obamacare, I purchased the last Mushin Art, Spiral Cloud Passage, to fully completionalize every morsel of content I had drained from the game. I was sitting in my father’s empty house days before he would sell it in the fallout of a divorce. The event was captured on an iPhone X for proof—proof I needed because what had driven me to so thoroughly beat Sekiro in such a short span of time was that I had hated it. I hated it and needed to show its defenders that I still triumphed over every one of its bosses.
Sekiro had stripped away the meat of the RPG mechanics that lend a sort of artificial complexity to the Souls series. Stats, as a well-seasoned fan should already know, have very little to do with success when playing the games at a high level. Yet each stat point accumulates until the end game where the gap between their influence, and your increase in skill, has become so blurred that you might not even notice how much they help you. Follow this particular rabbit down its hole and you become a challenge runner. You forgo fancy weapons, then consumables, and eventually even levelling up at all. The freakbeasts watch a hairy-chested teenager stream Bloodborne and learn that the Orphan of Kos can be beaten without rolling. In fact, every new entry in the series is accompanied by a ticking clock counting down to when its hardest boss is defeated without so much as moving the analog stick into the position that promotes your undead Übermensch from Terminator-walking to a brisk jog.
In the absence of stats, Sekiro gave us more of the flashy attacks and consumables that challenge runners scoff at. Not only that, but the world was folded in on itself. I’ll explain. Dark Souls I and even Elden Ring take seriously the notion that what a player sees from a distance should be realistically positioned according to a player’s expectations. If you see a city on the horizon, maybe you’ll get to explore it soon. Dark Souls II abandoned this to present its world as a greatest hits album of the fantasy genre, giving us Symphony of the Night in Drangleic Castle, the vista that lay beyond the aqua-colored walls on the cover of Genesis’ Trespass in Majula, and Shrek the Third’s Neverland in whatever Earthen Peak was. In Sekiro, at the conclusion of the Wolf’s scaling of mid-game D&D-dungeon Ashina Castle, you may notice a ghostly sketch upon the wall. Standing flush against it opens the secret door, and from the top floor of a military fortress, you teleport to the beginning of the game, exiting from a cave that, beyond its level geometry, connects to a bottomless pit. A windmill elevator cannot compare. Dark Souls II truncated itself to give birth to a diorama of Japan that the Wolf cuts through like a butter knife does butter.
What Hidetaka Miyazaki and Kazuhiro Hamatani tried to tell me as I Doom-Guyed my way through this simulacrum is that Sekiro is about the bosses. It should have been obvious in retrospect. At the time, I enjoyed harping on a particular example of masterful game design in the first real area of Dark Souls I, the Undead Burg, that Sekiro lacked. After its first bonfire, the player crosses a bridge and finds themselves encased in a small, square-shaped room with two locked doors and two aggressive Hollows. For the first time, you have no way forward except to take down several enemies at once. While balancing awareness of both a cramped environment (not made any better by the game’s extremely basic, unmoving camera) and multiple mobs, the game’s ongoing bike-riding lesson punts away the training wheels. Situations can change unexpectedly, you learn, when a third Hollow busts open a door and barges in to kick ass and take your name.
By the time you’ve either died or lived, the game has taught you multiple survival skills for your journey throughout Lordran. (1) You cannot run past everything. Sometimes, like in a boss encounter, the player must fight to progress. This guidance is absolutely essential when compared to the unessentialized combat of Elden Ring’s open world (something we’ll talk about later). (2) You’ll have to fight several enemies at once. Prior to Dark Souls II’s enemy encounters adapting the philosophy of endlessly pranking the player by doubling the expected size of any given gank, then quadrupling that by having magicians or Victor Wembanyama-sized knights practically fall in from the sky like the Zerg, many players, perhaps understandably so, grew dependent upon Demon’s Souls’ unimpeachably elegant lock-on mechanic. The archetypal example appears in the gameplay footage of Matthewmatosis’ review of Dark Souls II.
