The first Act of Baldur’s Gate 3 is ludicrously huge and a phenomenal intro to both Larian’s adaptation of the Dungeons and Dragons 5e rules and the corner of Faerûn the game inhabits. The continent itself has some rich history and super cool cities, but I was most excited to see what contents of the Monster Manual would be wreaking havoc on the land as I booted up the game for the first time. Act I alone features classic monsters, like a Gnoll pack, a mama Owlbear, and of course lots of Goblins and Ogres. However, the coolest encounter by far—at least of the ones I’ve played—is with the ray of sickness-slinging hag Auntie Ethel.

When you first encounter Ethel in the Druid’s Grove in Baldur’s Gate 3, she seems to be a kindly herbalist with potions to sell, but certain mage characters, Warlocks, will be able to get a whiff of her magical disguise. If you choose to check out the Sunlit Wetlands area before taking on the Goblin Camp, you’ll find Ethel confronted by two brothers who accuse her of kidnapping their sister Mayrina. Her sweet demeanor melts away quickly if you don’t back her up, and she teleports away on the spot—probably not worrying about up the charade since she doesn’t see your party as much of a threat. If you follow the brothers in their charge to the teahouse, you’ll realize that the wetlands aren’t just open for a pleasant marshy stroll. Hidden spike traps will punish you for rushing with bleeding, and then rotting wounds if you aren’t careful.

Related: Can You Change Your Race in Baldur’s Gate 3 (BG3)

If you’re perceptive enough, you can discover this region’s true nature early. The pristine landscape with lush plant life is actually a cover for a dank and thoroughly uninviting swamp, which definitely lowers the rating on the Yelp review I’m leaving for the Riverside Teahouse. A small group of cute sheep wandering around turn out to be Redcaps, bloodthirsty fey creatures that have a characteristic red hood. If you pause to explore or heal, you’ll later see that the brother’s quickly succumbed to their wounds before even crossing into the house’s front yard. The teahouse has a classic witch’s cottage feel, with a gnarled tree-trunk going through the center and a roaring stone fireplace lighting it up. If you’re brave enough to drink from the well outside, you actually get a health buff that helps out a ton for the chaos to come.

You encounter Mayrina—and finally the true Green Hag form of Ethel, when you barge in the teahouse. Charging in guns (or hand-crossbows) blazing was how I decided to go with my first character, but I missed some awesome dialogue that I checked out in my second playthrough. In classic hag fashion, Ethel offers to help with the tadpole ingrained in your head, but only if you let her pluck an eye from your skull. Not to get your hopes up if you thought this (pretty clearly bad) deal was an early solution, Ethel can’t do anything to help you, won’t give your peeper back after the procedure, and is frankly offended that you would even ask. If you want to roleplay as someone who trips over every trap, then this debuff is perfect.

If you try to intervene and save Mayrina, don’t expect a full drag-out boss fight to happen immediately. Ethel has actual self-preservation instincts and won’t just hang around to let you take her down  to 0 HP. Her first move is to go invisible and sic Redcaps after you, and then she quickly retreats into her mysterious abode, teleporting Mayrina away as well. She completely tricked me the first time around, leaving me perplexed as to how I could follow her when she dove right into the fireplace and there were seemingly no other doors or paths outside the teahouse. After giving up and doing a little bit of goblin murder, I got close enough to the fireplace to trigger an investigation check—it was an illusion this whole time! The phony fireplace hid a staircase down to the hag’s cursed lair.

The first area is a display of Auntie Ethel’s previous victims. The hag heckles you one more time for daring to intrude, but quickly poofs away for you to regard the horrors. It’s basically a museum of bad deals, like a petrified dwarf who apparently begged Ethel to halt his terminal disease, or an elf in an alcove surrounded by mirrors and tortured with grisly visions because he wanted to see the future. This momentarily seems like a dead end, until you make out the shape of a face formed out of gnarled wood. The sealed-looking door is one of the hag’s victims as well, and begs you with visions of other failed attacks to discourage you from moving forward. A successful intelligence check reveals that this too is an illusion, and you can walk right through with no problem, but you can also put on Baldur’s Gate 3‘s Whispering Mask item to get through it. I thought I scored a fun accessory the first time I used it, but quickly realized that Auntie Ethel turns the wearer into a puppet if you keep it on, creating a fun forced PVP scrap.

The next encounter uses the whispering masks again to cool effect. You find yourself surrounded by adventurers trapped in Ethel’s lair. While she bids them to attack you, it becomes apparent your foes are actively resisting this, and may pause in the middle of the carnage to refuse if they succeed a save. This leads to an interesting degree of chance in this fight, with some run throughs being way harder than others for me. I also decided to try knocking these foes out, since they didn’t want to hurt me either. That goal reached a tragic end when I finally got everyone down, then saw that removing the masks caused their deaths anyway as their minds shattered from so many years of control. Continuing the trend of obscured ways to the next room, you move on by jumping through a waterfall to reveal a poison-clogged path ahead.

Related: Baldur’s Gate 3 and Starfield Are the Two Extremes of RPG Storytelling

There may be a way to completely avoid damage that hasn’t come to mind for me here, but I’m pretty sure you just have to let your characters suffer through this part. But if you just run through the poison blindly, you’ll get tripped by even more hidden traps, now in the form of flaming flowers that’ll cause a chain explosion when mixed with the noxious fumes. It’s funny trying to play this area strategically, and I admit I reset a few times when attempts snowballed out of control and my screen was suddenly filled with fire and carnage. But if I’m a hag who can teleport anywhere in my lair, why not fill a room with unavoidable toxic clouds that require an astronomically high Sleight of Hand check to get rid of just one? 

After stumbling through this trap area and probably taking a short rest in the middle of the cave, you get to the final fight with Auntie Ethel. Mayrina is trapped in a wood cage over a chasm, which Ethel sets ablaze before turning into multiple copies. Her doubles die after one hit, but they can all sling vile Rays of Sickness or paralyze your party members with Hold Person. It’s easy for the tides to turn quickly in this fight if you don’t dispatch those copies, even if you’re lucky and hit the real Ethel early. Her high armor class challenges you to explore other ways to damage besides direct attack rolls, like spells that blast an area or rebuke abilities that let you hit enemies back. Mayrina’s burning cage also adds a tense secondary challenge to the fight. My first time playing this fight, I saved Mayrina in a pretty convoluted method, by dashing around the arena to the open side, and lashing out a Thorn Whip spell to pull her out. I later realized while replaying how many simpler solutions there were, like just lobbing a water bottle or ray of frost spell up there to douse the flames.

