The RPS Advent Calendar 2024, December 18th

Today's door casts a long shadow

The RPS Advent Calender 2024 is underway! Each day reveals one of our favourite games from this year, leading up to our Game Of The Year on the 24th. Check the main calendar post to see the full list.

Today's Advent Calendar might take you quite some time to polish off. It's ridiculously dense, darkly majestic, and popular among masochists. Come then, touch the withered arm and be transported behind door number 18...

It's Elden Ring: Shadow Of The Erdtree!

Ollie: No matter where you delve or climb in the Land Of Shadow, wherever you point your camera, From Software's mastery is evident. Elden Ring was an unforgettable, punishing pilgrimage through one of the most stunningly designed worlds on PC, and somehow Shadow Of The Erdtree betters it in nearly every way. The world you're transported to when you first touch that withered arm is an Escherian nightmare of intertwining landscapes, a vertical labyrinth of connected regions. The new gold standard for open world environment design, and it comes from a DLC.

Like the base game, Shadow Of The Erdtree gives you just the barest, gentlest nudge in the direction of the main story if you want it. But the quantity of fascinating sights and sounds around you ignites an even stronger desire to just pick a direction, and let the game's tentacular mass of memorable encounters slowly cuddle you to death. The Land Of Shadow is a place where you can spend a hundred hours and entirely miss whole swathes of the map. That'll be offputting to some, but to me it's an impressive testament to the world design. This is a truly ancient and complex place. The birthplace of a goddess's people, before she ascended to godhood. The battleground of several half-forgotten wars, the ramifications of which will take dozens of hours of exploration and lore-gathering to understand. The Land Of Shadow does not know you or owe you anything, until you give it reason to.

The story is also tighter and more intriguing than Elden Ring's familiar tale of growth from lowly Tarnished to god-slaying legend. The world itself is still packed with some of the most exciting lore in any game, but Shadow Of The Erdtree benefits from a more focused journey. From the start, you know that you're following in the footsteps of Miquella the Kind - until now, probably the most enigmatic character in the game. Why, and to what conclusion, is a mystery which both you and several other players on the field are racing to piece together. It's a carefully considered, high-stakes story about free will, revenge, despair, and the greater good. It answers some very longstanding questions about how the world and mythos of Elden Ring fits together, while also adding some fascinating new points of uncertainty and speculation. It's marvellous, truly extraordinary worldbuilding.

Of course, the combat and boss fights themselves are still best-in-class. The unforgettable experiences of Malenia, Mohg, and Placidusax from the base game are joined by a series of grand new encounters, some of which I'd consider the most spectacular and gripping boss fights in any game I've played. Entirely new weapon classes and schools of magic are free to explore or entirely ignore as you wish. Organically unfurling, DLC-spanning side quests offer you more unforgettable journeys if you desire them. And a new roster of strange NPC companions make for some genuinely edge-of-your-seat-compelling moments of dialogue as you try to figure out who is your ally and who is an enemy waiting for the most beneficial moment to betray, strike, and further their own hidden goals.

Shadow Of The Erdtree further cements Elden Ring as not just the premier open-world game in my mind, but probably the single most engrossing journey that's currently available to play on PC. I'll likely play it through again every year until we finally get Elden Ring 2.

Nic: Good worms. The absolute best worms.

Ed: It's super dense and at times, maybe a bit too dense. But I gotta respect its adventurous vibe, what with its jungles and twisting libraries and fields of eyeballs. I wish the base game had this level of weird. Also yeah, great worms.

James: I, uh, misunderstood the voting rules and didn't think this was eligible. But if I'd bothered to check, this would get many, many James votes. I had no interest in playing Elden Ring beyond my professional obligations, but the sheer atmosphere of that opening ride into the Land of Shadow was so intoxicating, its call to adventure so loud, I decided to get off my colleagues' save files and give it a proper go. 261 hours and two complete playthroughs later, my top game of 2024 is in fact Elden Ring, and I have Shadow of the Erdtree to thank. Slash, blame.

Jeremy: I had an interesting experience with Shadow Of The Erdtree, as I was one of the guides folks tasked with tackling all of the intricacies of this massive DLC, so big enough to be its own game. I also had only played a handful of hours of the original Elden Ring, which I'd hoped to run through prior to Shadow Of The Erdtree's release, but never found the time.

Thanks to a saved game mod, I jumped into the new stuff a week ahead of release and immediately got stomped by those Furnace Golems and crossbow bolted a million times by the Blackgaol Knight. Thanks to my inexperience with the base game, I definitely felt like I was behind on the collective Elden Ring knowledge needed to progress through the DLC in order to write about it, and while all Souls games are an uphill climb in their own right, this one was a particularly steep trek.

But as is the case with most of From Software's output, that grind of slowly getting better and more accomplished soon kicked in. Now, I can happily say that my Elden Ring experience is a fascinatingly lopsided one, where I've played the heck out of Shadow Of The Erdtree but not really touched the main game. And as someone who isn't terribly keen on open world Soulslikes (this is what made me procrastinate on playing the base game, honestly), perhaps it's good that I went about it this way. Shadow Of The Erdtree's intricate map, with layers upon layers of interconnected bits and bobs to discover, is the stuff of a guides writer's nightmare - but also perfect for someone like me who prefers tight environments and well-designed linearity to one huge sandbox. Someday I'll go back and probably try to play through Elden Ring "properly," but for now, I'm happy that I got to dive in DLC first.

And speaking of "DLC first" - if you're like me and wondering how to get by in those beginning hours of the Shadow Realm... hey, I wrote a guide for that!

Graham: Soulslikes: like roguelikes, but for cowards. (I have not played Elden Ring or Erdtree.)

Head back to the advent calendar to open another door!