Matthew, you are one of the greatest critics to touch the face of YouTube. In your appraisal of Demon’s Souls, you prefigured the bones of an analysis of Elden Ring so prescient, so laden with pessimism amidst Dark Souls III hype, it still blows my mind to think about. In abandoning YouTube criticism to make your own game, you sublated critique into real, positive practice. I have not played your newly released Logic Bombs, but whether it’s good, or about as ingenious a product of YouTuber authorship as Joji’s Piss in the Wind, to make it at all puts you above any piddling refutation of your condemnation of Dark Souls II. In all honesty, I appreciated the ambivalence of your perspective. It’s sincerely refreshing. In the game of content creation, the urge to masquerade as a curator of taste and a genuine connoisseur isn’t just understandable, it’s an iron necessity of the logic of the influencer. You would have none of that.
But when you picked at the bone of Dark Souls II’s decision to emphasize ganks, I got the creeping suspicion that you had failed to pay attention to this room in Dark Souls I. I haven’t even exhausted all its brilliance yet. Its third lesson is that situations can and will develop, and almost never in your favor. Long before a Dark Souls II had shot fifteen-million Touhou-bolts at the Bearer of the Curse while they had half-health, waded knee-deep in water, and couldn’t roll to dodge enemy attacks without levelling a stat whose name is still a punchline to half of all Dark Souls jokes, Demon’s Souls threw two Maneaters at the end of a level full of Gargoyle-ganks and bottomless pits in an arena built out of bottomless pits. Dark Souls II made this an exoteric fact of survival. Dark Souls I, however, tastefully underlined it in an unspoken tutorial fit for a Super Metroid.
Sekiro arrived with little in-game fanfare for its shift in encounter design, but we did get a few influencers telling us how to play it. A preview from VaatiVidya first informed me that any time I wanted to dodge the swing of a samurai’s katana, I should circumvent that urge and instead tap L1 on the PS4 controller for a cathartically sound-effected parry. He said this in the same inflection with which he would chronicle the rise and fall of the sixteenth king in Dark Souls II’s DLCs that nobody, not even VaatiVidya himself, ever cared about. It sounded like a story, is what I mean, and when the first blade fell upon the Wolf’s ponytailed head, Pavlov’s mutt drooled. I dodged, taking no damage, and with all the permanence of the Darksign, a poisonous weed was planted that nothing could make me uproot.
Nothing, except for bosses.
Back in April 2019, I’d come unto that platinum trophy in my recently divorced father’s ruin of a home, carpets stained by a distant ‘incident’ between my brother and the quarterbackian toss of a jug of bleach, like a child in a candy store full of free candy. It was sweet in my mouth, but my stomach still growled. While it may not have an interchangeable money-experience system like Dark Souls’ titular souls, Sekiro does have skill trees and MMO-style resource-gathering to upgrade your toolbox of prosthetic limbs and special attacks. With the scorn of a challenge runner, I’d emptied all my time into maximizing my character across two mandatory new game plus cycles without using a single skill nor the prosthetic limb. Hours disappeared into the paper shredder of what I’d considered bad design. Dark Souls I, in bringing the interconnectivity of the Metroidvania to 3D without being terrible, read to me as a game whose world made it special. The rest of the series, from Bloodborne’s Lovecraftian atmospheric aspirations to the opening of Dark Souls III wowing the player with the radiant echelons of the High Wall of Lothric, never captured the same lightning in another bottle, but it at least could put Diet Coke in an empty can of regular Coke. It was Sekiro where new, first-time director Kazuhiro Hamatani injected the can with the nitrogen that would rupture it. But Kazuhiro didn’t need a new can. FromSoft still had a perfectly good bottle called bosses.
As it turns out, the appeal of not just Souls games, but all video games, cannot be reduced to their world, not their music, not atmosphere, not even their combat. Shackle not the organism within the confines of this coffin made for dying in. These games are structures. Dark Souls I is good because it has a great world, alright combat, and good bosses. Demon’s Souls, too, has a good world, alright combat, and phenomenal bosses of a genus unrecognizable to the Elden Ring fan. Sekiro’s combat, however, is the clean-shaven, enigmatic brother-in-law of Dark Souls. YouTube videos of him stun with an elegance that hides a Christian Grey’s penchant for torture. The diorama of its world makes no attempt to impress when it exchanges Symphony of the Night for secret-door-teleportation as arbitrary as in Terry Cavanagh’s VVVVVV. The moment you first deploy its grappling hook, you confront the fact that the bespoke horror of Demon’s Souls’ Tower of Latria, at last, has been exchanged for ‘hype moments and aura.’ Mash everything together, and you have 2019’s game of the year.