Auntie Ethel’s fight is so fun because of the focus on misdirection, and not just pure terrifying damage numbers, that was implemented here. Along with her invisibility and doppelgangers (which come back if you don’t get her down soon enough, by the way), she’ll also pull an oh so dastardly move if you save Mayrina. Ethel takes on her form while also shifting both of their spots in the arena, leaving you  to determine which one is the hag, and which is the human with only a few hit points. I’ve done this by making wild guesses with an unarmed strike attack, but in another run, I realized that the real Mayrina still had the “Wet” condition after I put out the cage fire with a Create Water spell.

When I cut Ethel down in my first run of the quest in Baldur’s Gate 3, I was expecting praise (and maybe a reward) from Mayrina, but she immediately chewed me out for ruining her deal. It’s an emotional gut punch after such a tough journey to free this stranger, with Mayrina revealing that she was to give her coming baby to the hag so she could resurrect her husband Connor and go back to their old life. It’s a brutal moment, but you hear her pain and desperation as she says the hag would have given her baby a better life than she could ever manage. Mayrina leaves you to loot Ethel’s quarters as she mourns Connor’s corpse out in the bog. There are tons of spoils for you to plunder, but be careful with the rows of potions that have names like “Wilted Dreams” and “Butterflies in the Stomach.” I casually chugged one of them, and later realized I had gotten a permanent -1 to my strength. That one’s on me I suppose.

Auntie Ethel has one final, cruel trick for Mayrina if you talk to her outside with the hag’s wand in your possession. You see how Ethel’s end of the deal would have played out when the wand… sort of revives Connor, as a flesh-rotted zombie and not his former, I assume lovely self. You can either send Mayrina away with the wand, hoping she can find someone in Baldur’s Gate to turn her husband back, kill the zombie, or take the wand for yourself and have a new undead, freshly-single thrall. Not only does this side story do great justice to an incredible being from D&D campaigns and fairy tales with excellent writing of Ethel’s dialogue and a beautifully-uninviting dungeon to explore, it made me feel for her victims that sought out her ancient power to try and right the variety of wrongs in their lives.

My perfect silly objective came when I learned about Goblin Wars, a fascinating enemy mechanic apparently present in Oblivion. While goblins are standard starter enemies like in most fantasy worlds, Bethesda also added basic tribal dynamics to the named goblin tribes you encounter. The player can pillage tribe totems (which are also magical staves) from the tribe camps, which apparently cause parties of goblins to go to its location and try to retrieve it. If you then put a totem in an opposing tribe camp, this can supposedly start a war between the two groups. The idea of stoking a chaotic goblin conflict sounded like great fun and motivated me to boot up a fresh Oblivion save on my PC.

I clicked through the intro dialogue as fast as possible, barely thinking twice when choosing my class and going for a spell caster, which I would regret later. When the chatty Emperor finally stopped talking my ears off about amulets or whatever (due to getting stabbed), I was let loose in Cyrodiil. I got my bearings and made for Skingrad. I had read that you can stumble on two Goblin Wars already in action in Oblivion’s world, with one of them happening at the Derelict Mine. As I approached the first cave, I felt a pang of hope when I saw some goblin corpses in the outside area, but I only found local Sharp Tooth tribe goblins after exploring the dungeon, running into no other clashes already underway.

I came to regret my stat specs because I neglected stealth, which would have made being a fly on the wall in these goblin caves a little easier. I was stumbling through Derelict Mine, thinning their numbers as I had to fight most goblins I encountered. I made it to one of the deepest areas and ended up having a spellcaster duel with a strong goblin shaman. I emerged from the fight bloodied but victorious, but then dread started to creep over me as something tickled my memory. My fears were confirmed when I double-checked the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages (UESP) wiki and saw that killing the shaman effectively pacifies the residing tribe and ends any Goblin Wars happening. Shit.

Well, at least I have a staff to blow things up with, but placing it anywhere would pretty much be useless since the White Skin tribe were now filthy pacifists. I’m more of a Goblin Peacekeeper than a Warlord, besides all the murder I committed. I figured I might as well check out the side quest built around this mechanic, Goblin Trouble, since it revolves around the only other active Goblin War I could access. You get the setup for this quest when you stumble on a group of farmers camping in the forest, who tell you they can’t build their farm because of the warring Rock Biter and Bloody Hand tribes. The combat was so brutal, so vicious, so merciless that they had to turn tail and hide until a brave adventurer could save them.

The farmer’s guide Mirisa explains that you could either retrieve the stolen staff or kill a shaman to end the fighting. She even notes mischievously that you could place the staff elsewhere to cause more chaos after getting payment for ending the fight, making me even more excited to try this stuff out for myself.

I decided to check out the Rock Biter tribe in Timberscar Hollow first, since they were the offending thieves, and hoped to glance at some goblins fighting in the farmland while on the way. But as I crossed the future farm, waiting to view the goblin adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front, it was completely serene and peaceful, no goblin slaughter anywhere in sight. Timberscar Hollow was also pretty mellow with no fighting, and there were just a few patrolling Gobbos well spaced out in the first room. So I managed to pull off a stealth approach even as my clumsy mage. I found a corner to park it in the room outside the shaman’s lair and decided to wait around to see if a Bloody Hand raiding party would arrive to claim their stolen goods. I let the wait timer cycle through some hours quickly and even took an in-game day or two crouching in a dank cave, but the war never came for us.

I got a little impatient here, frustrated that I was just sitting in front of a PC watching the camera slowly rotate around my sitting dark elf character. I wanted to nurture my own homegrown conflict, not piggyback on a preplanned one. Why not have the biggest fight possible? I stole the Bloody Hand and Rock Biter totem staves hidden in Timberscar Hollow, then scampered back south to collect my reward from the farmers. I went with the Three Feather Tribe in the northern mountain area as the site of the Final Fight. I whizzed into the Plundered Mine, trying to leave as many Three Feather soldiers alive as possible and stowing the totem staves in different barrels in the dungeon. With my trap laid, all I had to do was make it out of the mine, kill the one goblin still hounding me down, and wait outside for the inevitable raiding parties to come.

I sat for one day, then let another pass… nothing happened. I ate away more hours with the wait mechanic, and the only goblins that appeared were more Three Feather soldiers to guard the entrance. I just watched their models shuffle back and forth as more days passed my burgeoning hero by. No raiding parties came; no Goblin Wars broke out. Basically, all I’ve succeeded in doing is ending all the combats in progress and nothing else.

