As of this writing, it’s not been terribly long since From Software dropped what is probably the largest single DLC ever made, stapling what amounts to an entire second game onto Elden Ring, and fans have been screaming (of joy, of rage, of jubilation, of agony). There’s so much to dive into and talk about with Shadow Of The Erdtree, but today we’re just fixating on one thing that really struck me in a special way.
This concerns one area in particular, and how everything about From’s world design comes together to create a masterpiece of unsettlement and tension.
To get there, you need to put in work, following very organic-feeling breadcrumbs laid out for you. You feel like you’re just exploring, finding new things off the beaten path. After you’ve gone through the illusory wall in the Shadow Keep’s underbelly and taken a coffin ride down a waterfall, you end up in the Ruins of Unte, a scorched former village thick with destroyed (and not-so-destroyed) furnace golems, telling more of the ongoing tale of cruel genocide in the wake of Messmer’s armies. You ride through the ruins, to the other side where you’re faced with another waterfall, but with a rocky outcropping that you can take to continue moving forward.
To continue along this path, you need to traverse, platform and maneuver down several more waterfalls. (The part where you’re confronted with another one of those Torrent-platforming sections down a high wall with the sideways gravestones might make some players instantly think, ‘nah, I don’t need to do this, there’s gotta be other stuff.’) You can fight some hippos and earn some scadutree fragments, the prevailing currency of the realm when it comes to palpable stat upgrades; you can explore a new Catacomb called Darklight, because the Realm of Shadow clearly has a handful of HIM fans; the Catacomb itself is quite lengthy and involved, but eventually you reach the boss, Jori, Elder Inquisitor.
If you notice as you fight the boss, this is not the usual closed-in boss room you expect in Catacombs. Once you put paid to Jori, the back fog wall opens up.
Instead of the Catacomb just ending, as they do, you keep going through the threshold that Jori was guarding, and you walk out into a deep, ominous forest.
That is when it might occur to you that you still don’t have the map for this part of the explorable world. That is by design; you obtain that deeper into the Woods. You can’t have it yet.
For my part, I hopped on Torrent after beating Jori, entered the Woods, then the loudest BOOM I’d ever heard from this game sounded and he vanished out from under me. Scared the shit out of me.
You go a little farther and even if you’re playing offline, you start to see messages on the ground, imploring you to turn back, to take your leave while you still can.
Go to the east and you can pick up the map. It doesn’t help much.
But press on westerly, and you keep getting these sorts of messages (from the game itself, not other players). One message tells you, “Once you are seen, there is no escape.” The messages tell you in no uncertain terms that fighting is useless, that you simply must not be seen if you are fool enough to persist deeper into this forsaken place.
This is an actual stealth section in a Soulsborne game. Souls players being Souls players, you’ll probably try to fight these things at first regardless of what the messages are saying.
While the messages about being unable to fight these foes are their way of informing you in no uncertain terms that we have a slight gameplay shift afoot here, I found something bigger to be happening here.
This entire leadup to the Abyssal Woods, and the Woods themselves, are brilliantly designed and curated to instill in the player a sense of absolute dread and unease. Just to even get to the Woods, you need to travel well off from the quote-unquote ‘right way’, descending and progressing through dingy regions that are blocked off from view on the world map by the stuff geographically above them, and then there’s everything that happens once you get here. The only way they could have driven home the sense of discombobulation and discomfort more is if they’d disallowed you from fast-traveling out, though I’m kind of glad they didn’t do that because when it comes to the game as interface between player and fantasy, there can be a thin line between knocking you off your axis while maintaining immersion, and knocking you out of immersion by straight-up annoying you. On that note, the developer messages on the ground here also run the risk of breaking immersion, but I think it pulled off; they feel less like developer messages, and more like in-universe warning signs that someone scrawled for wayward travelers, much like that message before your first Headless fight in Sekiro. If you know, you know.
Torrent being too frightened to venture inwards makes you wonder what the hell could be waiting for you inside (lore-wise, it’s because we learn in Shadow that the frenzied flame is one of the very few things that can destroy spirits, which in itself has numerous morbid implications: are the Frenzy-afflicted actively burning off their souls to wield its power?), but mechanically there’s a sense of vulnerability the Woods gives you from not having him. There’s a lot of open space in the Woods, such that riding Torrent through here would feel totally natural. Conversely, not being able to ride him feels uncomfortable. You’re constantly thinking there will be threats around every corner, but the negative empty space throughout much of the Woods only contributes to the dread.
And that stealth section really is the only section of its kind, but once you’re through it, the fact that it happened means to a first-time player that it could happen again, or something like it, something else that could knock you off your guard.