Critiquing the structure of Elden Ring doesn’t take unfavorable comparisons to Dark Souls. By extracting the essence of its most important mechanic we can grasp every link in the chain that binds the totality of player experience together. Sekiro has an unassailable structure because of its identity with the boss fight. Its 1.05 patch, released October 29, 2020, only had to say louder what those of us in the back hadn’t heard. I’d gotten better at the game since release. I knew how to parry and, both then and now, could chew through the game, start to finish, in under three hours. But until the addition of a boss rush, Sekiro remained a decent combat system that couldn’t break through the dying shell of Dark Souls. 1.05, accomplishing the nearly impossible, changed my mind about a video game. Gone were superfluous areas full of enemies to deposit useless experience and resources. At one stroke, Sekiro’s 1.05 patch announced that Souls had always been a series about the bosses. And it’s bosses that structure the chain that makes every Souls-‘Borne-‘Kiro-Ring meaningful.
So let’s talk about the bosses. Not of Elden Ring, but of Demon’s Souls.
We must go on this expedition into the past to loop back to my earlier claim about why we love Demon’s Souls. It’s not because it was the only non-linear Souls game before Elden Ring. It’s not because every subsequent entry in the series is a fancier retelling of its story. We love Demon’s Souls because of Maiden Astraea.
Maiden Astraea stands alone, incomparable to any other boss in the series, much less gaming in general, because she resists being summarized by a set of reproducible mechanics. The fight is trivial. Upon passing the fog gate, you’re pitted against an NPC, Garl Vinland, that stands still in a choke point of the arena. Their dialogue is strangely accusatory, implying that you might be an outcast from the Valley of Defilement, the level of which Maiden Astraea is the final boss. The game makes neither him nor Astraea the aggressor. Both wait for you to attack. If you kill one, the other gives up. The two possible lovers choose to die together.
Despite all the alleged similarities between the Metroidvania genre and the Souls series, I’ve never seen someone compare Maiden Astraea to the final boss of Metroid II: Return of Samus. Like every non-Super Metroid Metroid, its gameplay makes it a perfect example of why Metroid is not a Metroidvania. Samus is sent down a linear path in the self-same, black-and- white tunnels of SR388 on a search-and-destroy mission to wipe out the last of the Metroid species.
Between its forty-seven copy-pasted Metroid battles the Gameboy speakers cry out shrieking bleeps and, at times, an urgent, paranoid techno. Ryoji Yoshitomi’s avant garde attempt at an ambient soundtrack for a franchise that would go on to occupy shelf space in a generation’s worth of average children’s bedrooms is only the first, most coy hint at the game’s urge for experimentation. The same composer would go on to direct the music for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, the Nintendo demon’s favorite game. At its conclusion, Metroid II closes out a character arc written wordlessly when Samus kills the Metroid Queen. The encounter deals its first card a room beforehand. With the last of her brood dead, her screams of anguish are heard under the ominous boom of stomping. When you enter, she hides at the edge of the screen, only extending her neck to nibble at you like a cornered animal. The bottom of the arena, notably, contains an exit. She does not give chase, should you try to spare her.
But Metroid II holds you to Samus’ mission. With the death of its final boss, we find what the queen tried so hard to protect—one more egg. And upon witnessing the birth of the last Metroid, Samus’ remorse at her actions is illustrated by the simple decision for Samus to walk on, the baby Metroid imprinted on her as a companion instead of her final kill. Nineteen years later, the series would flail toward expanding this motherly side of Samus with far more writing, far more Team Ninja cutscenes, and far more misogyny. Ever since, the only form in which Metroid fans will tolerate the bounty hunter lacks personhood and motivations, and every iteration of her design narrows down the waistline of a power suit once unisex enough to make “Samus is a girl” something actually shocking to hear.