After taking a break from this absolute failure of a playthrough, I unfortunately made a horrible discovery on another wiki page. While researching the remaining tribes on the Goblin UESP page, I found this line that I previously missed: “Stealing a goblin tribe’s totem and hiding or placing it somewhere will not start a war though, due to distance restrictions built into the game.” Interesting. This would have been valuable information for the Goblin Wars wiki! Basically, without mods, there’s no way to start your own Goblin War, and I had already undone both of my chances for seeing one in my foolishness.

I’m pretty much waving the white flag here. I know it would be very fun to figure out modding, but that’s not a rabbit hole I’m particularly interested in jumping down at the moment. I think my biggest mistake here was that I tried to play Oblivion too much on Skyrim’s terms and didn’t familiarize myself enough with the game I was actually playing. In Skyrim, there was at least some illusion that NPCs could trek long distances in the map, with some characters jogging to far-away quest markers after agreeing to meet you there. Ultimately, I definitely let myself get prematurely excited over this minor game mechanic that was basically just created for this sidequest and a couple of other encounters.

Even though my set goal was a total failure, I still enjoyed my time wandering around Cyrodiil, foraging plants, and meeting characters in the towns I passed through. Maybe I need to “yes, and” the role-playing prompts I’m getting and make my new goal to become the most nonviolent hippie character I can possibly embody to gain redemption for the goblins I slaughtered for an inane cause. As much as I wanted to discuss the other interesting mechanics in Oblivion that unfold during a Goblin War, this failure became its own story and a unique mark I left on the world.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom has featured a ton of amazing continuations of its incredible characters from the first game, but the best Side Adventure I’ve stumbled upon so far has to be the new series of boss fights against Master Kohga. The Yiga Clan, AKA Link’s eternal haters, are still just as much of a nuisance with roving assassins leaving banana traps and more Yiga bastions around Hyrule than the last game. Despite the Yiga expansion on the surface, Master Kohga has taken residence in the Depths beneath Hyrule, becoming accustomed to it after Link knocked him down there at the end of his Breath of the Wild encounter.

Even though he can teleport like all other Yiga and could leave this harsh, pitch-black environment anytime he wants, Kohga is busy living out a full revenge fantasy in the Depths and forcing his foot soldiers to mine Zonaite to craft weapons. But they’ve been building contraptions much more laboriously, without the convenient powers being the Hero of the Story affords us, leading to some funny scenes where the Yiga master balks at the nifty Autobuild feature you unlock before your first fight, calling it “cheating.”

Master Kohga’s expressive animation as he monologues at Link and poofs around with every other word makes every cutscene delightful. It’s almost criminal that they didn’t give him any voiced scenes when he had some hilarious moments in the spinoff game Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, with a fantastic English dub performance by Erik Braa. But even without the great voiceover, I can’t help but love Kohga’s cheesy dance routine he does every time, as well as the rousing theme that kicks in at the start of every fight.

None of the boss fights are particularly hard, but they’re all creative and goofy and get the wheels in your head spinning about the possibilities of Autobuild as you see him zipping around in different contraptions. I used a lot of homing Keese Eyeball arrows to knock him off his steering stick, but it was fun coming up with alternative solutions when he eventually threw a shield up in front of him for most of these encounters. As someone who spent actual months unable to beat Malenia in Elden Ring last year — and loved it — I still really appreciated these lighter boss fights that just provided brief puzzles to use the amazing new abilities in TotK and whatever tools I happened to be able to throw together. Fighting Kohga in a decked-out glider is certainly a highlight, as the arena is littered with Zonai devices like Rockets and Springs that can give you a fun boost if you came unprepared.

I did end up frustrated in one of these encounters, in the third fight when you face him in an arena of water, though my fight strategy going in wasn’t my strongest of all the runs. I tried to make a complicated flying death plane with swiveling cannon turrets as revenge for his air attacks on me last fight, but mine did pathetically low damage and I wasn’t able to relaunch in any easy way if I wanted to smack him while he was staggered. In all honesty, my failure was sort of inevitable when I could have put the turrets on some sort of boat just as easily, but I don’t find the steering controls of the boats nearly as satisfying as those of land vehicles or the Wing gliders.

The final fight is an absolute cherry on top of this boss rush, however, and Kohga won my heart again with his sick mech construct that hurled spiked orbs at me. I was first running with my tail between my legs trying to get arrow pot shots in, but I soon realized I could knock the mech back with melee strikes. I loved jockeying for space with the mech and trying to get it all the way to the barbed wire arena edge to slam it for some bonus damage.

In TotK, getting to the new dungeons is half the fun. Yet in that same vein, the loop of beating up Kohga so he turns tail and flies away and then getting to map more of the Depths as you track him down for another fight was so fun that I did all of these quests before even touching one of the main dungeons. Following Kohga to several different Abandoned Mines under Hyrule’s surface is a great primer on navigating the Depths, as you’ll start getting a sense of how its geography mirrors the Hyrule map. Once you actually manage to light up the damn place, this cavernous underground area presents unique combat and traversal challenges with tough enemies and unforgiving environments. It always felt good finding a spot to cobble together a glider or car to zip over a huge field of pulsing red Gloom, or the perfect spot in world geometry to Ascend up somewhere super high.

Some of the Abandoned Mines are tucked into harder-to-reach areas of Hyrule’s Depths, flanked by walls that never flatten out and reach all the way to the ceiling. You may flail around a little if you’re just trying to follow a map marker and go the shortest distance Skyrim-style, but there’s always a path of statues leading to the mines and other key Depths locations. There are even hidden chasms you can find on the surface that lead right to a few of these mines, if you’re particularly averse to this new zone. But even if you’re terrified, the goofy encounters absolutely take the edge off the Depths after you’ve seen them all through, and they still leave a ton of the underground map a mystery after you’re all done as well.

After your epic robot cage match, the ending cutscene really is a cherry on top for this goofy Side Adventure. In Tears of the Kingdom, Kohga tries to get the last word on Link with a massive Rocket attack in the cutscene following the final fight, but in Looney Toons-esque fashion, it’s suddenly directed towards him, causing him to be launched off and unwillingly ejected from the Depths. Go take a vacation, Master Kohga — get a tan or something. But if he’s not in whatever future DLC that drops down the road, even if he’s just soaring with dragons in the background, I swear you’ll see me demonstrating at Nintendo HQ.

