janusz_gg reviewed Elden Ring

I want to be careful here because a B from me is not a dismissal. The first twenty hours of this game are close to the best twenty hours of anything in the last decade.

The problem is the other eighty. Somewhere around Altus the game stops introducing ideas and starts reusing them, and it does it at a volume that's hard to ignore once you've seen it. The same catacomb layout. The same Erdtree Avatar. Three separate dragons that fight identically. I counted eight reused bosses before I stopped counting, and that's before the Consecrated Snowfield, which feels like it was assembled rather than designed.

Performance is the other half. A 5. Shader compilation stutter on a 3080 two years after release is not a small thing and the reviews that waved it through did readers no favours.

Great game. Not a flawless one, and I think the discourse around it has been allergic to saying so.