Meanwhile, a year earlier, someone at FromSoft may have been paying attention to what made Metroid II’s final boss so great. What the Metroid Queen and Maiden Astraea have in common are their experiential aspirations. Knight Artorias and Slave Knight Gael are similar bosses for more than their bestial move sets—their fights tell the same story as well. Hidetaka Miyazaki uses the boss fight as a form of narrative. Gwyn, Ludwig, Messmer, we care about all of them because we experience the weight of their character while fighting them.
What makes Maiden Astraea unique, then, is that her character is experienced by not fighting her. Once Garl Vinland is out for the count, she kills herself after lecturing you for your evils. But while in Metroid II, this sort of knife-in-the-gut twist sufficed for a grand finale, Demon’s Souls provides it non-linearly, just as easily encountered as the first major boss as it is the second-to-last. The crossing of a moral event horizon, normally a story’s emotional climax, comes arbitrarily, like a perfect slice of cheesecake hidden under heat lamps in a Golden Corral. Each of its Archstone Demons, the game’s five major encounters, rinse over the player just as cleanly and inconsequentially. They’re all identically unique in how resistant they are to reproduction.
Take the Storm King for example. His gimmick has appeared two times since, while fighting Yhorm the Giant in Dark Souls III and Rykard, Lord of Blasphemy in Elden Ring. The return of their gameplay gimmick has basically become an inside joke. Why, exactly, are we fighting a giant boss with a tornado sword again? The most easily stuffed and mummified element of Demon’s Souls is the echo of this one hollow vibe. Neither iteration can compensate for the fact that the Storm King is unique in its own game. By the time you’ve encountered Yhorm in Dark Souls III, he isn’t even the biggest giant you’ve seen in Lothric.
Meanwhile, the Archstone Demon at the end of the Stonefang Tunnel, Dragon God, has never been repeated because of its status as a botched stealth encounter. Throwing anything at the wall to see what sticks can be productive, but it isn’t magic. However, the absence of a Dragon God, or even Dark Souls I’s Bed of Chaos, is in fact a symptomatic silence. An experimental approach is exactly what produced these infamously terrible bosses. Their disappearance heralds a distinct shift in the series’ design philosophy. We can talk about it by first talking about the Penetrator.
‘Normal bosses’ are a Kinkade
Building up to this discussion, I’ve tried to flip a given, common-sense narrative about the Souls series on its head. ‘Puzzle bosses’ have never been the maligned ‘gimmicks’ their haters describe them as. The experiential aspirations that put Elden Ring’s greatest bosses beyond the rest of its genre were codified by the ‘gimmick bosses’ of Demon’s Souls. ‘Normal bosses’ are anything but, and constitute a pervasive, interloping blight on the bespoke. This rupture between infinitely reproducible formula and the sublime is most pronounced in Ludwig, where his two phases, the Accursed and the Holy Blade, can be seen to represent each side respectively. A cutscene dividing them provides the story of Ludwig for us because the fight is incapable of speaking for itself as the False and True Kings Allant once did. The Penetrator, then, is a boss that tells us nothing. His repetitious, predictable attack pattern makes him the ur-example of the Elden Ring boss. For that reason, we’ll use him as the chief illustration in the definition Elden Ring’s boss design.
The first mandatory boss of Bloodborne is Father Gascoigne. His introductory cutscene is the model for almost every Elden Ring boss’ introduction—some old guy rambling cryptically before growling at you and attacking you without really knowing why. My favorite Elden Ring boss, Radagon of the Golden Order, begins his fight in silence when the crucified body of Queen Marika silently transmutes into this male counterpart. Demon’s Souls pioneered this impressionistic style that leaves the intentions and motivations of its bosses up for interpretation. The Penetrator enters the arena devoid of words, but loud in action when he impales a Fat Official you’d been chasing through the Boletarian Palace through the back. Even in its most primitive iteration, the Souls series could still capture hype moments and aura.
What ensues is a rudimentary take on the frenetic, dodge-heavy, quasi-turn-based combat system most Souls bosses use from Dark Souls II onward. The Penetrator has three types of attack: sword-slashing, a deceptively animated twirl that only hits on the second spin, and a thrust that, on contacting the player, locks them into an animation that ends with a stun and huge damage. You’re best off using the invulnerability frames of your rolls to dodge through his swipes, learning to time in accordance with his unusual twirl, and strafe out of the way of the thrust. Demon’s Souls bosses aren’t very fast compared to an Elden Ring boss, but the aggression of the Penetrator can catch you off-guard if you’re used to the molasses-like pace of the prior bosses like the Tower Knight.
