After the tragic death of a close friend, my time with EldenRing became an impossible quest for closure.
Contents On May 24, 2021, my friend Andrew Thomas pinged me via Facebook chat with that message. While I had crammed most of the game into a single frantic week in February to review it for launch, Andrew had been plugging away at it casually and sending me his observations along the way.
Andrew’s sudden death put an ugly black stain on the end of a beautiful life filled with limitless potential. As I struggled to grapple with my grief, that final conversation about Elden Ring loomed in the background. I wasn’t upset that he never got to finish the game — in fact, it was perhaps better that he didn’t. But the more I struggled for a sense of closure, the more I saw that Elden Ring’s majesty and tragedy mirrored Andrew’s life, right down to the end.
This is the moment of contrast that makes Elden Ring’s opening so breathtaking. A claustrophobic prelude turns a fairly standard open-world introduction into a revelation. I have exited the catacombs and now stand on the precipice of freedom, like a 16-year-old with a freshly minted license and a tank full of gas. It’s a paralyzing sight and players might feel their thumb fall away from the control stick for a moment as the painterly landscape washes over them.
As two eccentric kids growing up in a vanilla town, Andrew and I became fast friends — something that was bound to happen in the 1990s when two kids who loved video games crossed paths. In fact, my earliest memory of gaming journalism came from Andrew. In what I think actually was fourth grade, Andrew wrote a short blurb for a class newspaper about a new video game that had just come out: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I had never heard of Zelda, but his brief write-up wowed me.
I spent hours battling the Godskin Noble, making little progress. Each death became more frustrating than the last, as I simply couldn’t nail down the timing needed to avoid his massive arsenal of attacks. Were I not reviewing the game, I may have simply quit it. After 30 hours of riding around The Lands Between and taking down powerful foes, I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t growing.
Bushwick When most people head off to college, they naturally drift apart from their high school friends. That was far from the case with my Medfield gang. As fate would have it, several of us all moved to New York City after college and reunited in Bushwick, a neighborhood in Brooklyn. Andrew and I would become roommates for a few years, living together in a crappy two-bedroom apartment with a third friend sleeping on a fold-out couch in the living room.
Andrew was infamous for starting projects and then dropping them right before they reached their final form. I remember him spending months prototyping and playtesting an original board game called Terradice, only for him to rush on to his next idea once it finally felt like he’d cracked how to make it work. It was always something about him that puzzled me; I could never grasp why he’d put such a tremendous amount of time and effort into an idea only to let it fizzle out.
It’s this section of the game that prompted Andrew to DM me about his own frustrations about his playthrough, which he’d been gushing over up to that point. “Yeah the last arc of the game feels flat,” he wrote. “Nothing new is introduced.” Instead, I returned home, went to the church that I attended as a kid, and sat silently next to his open casket for an all too brief final moment. Medfield had become Crumbling Farum Azula.
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