The expanded questline for Master Kohga in TotK is a justice to a delightful character who was always tied to a less-than-stellar required story quest in Breath of the Wild. The clunky Yiga Clan stealth segment in the original felt totally out of place, with its only upside being it was at least pretty quick to get through once you’ve done it a couple of times. These ridiculous fights and funny cutscenes have permanently solidified the Yiga Clan as The Legend of Zelda’s Team Rocket in my mind, and I hope there’s a way Kohga can live on if they move on from this incarnation of Hyrule in future releases.

It’s totally fine that most other open-world games don’t let you scurry over every single sheer mountainside you come across, but dammit if Breath of the Wild doesn’t make it feel so good to ignore the path and go straight up a cliff. Link can climb up almost any surface as long as he has stamina, he isn’t going upside down, and a rainstorm hasn’t rolled in to ruin my fun. This climbing system activates impulses from my days as a Skyrim goblin, when I would carve idiotic routes up and down mountains that probably wasted more time of my journey by tumbling back down or just getting glitched into the rocks. Even though there were key areas that you couldn’t climb as freely, the much smaller guardrails around traversal in the overworld of BotW was a huge part of why this game sunk its claws into me for so long.

Climbing starts out harder in Breath of the Wild when you have just one stamina wheel, no food, and no other buffs to speak of, but had all I could possibly need and some casts of the incredible Revali’s Gale ability to boot. I was able to make it up the sheer sections of trunk and had gotten Link bulky enough to make it to the Deku Tree’s huge limbs for occasional breathers. When I realized I was getting to the top, I decided to do one Revali’s Gale jump for style, and I was even more delighted by what I saw up there than I even expected to be.

There weren’t any shiny new armor sets, or secret shrines, or the Master Sword 2.0 — just a clearing brimming with plants and one Korok hanging out up here who tells you some riddles for a minor sidequest. I dutifully went and gathered his five requests, starting with an Apple and tripping me up a little bit on the fourth request for a Voltfin Trout. Every time I returned, I happily climbed up the Great Deku Tree again and again and never got tired of it. I didn’t even care about the diamond he gave me at the end; Link was absolutely drowning in rupees at this point, and he was much, much richer for the wholesome childhood experience of climbing a tree.

This little area is one of many countless spots that exemplify the love and care that went into this world. Just seeing the area was reward enough. If there were a blank clearing up there with a chest that had a mechanically better item, I probably wouldn’t have felt as satisfied because of how much less personal and handcrafted it would have felt. Okay, I might have been excited if there was a Master Greatsword in a blank area, but that’s literally the only way.

Climbing in video games is such an important element but can be approached in totally different ways. The free-running and climbing system in the Assassin’s Creed games is a far cry from the Spider-Man game series. Breath of the Wild strikes a fine balance between being shockingly permissive with where you can go and also giving you firm walls in the form of limited stamina you can slowly raise, as well as locations like Shrines and the Divine Beasts where climbing is much less emphasized. Even though Link doesn’t have the infinite mobility of a web-slinger, his items and powers are perfectly suited for the vistas and landscapes of Hyrule, and you learn more about how your Sheikah abilities and other powers can be used for movement as you go.

As much as I love just ascending whatever I laid my eyes on just to see if my stamina could manage it, I also enjoyed how I was able to put my own spin on combat not just by mastering dodge and parry timing, but using the environment and movement to my advantage. Not only is there an obvious advantage in the high ground, especially when you haven’t been spotted, but there are plenty of other great touches like the slow-motion mode you can go into after jumping that lets you bury a hail of arrows in a super unlucky Moblin’s face on the way down. I even discovered more movement mechanics through combat, like the first time I saw a fire arrow land in the grass and cause a swell of wind that I could then ride up with the paraglider.

There are so many more advanced movement options left to try to master. I could train myself to nail the timing of the mind-boggling bomb jumps that speedrunners sometimes use, or try to figure out more of the deep options around launching objects out of the Stasis ability. But even with these complicated techniques, I got the most enjoyment in managing my stamina, wondering if I had enough to make a leap to the next section of flat ground. I became a Rushroom fiend, cooking tons of hasty meals and chuckling at Link’s sped up animations when he’s hauling ass up any peak, no belay in sight. I know there are a million and one awesome features in Tears of the Kingdom to look forward to, but the climbing goblin in me is just so ready to scramble up some new and beautiful structures.

My Extractor was finally starting to gain their footing on the Erlin’s Eye station. Through skill upgrades, I was capable enough as an engineer and cargo hauler to get some decent jobs and more than a couple chits to scrape together to afford delectable fried mushrooms consistently, while also keeping my condition maintained to maximize my daily actions. I had even passed the exciting milestone of finding new lodging for my Sleeper outside of the cold shipping container I crashed on the station in, in the form of the Hypha Commune in the Greenway. But just as I was getting comfortable, the stakes ratcheted back up tenfold as I continued to make connections and explore the station.

I overcommitted my character to two time-sensitive questlines, one involving supplying a ton of materials to refugees quarantined by the order of the higher powers in the station (which is the beginning of its stellar three-episode free DLC), and another helping the mechanic Bliss set up her repair yard in the Hub and do increasingly difficult jobs for different space vessels. Even though I was warned that the DLC quest would be demanding, I still went forward without thinking about how much these commitments would add up when I only had five actions a day, and that’s only if I kept my condition maxed out at no small cost.

Well, I really threw myself into the deep end there. Not only was I tasked with building a huge cache of food, water, and scrap for the refugees, but also implementing risky security breaches to help the ship actually reach them. As I was trying to fulfill these huge resource-gathering requirements, I heard from Bliss’ assistant Moritz that our first contract had failed, and I became wracked with guilt that I was leaving them hanging even if it was for a noble cause. I had my own money tied up in the repair yard and couldn’t just let myself abandon these people and let their clock run out completely either.

Not wanting to fully disappoint either group led to a pretty poor performance for the refugees. I had a great scrap hookup and eventually managed to purify some water as well, but I absolutely flopped on the farming when I forgot to return to harvest the crops I had cultivated. I also only managed to pull off a couple of the security maneuvers, so our allies didn’t have a straight shot to even get the supplies over. I ended up getting an ally, Eshe, arrested but at least successfully got some meager comforts to those that needed them.

I felt like a huge failure going into the second episode of the DLC questline and nearly let the repair bay fall into obscurity before saving it with some final contracts, but I ultimately appreciated the messy situations Citizen Sleeper let me get entangled in. You can feel a little infallible in certain role-playing games, but you can’t really grind your way out of a sticky situation in Citizen Sleeper. You can work slower and more methodically, looking for the optimal place to spend your actions and investing in skills to reroll less useful dice values, but you’ll inevitably be faced with challenges you didn’t build for and have to deal with them with whatever you’ve got.