The Penetrator, interestingly enough, also prefigures another element of Elden Ring by being one of the only boss encounters in which an NPC, Biorr, of the Twin Fangs, can assist you, much like the former game’s Spirit Ashes. His arena, too, is straightforwardly boxy. Nothing about that is out of place in Elden Ring, but Demon’s Souls boss arenas are the most environmentally diverse and threatening in the series, full of bottomless pits and narrow hallways.
I wanna summarize this mélange with a metaphor. Imagine holding a box of puzzle pieces. You empty it onto the floor then, picking through the mess with the urgency of a puzzle freakbeast, put it together to form the shimmering Kinkade decorating the flimsy cardboard. You’re satisfied, patting yourself on the back and enjoying the catharsis of that final image bound together by jagged bulbs, all neatly sorted into their respective holes. Maybe for a moment, you’re reminded of another, human-shaped hole inside of yourself, waiting to be filled. (Alternatively, you don’t enjoy puzzles at all, in which case, I ask that you bear with me for a little while longer.)
The fun of the Penetrator comes in memorizing its swings, twirls and thrusts until your rolls are timed so perfectly as to effortlessly stunt on him without taking an ounce of damage. The solution to the puzzle is a flawless dispatching of the Penetrator, or any number of bosses in the series that invite you to take advantage of invulnerability frames to avoid them.
If that metaphor ran a little bit on the tortured side, that’s because what I’ve described is, in fact, not at all the appeal of an Elden Ring boss. I’d argue it’s not even the appeal of the Penetrator. Where, for example, does the option to let Biorr help you come in? Am I seriously arguing that completing Biorr’s questline and seeing him fight the Penetrator is non-operationalized, or even definitionally anti-fun? No, I am not. The fun of an Elden Ring boss can be captured far more effectively with a YouTube search of the game’s name, which, during my own research, ten results down the screen, provided me with a guide by Boomstick Gaming on how to “get overpowered at the very start” of the game. Scrolling any lower produces further repetitions, before I’m shown beneath section header ‘Explore more’ a video about Elon Musk’s opinions on the AI revolution.
An Elden Ring guide recreating an overpowered build of Berserk’s Guts within twenty minutes of beginning the game defines the fun of the bosses in fewer words and less time than I ever could. Watch as thirteen-year-olds (my nephew, son of the same brother who scarred the carpet of my childhood home with a bottle of bleach he momentarily confused with a football, is thirteen, and can probably play Elden Ring better than me, the one writing an essay about it) enter the arena of Elden Ring’s version of the Penetrator, Messmer the Impaler, and kill him in a single, 91,000 damage attack in a video titled “Messmer the Impaler – One Shot – 91K Damage Per Hit – Elden Ring”. The thumbnail clarifies that the attack is, in fact, actually 91,328 damage.
Had Demon’s Souls accidentally spoken to the base, caveman-like urge to absolutely clown on bosses when it let you summon Biorr to fight the Penetrator? Consult the Demon’s Souls Wikidot and we find a set of strategies to beat him, one of them saying that the spell Firestorm quite simply rocks his shit. The essence of the ‘normal boss’ is not an interloping blight, as an earlier, more facetious version of myself claimed. It’s been here all along, baby—Elden Ring just wants to serve it to you hot ‘n’ ready.
Watching these videos might, at last, raise the dead horse of a question about Dark Souls’ difficulty. Can I, in the course of this section, resolve every philosophical quandary packaged in this riddle Miyazaki engraved into these games? No, absolutely not. But I can offer you a theory, hoping you’ll see where I’m coming from.
