ELDEN RING: METAPHYSICAL HORROR AND MYTHOLOGICAL ENTROPY

Nothing is sacred, nothing is untainted or unambiguous. The result is a world of the most exquisite, moribund beauty, of breath-taking atrocities and a pervasive entropy that lends every moment of play deliciously despairing poetry. 

From Software's epoch-making forays into the realms of role-playing video games characteristically distinguish themselves by an acute mingling of fantastical and horror elements. Both the legendary Dark Souls series and the incredible stand-alone Bloodborne evince influences as diverse as Manga such as Berserk, the art of Junji-Ito, The Lord of The Rings and the cosmic horror mythologies of H.P. Lovecraft. In terms of subject, little is off the cards: from witty reimaginings of Dungeons and Dragons monsters to creations more redolent of surrealist art or renaissance depictions of Hell itself, From Software's franchises represent arguably the most diverse menageries of entities, situations and concepts ever boasted by video game franchises. 


Quite apart from the various abominations and atrocities each game includes, their horror also operates on metaphysical levels: In Dark Souls, players are confronted with the existential despair of a mythology that has already failed, an entire reality rotting on the vine, whose purported mechanisms of salvation turn out to be deceptions and corruptions of the truth. This leaves players in the unenviable position of having no good choices: there are no binary conclusions here. Whatever path they ultimately take, reality is condemned to the same sorry rounds of corrupt renaissance and descents into entropy, all thanks to the ego of a mad god who cannot accept his own decline. 


Bloodborne, by contrast, paints a reality in which nothing is stable or certain from the very first step; a condition in which dreams are indistinct from reality and insight from madness, where the most surreal and mind-shattering horrors become pathways to strange transcendence or more sorry rounds of the same despairing pilgrimage. Here, dreams and nightmares are indistinct from waking reality, such binaries meaning little next to the screaming, fractured madness that is creation itself. Unlike Dark Souls, which is obliquely communicated but clearly defined by the series' end, Bloodborne's metaphysics is entirely without definition or stricture, echoing in form the insanity and disturbia of its content. 


Both games utilise certain imagery and archetypes from fantasy and horror to create something uniquely compelling and uniquely monstrous: a species of horror that may not be readily apparent, but that swells and congeals as the games progress, to the point whereby reality and sanity themselves begin to collapse in latter chapters. 
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All of this is communicated in peculiarly sophisticated fashion; not through extensive exposition, cut scenes etc, but via subtle symbolism and implication. Much is left up to player inference, meaning that engagement is essential and necessarily intense. Unlike most other franchises and, indeed, storytelling mediums, the audience is not a passive entity when it comes to these mythologies: the games oblige them to become active participants if they are to even begin understanding the depth and complexity bubbling beneath the surface, not to mention reconcile the ambiguities and contradictions the games deliberately subject them to. A significant part of the leg-work here is committed by the audience, meaning that no two players come away from these experiences with quite the same responses or assumptions. Every player experiences something unique, and builds a unique mythology in their minds utilising the materials and parameters provided. Beyond that, both Dark Souls and Bloodborne acknowledge this in their mythologies as well as their technical qualities: both games are haunted by the spectral echoes of other players, who are progressing through related but subtly different narrative tracks. In Dark Souls, a deliberate multiverse is drawn whereby each “game” is another reality, subtly removed from the other in Mandella Effect fashion, but also interbleeding. Likewise, Bloodborne establishes that multiple “Hunters” pass through the state of dreaming at any one time, and may cycle through again and again until they find their own means of reconciling and transcending it. The resultant sophistication of storytelling here is profound: a level of player engagement arguably unlike any other narrative franchise in video game history. 


With the marked success of these games both technically and narratively, trepidation for the open-world experiment that is Elden Ring was as high as hope. Even when the first suggestions of what the game would consist of were made public, concerns spread like wildfire across the internet. An "open world" experience that somehow seamlessly incorporates the suggestive and ambient storytelling of the previous games, not to mention their notoriously nightmarish difficulty? The ambition seemed quixotic, to say the least. Moreover, "open world" experiences have been notoriously riven with problems in recent years: a lack of narrative rhythm and cohesion, vast expanses of emptiness or copy/pasted identical environments, plus numerous examples of predatory monetisation (loot-crates, micro-transactions etc), have all conspired to make the "open world" something of a dubious prospect for the video game playing public. 


From the earliest reports, it became apparent that, via the sincere genius of its creators -plus a hint of video-game alchemy-, Elden Ring has not only succeeded in fulfiling its vision, it may be the title that defines this console generation. ​

A technical and visionary masterpiece, Elden Ring has taken the assumptions of "open world" video games and blasted them open with the force and vividness of an LSD trip shattering parameters of perception. The experience of the game has left many of us in sincere awe at what From Software have achieved, both technically and in mythological terms.