As you explore more of Citizen Sleeper, you’ll realize that rolling a 1 in this game isn’t as devastating as a critical failure in Dungeons & Dragons, for example. A nuance I came to love in the game’s design was that high d6 dice rolls, which represent the actions you can take every day, aren’t what you always need depending on the system you’re engaging with. While carrying out most ordinary actions, a higher dice value plus your relevant ability modifier will increase the odds of a neutral or positive outcome, but this is flipped on its head when hacking various points in the station’s electrical network. Hacking requires a fixed dice value, with a majority of them being 1s and 2s. Small considerations like this help you not always feel cornered into swallowing negative outcomes.

But even with this capacity for failure always present, I never felt compelled to quit or wished that I could turn back time on a mistake. Life still goes on in the Eye even if you lose out on an experience point here and there for failing a certain Drive. You’re not being graded on an F-through-S scale here, and my bumps in the journey made the playthrough feel even more unique to me. Part of me does wish I hadn’t rushed so much and approached each day more strategically, but I liked exploring the character tensions that bubbled up while trudging on in a quest after this pretty major failure, bolstered by the excellent writing at pretty much every moment in the game.

Towing such a fine line between the stresses and pressures of the bleak capitalist system you have to survive in and other moments of comfort and connection with this world made Citizen Sleeper feel like one of the most genuine life sims I’ve ever played. Even though I did need rewards and money to get by, I still felt compelled by my favorite character’s Drives even when I wasn’t sure they’d have much to offer me in return, just so I could have more chances to engage with them. With the release of yet another DLC episode at the end of March, there’s no better time to immerse yourself in this incredible game if you haven’t yet.

Clicking the left stick with the map out will circle your approximate area, and Tchia calls out the closest named landmark by you in dialogue. There have already been tons of moments where I’ve overshot my destination, sometimes by a cartoonishly huge margin given how much distance you can cross by soul-jumping into a bird and just zooming up a mountain or across stretches of coast. Hell, even just turning into a rock or coconut lets you bounce along the landscape at a pretty brisk pace. You can actually bounce along the ocean water as a coconut too. There isn’t a greater point to mentioning that; it’s just really fun.

There are a lot of ways that frequently getting turned around in a game could be frustrating, but Tchia’s navigation complements its rich setting, inspired by the archipelago of New Caledonia. I didn’t feel the need to always have the compass on because I noticed organic waypoints incorporated in the world design, like the smoke of campfire checkpoints that peeked above the treeline. The map also does a great job of showing paths and shifts in the terrain, so it’s genuinely useful to look at even when you aren’t being spoonfed your exact GPS coordinates.

Along with story objectives and your custom pinpoint showing up on your compass, you also slowly unlock fast travel via the boat docks, which lets you warp your boat to your location if you left it behind by turning into a bug for a bit. It’s great to have these conveniences partially available, but it just feels so good to walk and sail around that you don’t want to fast-travel as much anyway. It was nice to be able to zero in on a valuable item that was marked on my map when I wanted the option, but I truly appreciated how I felt encouraged and empowered enough as my character to not always use them.

Some of my favorite missions revolve around a treasure map you get from the NPC Gaby, since they all involve fun exploration puzzles that add little wrinkles and challenges as you get new directions from every chest you find. I even got a reward for my aimless wandering when I noticed a treasure chest in an unusual sinkhole area before I had unlocked this questline, and then I had a natural eureka moment when I saw the same area drawn on the treasure map.

I didn’t even care what was in the treasure chests; I just loved hunting them down. Some new outfits? Sure! A flag for your ship? Great! There’s an unlockable ukulele ability nearby? Awesome! The treasure maps were enough motivation to keep me climbing around and exploring every nook and cranny of the game’s many islands, but I wasn’t so focused on the rewards locked in the chest that I got frustrated when I was turned around. I took them on at my own pace.

The relative lack of danger in the world may also have helped with smoothing the edges of getting lost. You’re not going to stumble into an area with overleveled enemies that wash you away, and getting knocked out isn’t much of an impediment to progress unless your last-visited campfire was a long ways away. I still enjoyed taking on the game’s approach to enemy camps, populated by the hostile cloth creatures called Maano who are animated by Meavora. But I appreciated that combat was slightly de-emphasized here in favor of charting the island, collecting, and of course the excellent movement.

Having a more hands-off or obscure map system doesn’t work for every game, but it’s great to see some exploration titles like Tchia break off from the AAA default of overloading their huge maps with icons. Survival games like Subnautica and The Long Dark also revel in getting you completely lost as you’re starting out. You have to actually draw your map yourself in The Long Dark, with the amount of area you can draw limited by the light and visibility as you try to scribble landmarks on paper with scavenged coal. Subnautica has hardly any mapping functions at all besides the compass and Scanner Room, so you simply have to gain an understanding of Planet 4546B by seeing everything. These games are stressful as hell, though, so it’s great to have a much cozier world to get turned around in.

Some may bounce off of this game because they need a more complex combat system or a slightly bigger variety of items to discover beyond cosmetics, but I think Tchia really proves how far a game can go when it crafts a compelling world and nails the fundamentals of how to get around it. I guess this means I should be seeking out more cozy open exploration games, and I’d be more than happy to keep seeing designers use beautiful places from their upbringings to craft unique open worlds.

When choosing a game to try to speedrun myself, I knew I needed to go to one where I have tons of playtime already amassed. I’ve seen some absolutely insane speedruns in Dark Souls, with the current record being just above 19 minutes for the Remastered version. And even though the world of Dark Souls is practically withering into dust around you and not exactly friendly, I’ve played it so much that every location makes me feel sentimentally warm and fuzzy, even the laggy and poison-clogged Blighttown.

Here’s how the game broadly plays out for your character, the Chosen Undead. You’re broken out of the Undead Asylum and given the mission to ring two Bells, one atop a parish and another deep underground. Ringing the bells earns you a ticket to fight through Sen’s Fortress and a flight via weird naked bat demons to the City of the Gods: Anor Londo. You have to beat the infamous duo boss, Ornstein and Smough, to plunder the Lordvessel, and all that stands between you and the final boss are four Lords in remote corners of the world who unfortunately need to be separated from their souls.

Once you slay these titans set up from opening cutscenes, you offer their souls to the Lordvessel to access the Kiln of the First Flame and battle Gwyn, Lord of Cinder, who can provide a stiff challenge for even seasoned players with his high damage and relentless speed. If you can parry his flaming sword enough times to take him down, you’re left with the choice to kindle the first flame with your body, which keeps the hollowing cycle of undeath in this world going, or let the flame go out and begin the age of dark. So basically, I have to do all of that and other things I glossed over really, really quickly.