In short, the seemingly unassuming Darklight Catacombs back there led you into a horror game.
It’s so incredibly cool to see From taking advantage of the whole concept of the frenzied flame as something scary in Shadow Of The Erdtree, and brother did they commit. This whole section is a premium masterclass in how to tilt and swerve your story, or world, or plot flow, in a way that shivers the spine.
There are definitely parallels to how the frenzied flame plotline was introduced in the base game, being accessed through a very optional area, behind an optional boss. But the difference here is just how much presentation matters when setting up a section that’s supposed to scare people who already spend hours of their day playing really hard games.
And once you reach Midra’s Manse, which plays up a whole bunch of classic haunted house tropes in gloriously grungy form, things do not get better, especially with Midra, the mysterious master of the house, screaming and wailing in agony every so often, just sparsely enough that it manages to jumpscare just about every player I’ve been watching.
And then, you face Midra, impaled and skewered by the same make of weapon that Jori was wielding while trying to keep you out of this place, in a classic bit of From Software lowkey storytelling.
And then? Then…we find out exactly what heinous force has kept Midra clinging to life in such a dire state.
This whole section from Jori through Midra has a special place in my heart. From are not strangers to horror adjacency; I remember an old Jimquisition video where they made the argument (successfully, to my mind) that Bloodborne is more of a horror game than many games that outright call themselves that, because Bloodborne manages to keep players in a state of constant tension and fear by its atmosphere alone, and reinforcing the threat of death around every corner through honest challenge instead of cheap gimmicks like intentionally crappy control interfaces.
The difference between the Nightmare of Mensis and the nightmare lurking within the Realm of Shadow, however, is that if you’re going in truly blind and unspoiled, as I did, as many players did, you’re not expecting it. Your high fantasy open world action-RPG has turned into something that catches your heart between beats and toys with it with serpentine fingers. You’re being taken to the dark places and you might not be ready.
Speaking of Bloodborne, the Aged Untouchables are in some strong ways a callback to one of Bloodborne’s most dreaded entities, the Winter Lanterns, another enemy who was expertly curated to make things feel wrong.
They’re horrifying on the face of it, yes, being pustulous brain things with monstrous teeth and eyes and they appear to be wearing a shredded version of the same dress that your level-upgrade doll friend wears and let’s not think too deeply about that. But they only appear inside the Nightmare, in areas off the beaten path of progression, like you’re straying places where you aught not to be. The higher your Insight, the more you can hear them singing a strange off-key song, and just looking at them for too long causes your Frenzy to rise, eventually killing you.
Now the Aged Untouchables are a version of that whom you cannot fight and who kill you instantly upon being caught. Thank you, Miyazaki, you truly are the Jack Skellington of reading our Christmas lists and delivering something frightening instead.
That being said, the Aged Untouchables are in fact killable: if you parry their attack, it’ll leave them vulnerable. If you kill one, you receive a talisman that boosts your attack power while there is madness in the vicinity. This is incredibly useful for the Midra fight, and pretty much nowhere else in the Realm of Shadow, as this is the only frenzied flame-themed area in it.
This is one of those uniquely From things where I’m not sure what to make of it, from a design perspective. If you’re going in blind and everything in the Abyssal Woods is hitting as it should, then the game is grooming you very well to not try and fight the Untouchables. There are absolutely no tells or subtle indications that they are vulnerable to parrying. On the face of it, this talisman feels like you’re supposed to have it as an option if you’re struggling on Midra, but by the time many players started looking up stuff about this area, they’d already beaten Midra and experienced it unspoiled for themselves, so when they found out about this talisman, they were left with a talisman that was already just about useless for the purpose that design sense feels like it was meant for, much like how it feels like the super-holy-defense talisman you get in the Shaman Village is meant for the final boss of the DLC.
So I actually can’t figure out whether that’s good design – an extra prize for truly fearless and canny players – or bad design in that there are absolutely no in-game tells, and in fact everything in-game is trying to ward you away from trying what you need to do to get it, for the thing that is only really good in the area you find it in. Maybe it’s both. Maybe it’s neither. Maybe it’s just one of those idiosyncratic From things that simply is. Maybe that’s one of the weirder parts of why we can’t stop talking about them. They have so many little ways of getting in your head like this.
Or maybe that’s all hyperfixating on the smaller things inside the bigger picture, which is that maybe I want a whole game of this. Bloodborne brought the terror, but I’m talking about those sections where From knocks you off your axis entirely: the Winter Lanterns, the Headless buildup, and now the Abyssal Woods. I’m so ready to not be ready.