This piece contains spoilers for a few Elden Ring bosses.
For the first few hours of Elden Ring, I was miserable. I’d embarked on my journey into the Lands Between with a preconceived notion in my head: that I would be a serious swordswoman, sticking to the straight and narrow with my fighting style. I would use my powers of dodging, rolling and occasionally landing a hit to grind down my enemies’ health bars. Nothing fancy, just good old-fashioned, no-nonsense melee combat. That’s the way you’re supposed to play a Souls game, right?
After repeatedly butting my head against the game’s first few bosses, I began to despair. My sword-and-shield combination wasn’t getting me anywhere, and it felt like I’d never walk through the gates of Stormveil Castle. As a hardened Sekiro player, this felt like some sort of personal failing. I trudged out into the wilderness, in search of something, anything, that could turn my fortunes around. And I did, with the help of a rather unexpected item. I found a whip.
I’d never intended to play Elden Ring as medieval Indiana Jones, but after discovering that the whip could stun enemies, it quickly became an essential part of my toolkit. Groups of enemies were no longer a problem, with a simple crack of the whip keeping them all at bay. Boss enemies, at long last, began to fall before me. Leonine Misbegotten, previously a near-impossible fight, became a cakewalk when I summoned three wolves and effectively stun-locked the boss with my whip. Emboldened by my victories, I started messing around with new techniques in other battles. I decimated Tibia Mariner with some ridiculously aggressive horse-riding, circling and slicing the poor boatman to the point where I wondered if I’d broken the game. It felt absurd. It felt almost like I was cheating.
In many ways, this is one of the defining feelings of playing a FromSoftware game, and it’s particularly noticeable in Elden Ring. Feeling like you’ve gotten one over on the game’s designers – that you’ve somehow found a secret way to break the combat system – is one of the game’s great joys. Yet look more closely, and you’ll realise that FromSoftware actually gave you all the required tools to “cheese” a boss fight, and you start to question whether you’ve actually cheesed anything at all. Did you exploit a flaw in the game design? Or did you go down a route FromSoftware deliberately left open to those who experimented and used their heads?
Clearly, I’m not alone in feeling this strange mixture of glee and guilt. The Elden Ring subreddit is full of players who feel a little sheepish about how they’ve managed to defeat enemies. Some have admitted to using the jellyfish spirit summon in every boss battle as a tank. One player, rather ingeniously, managed to get a miniboss stuck on a lift – and I’ve seen another who dragged an enemy into some poisonous plants. Others, meanwhile, merely side-quested and overleveled to the point where they could overwhelm Margit with magic even while taking heavy hits.