There are a few tools I can use to shave off seconds here and minutes there in a Dark Souls speedrun. Even without glitches, the snaking paths around the game world have several natural shortcuts if you’re savvy, so I planned to start as the Thief, which is granted the Master Key item that opens an invaluable path down to the second bell. I also wanted to try to break the game as well, so I found guides for a soul duplication glitch, which would eliminate the need for grinding to level up, and the infamous wrong warp that skips the need to kill any of the Four Lords at all.

As I began my first run, I managed to kill the Asylum Demon boss with fire bombs, and it was mostly smooth sailing on my way to the first bell. I got more thrown off by standard Hollow enemies than the actual bosses in these first areas, since I was running through recklessly and forgot how far their jump attacks can track you sometimes. I died more to the group of Hollows in the Undead Parish than I did to the Gargoyles they were protecting. The most important part of the beginning area was the Undead Merchant, where I bought 999 wooden arrows and managed to successfully reproduce the soul duplication glitch, bringing my Strength up above 30 before I had fought a single boss. As far as a weapon was concerned, I sprinted to the base of the Darkroot Basin to try to grab the speedrunner’s classic Black Knight Halberd, but I had to roll with a Battle Axe and massive Demon’s Great Hammer after I got unlucky and the defeated knight didn’t drop it.

The Master Key made it easy to get to the boss guarding the second bell, Chaos Witch Quelaag, but I slipped up on this fight a few times because I had no items to heal the poison from Blighttown’s base. Even though I’ve died endlessly getting through Sen’s Fortress and Anor Londo areas in casual playthroughs, my first run was very lucky with navigating the treacherous environments and taking both the Iron Golem and Ornstein and Smough down in my first tries. I also stopped by the Giant Blacksmith to upgrade my new Silver Knight Straight Sword and buy the Giant’s Halberd with some black market duplicated souls. While I was having so much fun getting through Anor Londo quickly, I did have a pang of sadness not seeing the iconic NPC Solaire sitting cross-legged by a certain bonfire in the city, since I ignored his questline to save time.

With the Lordvessel in my possession, I bought the spells needed to try to force a warp glitch through the sealed door in Firelink Altar. Unfortunately, all I really managed to do was flail around for almost two hours with no warping to be seen. I had to decide if I wanted to dedicate the rest of this lost run to trying to nail this warp timing, but I realized I would have more fun just running a marathon through all the insane late-game areas Dark Souls has to offer. I cartwheeled through the Catacombs to kill Gravelord Nito in more attempts than I would prefer, traversed the Abyss below New Londo to take on the Four Kings. (Yes they’re Four Kings, but One Lord… try to keep up.) I even beat the frustrating Bed of Chaos fight on my first try and plundered the final Lord Soul from the Draconic nudist Seath the Scaleless after getting slightly turned around in the crystal-ridden Duke’s Archives.

Then came the Gwyn fight, and I died, so many times. I’ve parried this guy so confidently in so many final fights before this one, but I got so flustered and just couldn’t hang at all. I finally took him out after sleeping on it and ended my Dark Souls speedrun at six-and-a-half hours of in-game time… but I knew I could do it faster. I wanted to have a clean run that didn’t include time wasted on a failed glitch. So I started a fresh character and went right back to square one.

Armed with better knowledge of item pickups and a more solid route, I dove back into my next attempt. My times in the Undead Burg and Parish areas were great, and I duplicated souls at the merchant enough to wield a Falchion and defeat the Gargoyles. I decided to try for the Black Knight Halberd again, this time duplicating a Humanity item to up the drop chance. Even though I was bested in a duel by the Darkroot Basin Black Knight once, I went back and finally got the Halberd on the second try! This weapon makes pretty much every boss look like a chump, especially with the unnaturally high stats and currency I’m working with.

But even though this run had tons of blessings from RNGesus, it was full of silly mistakes by me, and prior good luck moments I had counted on last time didn’t work out the same way at all. In delicate vertical areas I had initially soared through, I tumbled off the ledges multiple times or got halted by minor enemies that could stop me in my tracks due to my low Poise stat. I lost tons of time early in the game on several failed attempts to weave through the Valley of Drakes to get the Red Tearstone Ring, which I then hardly ever took full advantage of. Even with the setbacks, I managed to beat Ornstein and Smough 40 minutes earlier than in my first run. The Lords went smoothly besides absolute idiocy on my part in the Bed of Chaos encounter, dying several times by plummeting into pits that open up in the arena and getting beaten down by her sweeping attacks.

I made my way back to the Kiln, the weight of past runs and deaths on my back, knowing I could get it down to under four, maybe even under three hours. I wouldn’t dare check the clock, I just had to get in there and win, and… well, I did win eventually! Look, even with the extra range and power of my Halberd, I need even more hours of training just in this fight before I could truly feel comfortable to pull it off consistently. Gwyn has just enough combos to be able to fake you out and keep you terrified, and he shredded through my juiced-up health bar with little issue.

I finally took him down just as my in-game timer crossed the three-hour mark. I brought my record time down by over three hours, which was such an incredible feeling, but I can’t deny that my eyeball twitched a little bit when I saw I was only half a minute away from the sub-three milestone. Even with that bother, I came out of this extremely proud of myself, and I see why people fall in love with the process of combing through these games and devising strategies for taking them apart. I won’t be shattering speedrun world records anytime, but it felt great to channel the love I’ve built up for Dark Souls over so many years into a totally new goal.

Prey, the 2017 game from Arkane Studios, has been burning a hole in my backlog for a year since I first picked it up, and I finally cracked it open. I got completely immersed in its world and systems, already thinking about a second playthrough build and story path before my first one is even done. There are tons of great stories you can uncover as you delve deeper into Talos I, but one that shook me out of my gamer autopilot was when I first encountered the “chef” in the Crew Quarters.

Although I had seen all manner of twisted alien Phantoms and even encountered the Nightmare already in Prey, this balding NPC, who introduces himself as Will Mitchell, exuded pretty bad vibes from the beginning. I figured I would still hear him out since he may have some goodies to offer, and I was trying to spare crew members when I could. I’m not saying everyone with a stern resting face and a Slavic accent is automatically sketchy, but the performance by the Ukrainian actor Ilia Volok does a great job of seeming pretty off, yet just barely welcoming enough to not write the request off completely. But who knows? Our protagonist Morgan Yu has had their memory wiped more than a couple of times, and sometimes chefs are just a little tortured.