The simplest way to decrease the difficulty of Dark Souls I is contained in its healing system. While later entries chose to trickle a supply of charges to each game’s respective health potion, Dark Souls I begins and ends with its own, the Estus flask, capped at five charges, refillable by resting at a bonfire. It then provides its organic, fully-integrated difficulty selection with the ability to ‘kindle’ that bonfire by burning a consumable, increasing the number of charges gained while resting from five to ten. A mid-game boss that arrives like a mosquito against the train of a player now at home in Lordran, Pinwheel, rewards you with an item that raises this limit all the way to twenty. Each consumable offered to the bonfire substantially decreases difficulty by expanding the player’s health pool an enormous amount. With no further upgrades to its healing ability, the Estus flask provides 300 health per charge, containing 1500 total in five, and 6000 in twenty. Assuming we measure difficulty by Estus charges, Dark Souls I allows the player to reduce its difficulty by 75% through kindling, but is so customizable as to give the player the option to reduce it by either 66.666…% or 50%, with 5, 10, 15 and 20 charges representing four difficulty levels. Even within the boundaries of the Estus flask, however, the inclusion of the Fire Keeper Soul, another consumable that increases each charge’s heal by 100 each, infinitely fractalizes these gradations. With seven possible charges, each Fire Keeper Soul consumed, combined with the four difficulty levels of bonfire kindling, multiplies the possible difficulties from four to thirty-two. However, kindling only works at one bonfire. The number of combinations of kindling levels across the game’s fifty-plus bonfires is a kaleidoscopically large number that calculating would test even my limits.
The point is, Dark Souls I does have difficulty options. The Estus flask is only one of them. With two slots to wear rings, the player can opt for seriously impactful stat increases from options like the Ring of Favor and Protection and the Havel Ring. Why not experiment with poise? Raising this stat makes it harder to stun lock you, reducing the punishment from taking hits. A high-poise build like OnlyAfro’s legendary ‘Giant Dad’ turns every boss into the inevitable encounter you have with Heimskr in Whiterun when you can’t stand his screaming anymore and your reputation as Dragonborn is good enough to justify Shouting him into a thin powder. I haven’t even mentioned NPC summons and co-op, which render the game trivial, or the dark inverse, player invasions, where interlopers can arbitrarily increase difficulty. Dark Souls I, it turns out, is in a state of constant Heraclitean flux, with no hard or normal mode—just the rollercoaster that is the one-of-a-kind Souls experience.
With such a degree of freedom of difficulty so baked into the fundamental identity of the Souls series from its inception, can I judge the teenagers making YouTube videos cosplaying as Goku to kill Malenia, Blade of Miquella? Of course not. Those teenagers used to be me. I admit—the first time I beat Dark Souls III, I cheated when I fought Gael. I cast a cloud of poison mist from behind an irregularity in the level geometry so he couldn’t hit me and would slowly wither out of unbeatable status. I did not use the same trick against the far harder Darkeater Midir. I couldn’t. There wasn’t a YouTube video for it. But this rush of euphoria at a fair win could not wash away the fact I used this dirty trick, this unfiltered, smelly cheese to beat Gael.
Nowadays, my preferred playstyle for a Souls game forgoes all consumables, magic, special attacks, summons, and boosted healing. Maybe the ghost of that first Gael still haunts me. I’m not a stickler who refuses to wear rings and armor, but I do opt for a simple, uninfused broadsword every playthrough. I’m far from a challenge runner. I consider my preferences to resemble the closest thing I could call a ‘normal mode’ in that it tries to engage with combat purely through learning enemy attack patterns. You don’t have to play like me. I do it because I like it, and nothing more. It’s just how I’ve chosen to solve the puzzle.
But the notion of choosing how to solve a puzzle raises an interesting question. Let’s return to the metaphor. The way that overpowered Elden Ring builds fit into it is that the Moonveil katana and Comet Azur spell are puzzle pieces without pictures. When at a loss for how to fill in the gap of the puzzle with the proper reaction to an attack, you fill it with a spell, or a Spirit Ash, or a skill on a weapon, or whatever. Bonfire kindling, while a brilliant system, is a rigid one that doesn’t inspire player creativity. It’s magic that slips into its place and represents the single most brilliant innovation of Elden Ring. Magic is a cheater’s blank piece.
Putting together the puzzle is no longer about recreating the Kinkade on the box. The exhilaration of every comment on an Elden Ring build video communicates the absolute volume of what the game’s addition to puzzle-solving brings to the table. Fuck it, it’s more than a Kinkade could ever be. When I walk into Morgott, the Omen King’s arena, I don’t even get a glance of the puzzle because I’ve blasted him into smithereens with a spell dealing 91,328 damage faster than you can say “like and subscribe.” The puzzle pieces are scattered on the floor. There is no box with picture to guide me, but I have a pair of scissors. I can cut each one into any shape I want and bind together a gnarled image with gravity magic.
