Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree

Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree - a visually resplendent living text made less alive. Much of Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree is more of the same gruelling beauty - but a shift to explicit storytelling and signposting means its essence as a living, evolving shared text is lost. My first steps into the Shadow Realm are with bare feet and an empty head. After reaching out to Mohg's crusty egg, I materialise in a vast, rolling field dotted with ruins. In the distance is a dimmed, sickly twin ...

From Software's expansion for Elden Ring offers an entire new game's worth of content, all of which is exceptionally executed. Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree is From Software's victory lap, an unmissable tour de force that is every bit as brilliant as the original game. Late into Shadow of the Erdtree, Elden Ring's first and only DLC, I encountered something I'd never seen before in a From Software game. Nestled in a far corner of the Land of Shadow was a village untouched by the death, deva...

FromSoftware says Shadow of the Erdtree is the only expansion Elden Ring will get, so it's fortunate that it's hard to imagine a better DLC than this -- as long as you're not hoping for it to do anything radically outside the box. Everything I loved about the original has been condensed into an incredibly tight package -- one that's the size of many standalone games all on its own, and can only be considered "small" in comparison to the absolutely massive world of Elden Ring itself. When I gave...

A masterfully designed expansion to one of the best action RPGs of the last decade that not only complements the base game but expands its thematic and systemic scope even further. Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree is a staggering expansion, not only for its massive size—it's about as big as half of the original map—but for all the ways it challenges the assumptions I had about the nature of its world, coming from the main campaign, and the limits of an open world narrative. SotE rivals Dark S...