With reference to its peculiar species of horror specifically, Elden Ring serves as a boiling pot of all that has come before: 


Mythologically, it resembles the moribind metaphysics of its parent, Dark Souls: here, once again, From Software paint the picture of a fractured fantastical world, one whose great metaphysical events are over long, long before the player character arrives. Centring on the eponymous concept of The Elden Ring, this world is fractured and dying owing to the shattering of that artefact (which is actually neither entirely material or abstract in nature). The grand metaphysics that once held this reality together is slowly unravelling, whilst the warring god-children who claimed its pieces squabble to establish their own realms and religions. Into this state of existential collapse, dead pilgrims known as Tarnished emerge; entities whose fated purpose -or so it is proscribed- is to destroy the mad and corrupted demigods, claim the pieces of the Elden Ring and establish a new divine order by which this world might reorient itself. 


Echoes of Dark Souls's mythos of old gods and new, of darkness and fire, are clear. And, as in those games, the mythology proscribed to us at the outset is slowly revealed to be more ambiguous than we are initially led to believe:


For all of its incredible beauty, a subtle undercurrent of moribund despair pervades Elden Ring. It is a peculiar species of horror that isn't immediately apparent in a setting that evokes so many fantasy tropes and images (dragons, magic, knightly orders, lost kingdoms, schools of sorcery etc): an existential dread akin to that evoked by H.P. Lovecraft (another significant influence on From Software) in many of his stories. Here, we are the dregs and by-products of a failing engine, a decay that becomes increasingly evident the more of the world we explore: 


Every society, every culture, every kingdom, has fallen into madness and abomination. Many attempt to maintain some twisted semblance of their former glory whilst most have embraced their own peculiar insanity. Even the seemimgly-human knights, soldiers and denizens of those kingdoms reveal themselves to be twisted parodies of their former selves when encountered close to. Meanwhile, the stuttering engine of reality ensures that they, like the player, are doomed to cycles of purgatorial repetition until that engine is either fixed or put out of its misery (this stands as another example of From Software marrying essential game mechanics to mythology: whenever the player rests at a "site of lost grace" -this game's equivalent of bonfires or lanterns-, reality stutters and resets once again, all of the minor enemies and encounters resurrecting, playing out their proscribed scenarios in another cycle). The impression created is of a world barely suspended above an apocalyptic abyss; one into which it might collapse at any moment. Meanwhile, the various remains of dying cultures, traditions and religions that inhabit it are all desperately scrabbling to establish their own primacy or to transcend the condition altogether. Most are lost things that have descended into cultures of insanity and abomination: ​

The first significant encounter in the game is with a homonculus-horror called "The Grafted Scion," a creature that is emblematic of the body-horror pervading the game: A gigantic, crab-like amalgam of magically and surgically grafted bodies, it is the product of a dark and forbidden science now practiced by Godrick The Great and his minions; a descendent of divinity who now, in his madness, actively grafts the limbs and bodies of others to his titanic frame.


Elsewhere, players will encounter the wasted, lepros corpses of those consumed by a magical fungus called "The Scarlet Rot," a blight that is as much metaphysical as it is biological: The result of a feud between demi-gods, the Rot infests the air, the land and all who come into contact with it, resulting in entire townships reduced to shambling, agonised zombies, hordes of mutated knights and monsters (the latter of which even include dragons). Whilst wandering The Caelid Wilds and Swamps of Aeonia (areas completely contaminated by the Rot), the player will encounter maddened remnants of those kingdoms and settlements that have sustained its assault: 


The kingdom of Redmane, for example, utilises arcane technology to hold back and purge the blight: In the desolations surrounding Redmane Castle, the player will encounter entire villages charred to nothing, the semi-magical engines responsible still roaming the wastes, directionless and without purpose now, save for the imperative to burn all in their wake. Even this scorched earth policy has failed, as the burned corpses still rise from their pyres and ashes, no matter how assiduously immolated. Others have attempted arcane means of insulating themselves from the encroaching infestation, only to have reduced themselves to semi-corporeal shades and spectres; a curse at least as maddening as the Rot itself. 