‘Puzzle bosses’ and scarlet rot
Maybe the Kinkade comparisons were unfavorable. Demon’s Souls is really a Jacques-Louis David. At the apogee of the French Revolution, David painted The Death of Marat. Clutched in Marat’s dead hand is the very letter his assassin wrote to him, blurs of red smudged into its corner in the shape of his thumb. Words that very well may be confidential state information should any modern assassination occur against a French politician were emblazoned across a public work of realist art. Realism, as a movement, may be accused of its limitations upon the form of expression. But look more closely at the scores and swirls of Marat’s bloodied thumbprint. Eventually, squint at the canvas itself and see how paint settles into its weave of squares. Edvard Munch’s 1907 rendition of The Death of Marat brings out these details in a harsh grid of frantic brush strokes, seemingly arbitrarily smeared with red that pools at the feet of a specter of which the Terror could not speak: the assassin Charlotte Corday herself, stark white, untouched by the chaos of a far more realistic portrayal of the chronically ill Marat’s bedroom than David’s romanticism could ever reveal. Realism does not limit the eye of an open-minded beholder.
On one side, Demon’s Souls is David’s painting. On the other, Elden Ring appears as Munch’s swirl of free expression. Like the games, I happen to think David’s is better and less reactionary. edvardmunch.org’s blurb beneath the paintings provides a mimetic reading of the artist’s two takes on the French classic. Importantly, it does not inform us of any paintings it inspired, just the painting that inspired Munch. I would be insane to go so far as to compare the interpretive potential of an Edvard Munch painting to macaroni art, but maybe it’s a bit fairer to do so with Elden Ring. Demon’s Souls inspired a genre, but Elden Ring was only capable of the stillbirth of the asset-flipping, slapdash romp that is Elden Ring Nightreign, the favorite game of your friend who already liked Elden Ring, and nobody else.
Do I need to explain why this infinitely reproducible formula will do gangbusters? The repetition of the same that makes up the Elden Ring boss has dilated into the logic of FromSoft itself. In 2026, Nightreign remains the contour of the future of FromSoft. Every piece of promotional footage I’ve seen of upcoming The Duskbloods seems to indicate it’s Nightreign with Bloodborne in it. Will it be good? Well, I can’t exactly believe a FromSoft game will be bad, so I bet it’ll be fine. However, will I play it? Never. I haven’t even played Nightreign and have consumed nary a stream, YouTube guide or VaatiVidya lore dump. I wouldn’t, even if you paid me in a million soon-to-be broken promises for a Sekiro II.
The question is: are we capable of remembering Maiden Astraea’s suicide? The structure of Elden Ring, held together by the master-signifier of the boss fight itself, remains nothing more than a balance sheet of the Penetrator. I detest the claim that FromSoft has simply sold out—maybe they have—but that is emphatically not what I’m talking about. The point is that Maiden Astraea’s death runs anathema to the logic of a modern Souls-‘Borne-‘Kiro-Ring. Not only that, but as she took her life in the pestilent, disgusting hole at the center of the Valley of Defilement, she sucked the purpose for her existence into the dark with her. Demon’s Souls, famously, is known to have been considered a failure internally by FromSoft before it was even released. A miserably misguided attempt to compete with The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, its empty husk was adopted by Hidetaka Miyazaki, given a bath, haircut and cologne, and sent on its way to a disastrous playtest by then-president of Playstation Studios, Shuhei Yoshida. As the story goes, he was so mystified by Demon’s Souls that he completely vetoed publishing it outside of Japan. Instead, Atlus picked up the rights, and the rest was history.