The chef doesn’t let you into the kitchen at first and demands you go to his room to pick up a cooking award, as well as kill a mind-controlling enemy nearby in the area that doesn’t seem to affect him. The crew quarters is a fantastic zone to explore. It’s filled with freaky new enemies like the Poltergeist and some great voice logs that I was initially compelled to grab because of main story objectives but ended up seeking out more from genuine interest. These stellar TranScribe performances by the voice actors gave background on certain characters in the crew quarters, like discussion of some crew playing a campaign in a tabletop RPG, Fatal Fortress 2, and an on-and-off relationship between crew members Danielle Sho (voiced by Mae Whitman) and Abigail Foy.

If you linger in Mitchell’s cabin beyond finding the clearly placed trophy, you’ll realize that your quest-giver is actually masquerading as the chef due to a voice memo revealing the chef’s true voice. Even realizing this, I boneheadedly figured I may get a reward if I go along with the quest anyway. Well, that didn’t work out for me. I even fell for the oldest trick in the book: He told me my equipment was in the next room, then locked me in a freezer to die. I even spent Spare Parts to repair the damn thing. While scrambling around in a panic as the imposter chef taunted me, I also found the frozen corpse of Abigail Foy, made more tragic by the context I knew from the voice memos. I managed to slip out of a vent with the incredible Mimic Matter ability, alive but thoroughly embarrassed that I got caught in the trap. Digging around the kitchen reveals the true Will Mitchell’s remains in the refrigerator, in a box unfortunately labeled “Mystery Meat.”

Now that he’s at large in the station, the imposter chef occasionally calls you with creepy and cryptic threats, but a station lockdown in the main questline prevented me from being able to get to him immediately. You’re tasked with taking him out by Danielle, who is stranded with low oxygen in zero gravity outside the station in a brief but memorable exchange.

The imposter chef quest weaves interestingly together with the main story because Danielle’s voice samples are needed to access the Deep Storage area of the station, which houses an important early-game sequence and initiates the station lockdown when you get there. While I was delving into Deep Storage and learning more about the story, I still had the chef in the back of my mind, looking forward to when I could roam about Talos I freely and hunt him down. You can also ignore this quest entirely if you get to the Fitness Center before the Cafeteria and get the voice code directly from Danielle instead of cobbling together TranScribes.

The chef’s true name is Luka Golubkin, a Russian murderer who chose to volunteer for the TranStar corporation instead of remaining in a gulag and became a test subject for Alex and Morgan Yu’s pre-amnesia experiments aboard the spacecraft. Parts of the experiments showed that he was resistant to alien mind manipulation, and the Neuromods forcibly installed in his mind for the tests were trying to give him Mitchell’s culinary skills. So I actually ended up as the target of someone else’s revenge quest and was played by the game like a fiddle because I was just hoping to mark another RPG task off the checklist.

I was spurned by the chef as a player and wanted comeuppance, but learning that Golubkin was turned into a guinea pig by Morgan and Alex Yu’s experiments colored his actions in a different light. Yes, he was likely a violent criminal before being tested on, but he was only on this station and able to do these awful things in the first place because of what the Yu siblings set in motion.

Even though I was conflicted, the idea of bashing him to bits with a wrench still sounded appealing. I activated his tracking bracelet from a security console and finally met him again in an escape pod on the bridge. Once again, though, I was a complete fool and walked into his trap, activating a recycler charge as I sprinted inside. But I was saved from an embarrassing retry thanks to a suit mod that saves me from an instance of lethal damage, leaving me with one point of health surrounded by scattered cubes of organic material where Luka once sat. I may have basically stepped on every rake laid out during this entire questline, but I still love The Cook’s Request for how much it consistently humbled me while I was gaining power and knowledge in this world.

But even in these more throwaway quests, you may find a new option that you never expected, like an invincible dog companion. One fetch quest that is made infinitely more memorable by the writing of your NPC companion is “A Daedra’s Best Friend,” where you run into a talking dog named Barbas that inexplicably sounds like he’s been isekaied into Skyrim from somewhere in Queens. In the typical structure of the quest, you help Barbas get back into the good graces of his master, the Daedric prince Clavicus Vile, and can then choose to either kill Barbas for the Rueful Axe you retrieved or spare him to get a pretty sweet masque.

It may end with a pretty standard moral choice, but that doesn’t mean you can’t add extra dimensions to the quest yourself. When I was playing through Skyrim on Switch this year, it finally occurred to me that there actually was a third option here: I could leave the quest unfinished and have Barbas follow me around forever! Obviously I’m not the first player to discover this exploit by a long shot, but it was still mind-boggling to take a quest I have thoughtlessly completed countless times in a new direction.

So after I got a mission from Clavicus Vile, Barbas and I never went to get the axe; only chumps play two-handed anyway. I took my dog with me to apply to wizard college in Winterhold, got him stuck on level geometry while cutting deranged paths through cliffs and mountains to get to my objective, and had him hold onto my car keys when I did a drinking contest with Sam Guevenne.

There are definitely tougher companions out there. Barbas doesn’t dish out a lot of damage at all, but he’s got one absolutely killer ability, which is titanium-grade plot armor. Most companions will take splash damage from your spells and melee strikes and start limping around uselessly once drained of their health. You can throw Barbas into a Giant Camp or toss fireballs at him all day long and he’ll stay standing through it all.

Having an invulnerable pooch in Barbas was also an interesting wrinkle to put in Skyrim combat as it scales in difficulty, because he would draw attention away from me when I needed to heal or just felt like staying back and chucking out blizzards. I needed this more and more as enemies eventually increased in power, and I had more fun being able to pace out battles with Barbas than I did going solo or with more frail companions.

Some points in Conjuration puts even more allies on the battlefield, but certain items can make that unnecessary. I had one great fight against a tanky Draugr Deathlord by blocking him with Barbas and then summoning a Dremora on its other side with the Sanguine Rose staff I had just received, hardly taking any damage myself.

There is some friction along my chosen path, though. Barbas will basically take a vow of silence for as long as you have him, losing part of the charm that made the quest great in the first place. Your only dialogue options with Barbas are to discuss the history of the axe you’re seeking or to tell him to get lost. He also barks pretty frequently, which can be disruptive if you prefer to soak in ambient music or hear the town guards roast you in real time.

