I’ve finally played a soulslike again in what must have been months! Gotten the itch to play a little Elden Ring again - partially because seamless co-op looks to be fun and I’d like to get back into the game before participating in some jolly cooperation (you know who you are 🤗) and also because my fiancée really enjoys watching me play the game a lot, and it’s a bit of a disservice to her that I’m so vehemently against playing the game again. At its core, it’s objectively a good game and the DLC is also really good. Might as well finish that and then I can lay it to rest for a while, I think.
Turns out, Messmer isn’t the only thing for us to do right now, so we looked up a couple locations of Scadutree fragments and found that an entire section of the map was gated behind the tiniest of caves tucked in the bottom-right corner of the map. After dispatching the Ancient Dragon-Man and wiping out the entire dragon population of the map in epic duels, we fought Senessax who proved to be a bit more of a challenge than first anticipated. I used the sword that the Dragon-Man dropped upgraded to +10 for some really good damage to the head (like 3k, NG) and with some good positioning, I got the W eventually. We’re on our way to hunt Moby Dick now. :]
For me, it would probably be a toss-up between Bloodborne, Sekiro, and Lies of P. I’ve played all of them for roughly the same amount of time and have finished numerous playthroughs in all of them. The initial confusion I felt when I first played these games in terms of where to go, when and why is mostly gone except for some minor hiccups here and there for some obscure part of a quest or map where I usually just rush through. Sekiro helps here with the traversal to streamline rushing through the game somewhat, but I sometimes forget where I need to go after I defeat Genichiro and have 3 different paths to pursue for different items needed to progress the story.
How about you? :)
Jesus, I was not prepared for that animation when the player character got caught by the axe in the Withering Realms trailer
I’m not usually one for roguelikes, with some rare exceptions. How important would you say that playing Rooms is for the story?
Can’t speak for the sequel but you should 100% play rooms!
It’s absolutely critical, I would say. Realms is a direct continuation, and despite what the Steam page says I would say you would be very confused by Realms without having played Rooms. At least if you care about story and lore. There are already tons of direct continuations from Rooms and the whole setting is built on top of what Rooms established.
Rooms isn’t a very traditional roguelike, though. It’s its own unique thing. And even it takes a lot of queues from Fromsoft. I think you’ll be just fine with it even if you don’t usually enjoy roguelikes. There is much more continuous progress in Rooms, it isn’t “run-based” necessarily. Much like a Souls game or something you constantly keep moving forward in the story, it’s just that you lose all your items when you die (apart from a select few you can “remember”). But even that very quickly becomes a non-issue as you get a very generous amount of remembrance slots quite quickly.
Honestly it’s just a great game, you’ll like it. Lore and world building is amazing too.