There’s just no getting back to the root of this death story. Flashes of urgency arise like flickering fireflies in FromSoft’s recent catalogue, and the determination to pivot formulas so radically for Nightreign may be an example of it. But Demon’s Souls harbors a case of scarlet rot to the core that structures the paradigm shift of Elden Ring: the synergy of its combat and the design of the ‘normal boss’. This is both its best and worst feature at one and the same time, creating a split we see at the center of the Souls fanbase to this day. The sniveling elitist, and the newbie who demands that we all let people enjoy things. As a member of the former camp, I may be pot meeting kettle, but neither of these sides is capable of truly understanding one another even when they love the same game. We talk in different languages. In mine, the ghost of Maiden Astraea speaks in the silences between every word of this essay.
I guess the death of the Maiden is a little unbecoming to the target demographic of Elden Ring. Is there any room for ‘puzzle bosses’ anymore? Does Rykard even count as a ‘puzzle boss’? He’s padded the fuck out with flashy attacks that force the player to run in circles, waiting for the next opportunity to cast the same tornados that took down the Storm King in a long-gone past so very far, far away from me. It’s almost like the game wants you to kill everything in the stupidest way possible when it gives you spells on spells on spells in its open world. How am I supposed to believe that The Lands Between has been a barren wasteland for thousands of years when every region has twenty caves containing a sword that cuts a hole through reality like I’m in The Matrix? Demon’s Souls is populated by shortcuts that explain themselves within the lore of the world, like an elevator for transporting ores in the mineshafts of the Stonefang Tunnels. As early as Dark Souls I, Miyazaki, for the first time, settled for putting a door in the Undead Burg that tells me it “cannot be opened from this side” when its wrought-iron bars are literally wide enough for my to put my head through, much less the Twiggy-Lawson-esque arm of a hollowed Chosen Undead.
In an earlier version of this essay, I called Elden Ring bosses themselves “doors that open from one side” then immediately clarified that I had no idea what I meant by that. I’ve finally found my explanation. If I can kill Mohg, the Omen in one 91,328 damage attack, why would I ever fight him with a broadsword? Today, game integrity is on the agenda. Used by Old School Runescape developers at Jagex to describe the common experience shared by all players when put on an equal footing, unmitigated by the pervasive microtransactions of the MMO genre, game integrity seemed to me a necessary component in making the experience of defeating a boss in the Souls series meaningful. The ugly truth is that the moment a Wikidot contributor posted on the internet that the Penetrator could be trashed in seconds with Firestorm, the genie was out of the bottle and couldn’t be put back in. The series never had it. Elden Ring just said the quiet part out loud.
The Lands Between is as believable a world as Tomato Town, but I never really thought it had to be realistic. When Sekiro showed me a map-spanning teleport, I hardly blinked because I’d never noticed the world anyway. What it showed me in spades was game integrity. In pursuit of telling us that Demon’s Souls was always about the bosses, Sekiro peeled away every layer of the inauthentic shell of RPG and Metroidvania world design. What remained was the beating heart of integrity to a shared player experience that brings together a fanbase with stories of Isshin, the Sword Saint-induced trauma. But another, worse boss in the game plays FromSoft’s hand. The Folding Screen Monkeys can be called a ‘puzzle boss’ in only the most derisive tone of voice. Martyring herself to create infinite Nightreign moneybags, Maiden Astraea invited us to “take our precious demon soul,” and with those words told a story about the nature of Demon’s Souls and the scarlet rot inside it. The Folding Screen Monkeys have no story to tell, but they do make funny noises. Why do both their spectral guardians and the Guardian Ape throw their shit at me? Is this supposed to be funny? What happened to the big-headed baby skeletons from Dark Souls I? Not Mad Magazine enough for you, Hamatani?
What I’m saying is that Demon’s Souls did not know what it wanted to be, so it tried every one of Miyazaki’s life-long caprices. For that reason, it contains both the good and the bad of the entire series. While the anarchy of the Terror produced The Death of Marat, the rigid formula of Elden Ring tells us a lie: that macaroni art is better than Jacques-Louis David. The first time I played Elden Ring, I created a perfect lookalike of STAYC’s Yoon in its character creator, then played it for more hours than I have on the rest of the series combined. Over one-thousand hours of playtime is the punchline to this section of the essay, which I’ve titled ‘Elden Ring as Puzzle-solving’. The trash-portraits and castles upon air I built in every playthrough with a digital recreation of my ultimate K-pop bias melted away and left me with nothing except for this. They weren’t preserved. They were meaningless.