The Scarlet Rot is a key example of Elden Ring's peculiar horror: a factor that is communicated largely through imagery, environmemt and intimation, it nevertheless charges any area in which it occurs with a dolorous dread, an atmosphere that feels actively sickening, as though the player themselves might be tainted through contact with it. In terms of the wider metaphysics, The Rot is emblematic of the pervasive sense of corrosion and collapse throughout the gaming world: 


As in its ancestors, Dark Souls and Bloodborne, Elden Ring paints a reality in collapse at a fundamental level; a state where every system, dream and design has comprehensively failed, leading to a condition of saturation of which the player character is simultaneously the product and victim. 


Even the anonymous player characters themselves -known as Tarnished- are products of that same systemic failure: Individuals resurrected from the dead, their proscribed purpose is to follow the path that "destiny" dictates; to repair the eponymous metaphysics of this world and become "Elden Lord." However, there are numerous side-quests, alternative paths, endings and revelations that suggest such may not be the best thing for the world. As in Dark Souls and its wholly ambiguous tensions, here, the system that demands the Elden Ring's repair is revealed as far from unambiguous, the events that led to its shattering more a conspiracy of liberation than one designed to plunge creation into chaos. 


That ambiguity ultimately leaves the player in a state where there are no good choices; no clear-cut decisions to be made; only that between -impotent, self-defeating- conformity and ruinous rebellion. The ultimate horror of the situation is Lovecraftian; a systemic sickness in which the scrabblings of humanity -and other sapient species- mean nothing. That despairing impotence is a horror all its own, that plays out in microcosmic set-pieces throughout the game: 


Whilst wandering a particular swamp early in the game, players may come across the ruins of a dragon-worshiping civilisation whose citizens, suspended in a state of undeath, continue their rites and rituals in the foetid remains of their temples. Should the player linger, the object of their worship, a great black dragon, swoops down and rewards their faith with further desolation, breathing death upon the congregations before settling amidst their ashes. In the ruins of Raya Lucaria, one of the great kingdoms of the dying world and an academy of magic, the player will encounter maddened scholars and sorcerers who exhibit Lovecraftian insanity, having lost their minds to cosmic revelations and the breaking of the world. Elsewhere, settlements of peoples who have lost their minds to a metaphysical madness known as "The Flames of Frenzy" sustain in states of metaphysical torment. This particular species of magical malady is a core example of the overlap in this world between the actual and the abstract: The flames are a particular kind of revelation, a dark insight that leads to the literal combustion of the mind and soul in the same way that the aforementioned Scarlet Rot infests body and spirit. ​

Nowhere is this peculiar horror more overt than in the game's major bosses: Whilst there is very little in the way of a strict or linear path in Elden Ring, progress is made by seeking out the demi-god children of Marika, previous incumbent of the eponymous metaphysics before its shattering, each one a holder of a shard of that divinity but also consumed by idiosyncratic madness. 


Marika's least divine descendent, the Shakespearian Godrick, for example, has lost both mind and body to the unclean practice of "grafting" (whereby various limbs and body parts have been magically grafted into his body, resulting in an abomination that wouldn't be out of place in Resident Evil titles). Meanwhile, Renalla, Queen of the Full Moon and high witch of Raya Lucaria, is bodily intact but has lost her sanity to the Lovecraftian revelations of her magical arts. Radahn, her former lover, meanwhile, has been entirely claimed by The Scarlet Rot, losing every vestige of his former nobility and becoming a swollen, immortal horror of cannibalistic proclivity and insane divine power. Every encounter, every character, follows a cyclical path of tragedy and damnation, as though the shattering of The Elden Ring has resulted in an entropy that pollutes even fate itself. 


Dead and dying civilisations, broken metaphysics, demi-gods become mad abominations, metaphysical plagues and apocalypses, Lovecraftian, cosmic insanity and a player character who is themselves an undead vessel of some process of undefined self-repair (or self-destruction?). In truth, Elden Ring exhibits so many strains and species of horror, it would be impossible -and, indeed, a profound error- to attempt a comprehensive catalogue. 


Instead, it is more apt to stand in awe at how seamlessly From Software has managed to integrate those elements into what is ostensibly a fantasy setting in the vein of The Lord of The Rings or Game of Thrones without friction or incongruity. The imaginations behind Elden Ring understand on a visceral level that such distinctions and parameters between genres are largely synthetic; that there has always been general thematic and subjective commonality, interbleeding and overlap. Elden Ring takes that acknowledgement to an entirely other level by exemplifying the horrors inherent to the metaphysics and subjects of fantasy fiction: Here, magic is the manifestation of mad revelations and broken mythologies. Here, demi-gods are scions of divine insanity and promulgators of existential corruption. Nothing is sacred, nothing is untainted or unambiguous. The result is a world of the most exquisite, moribund beauty, of breath-taking atrocities and a pervasive entropy that lends every moment of play deliciously despairing poetry. 

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