Barbas is absolute kryptonite to the popular stealth archer play style as well. He won’t go into stealth and follow your lead when you crouch, because his AI as a quest sidekick differs from that of normal companions. He also follows very close behind you, getting you stuck in tight corridors and other areas even more than humanoid allies do. Pretty much anything rogue-related is out the window with Barbas in your party, since he is a bit of a narc and you will incur a bounty if he sees you stealing — an odd trait for an evil Daedra.

I’m not touching a bow in this run, so at least the stealth flaw isn’t too painful. But I began to imagine Barbas’ silence not as a questing dead end, but as subtle punishment against me for not returning him to full power by the side of his true Daedric master. I would probably be pissed too if I were an immortal hound who punishes mortals for their greed with twisted deals, reduced to a follower of some idiot Spellsword running around smashing mudcrabs and chasing butterflies.

Even with this weighing on my mind, I’m too used to having Barbas with me to give him up yet. He’s even accompanied me on a huge rite of passage for any Skyrim character: my dark elf’s first trek into the cavernous underground city area, Blackreach. Hopefully he’ll find meaning in his new life by munching on some giant glowing mushrooms to try to trip or beating up some Falmer.

This experience with Barbas definitely epitomized the sandbox nature of Skyrim for me. As good as some plots and characters are, it really clicks in when you’ve become motivated by your own goals and stories as a player or the character you’re portraying. Maybe that’s why modders are still creating for this world, and entire game concepts have even been conceived within the framework of this one game. I don’t see myself growing out of playing around in Skyrim’s sandbox anytime soon.

We may talk about hidden items, cool areas, or lesser-known characters you have to dig for, as well as the emergent situations and player-created stories that can form your best gaming memories. Check out this column if you want to learn about the history of Huge Blue Greatswords in the Souls franchise, how The Witcher 3 contracts blend an action RPG with Law & Order episodes, or the best companion in Skyrim… the talking dog Barbas.

This article contains spoilers for the Ranni the Witch questline in Elden Ring and for developments that occur after defeating Radahn.

Ever since I first ran a Faith/Strength Build in Demon’s Souls on PlayStation 3, I always start my first playthrough of a Souls game in that way if given a chance. In Elden Ring, my Faith run was blessed with more incantations than ever, far beyond the days of just having Heal, Lightning Spear, and a few weapon buffs. I ended up choosing the Lord of the Frenzied Flame ending, in honor of my reliance on sinful incantations like Frenzied Burst for some key boss fights.

Learning more about just some of the lore and characters around the huge variety of sorceries in the game, along with incredible new space-themed weapons and Ashes of War, flipped my second playthrough on its head. I knew the sorcerers had some cool crowns, but moving beyond the starter Glintstone line of sorceries into a Gravity magic build reinvigorated my interest in Elden Ring after over 100 hours played in my first run.

Ever since the original Large Sword of Moonlight, which was hilariously hidden in a giant hanging mass of slugs in the worst poison swamp level in Demon’s Souls, most Souls games have had a staple huge blue greatsword in their extensive weapon lists. The original actually scaled with Faith but is more often now a go-to if you’re playing a particularly buff mage build as most scaled from intelligence afterward. An appeal of these games is that you’re pitted against incomprehensibly powerful titans of these game worlds, and creatures like the Moon Presence in Bloodborne made the cosmic horror even more literally cosmic.

With Elden Ring, FromSoftware explored its fascination with the outer reaches of space even more, creating mesmerizing new creature encounters with massive aliens and the slender and mysterious Alabaster Lords that’ll wallop you with a greatsword and Gravity sorceries if you aren’t prepared. There are also great lore details about the impact of Gravity magic and the influence of the Void on certain characters. Players can learn from his Remembrance that the formidable demigod Starscourge Radahn only mastered Gravity magic so he could still ride his childhood horse, Leonard, into battle.

The Moonlight Greatsword equivalent in Elden Ring is a reward for completing Ranni the Witch’s questline, which would be worth playing out even if you didn’t get a sweet weapon at the end. While I can’t say I would’ve been able to complete this without a couple of guide checks, I loved learning more about Ranni’s past relationships with other demigods and the lengths she took to spurn her fate assigned by the Two Fingers, including potentially being involved in Godwyn’s assassination and the resulting proliferation of Death Blight in the world. Her Age of Stars ending provides a beautiful image of a full moon and is very popular among players, but there’s also some interesting ambiguity and a bit of a more sinister, dark side to the moon if you look more deeply.

When I began as an Astrologer, a guide advised that I grab the Meteorite Staff ASAP, and I could get to it faster than just riding Torrent by opening the now-infamous trap teleportation chest in Limgrave. I was one of many Tarnished who accidentally warped to the Sellia Crystal Tunnel before knowing about the trap, with that being my first introduction to the rot-infested region of Caelid. Sellia Crystal Tunnel and the nearby areas will set brave mages up for a pretty breezy early game if they can quick-roll around some powerful enemies.

Players that ransack Caelid early, and explore the Lands Between thoroughly in general, won’t have to interact with Ranni at all to access a ton of sweet space weapons. You can snag the powerful Moonveil Katana if you’re able to beat a pretty powerful boss in Caelid’s Gael Tunnel. Magic-only players will be well-served by the area too, with the Gravity spell Rock Sling, which hits enemies for physical damage and is great for staggering bosses. Sellia, Town of Sorcery also provides different spells and staves if you decide to focus on other schools of sorcery.

Even if you’ve got zero points invested in intelligence, there are a ton of ways to become a proficient battlemage through Ashes of War, like the Gravitas skill you can find close to the game’s start. It truly is worth the intimidating runes investment to see all the magic options, though. Being able to chuck warbling starry galaxies and entire moons at enemies feels particularly badass in a game full to bursting with cool combat choices.

Magic has always been mechanically powerful in the Souls canon and the arenas of PvP combat. In the narrative, sorcery was often appropriately connected with characters that lost themselves in search of too much power or knowledge. These themes and character types aren’t abandoned in Elden Ring at all, but with stories like the sweet detail about Radahn and his horse, we also see more nuance with how magic in the Lands Between was used for more than just cold, ambitious climbs to power.

Some of the greatest set pieces in this game brought the void of space to the forefront. From discovering the starry ceilings adorning the Eternal City areas, to tracking down the crater of the falling star that crashes after you kill Radahn, it was great to see the cosmic influences more directly woven into visuals and narrative beats, as well as the expanded astrological armory. But as any FromSoftware fan knows, the weapons and spells themselves also tell their own story. I got much of the information I shared for this column in the descriptions of particular items, and I wouldn’t have it any other way in these games. I love knowing that each RPG build I go down will organically show me stories of those who might have walked similar paths before.