Elden Ring is a surprisingly brilliant "only forward" game

I am by no means a Souls expert. The opposite really. I played Dark Souls a bit and loved it – but I also struggled with it, as a foolish, cowardly, flighty kind of person and player. By the time I almost knew what I was doing – or rather, by the time I started to make any kind of real progress – I had started to play in a very specific way.

So specific I can almost remember the physical sensation of it. Most of the time, I played Dark Souls as if my head had been partway retracted into my shoulders. Sunken neck, everything tense, slow, tortoise-style forward movement, always expecting the blow on the head, always expecting the ground to fall out from beneath me. Which, granted, it sometimes did.

But now Elden Ring is here and I am giving it another go. And it’s made me remember that I only did the no-neck thing most of the time in Dark Souls. I had a second, rarer, mode of playing – and Elden Ring has given it back to me.

Real talk: when I properly take on Elden Ring I will hit the guides. I will learn which class to choose, which item to select, where to head first and where to stop off next. The order! The rituals and intricacies. I will learn where to put my points and all that jazz.

And yet that is to come. When I kicked off Elden Ring at the weekend I was just eager to see a bit of it. I told myself that this first sortie did not count – it was played in anticipation of a do-over. So I picked any class that appealed, selected the item with the most amusing name, and then set off into the world. And this bit is very important. Once I reached the open world, once I emerged from the darkness and the landscape lay before me beneath a golden sun, I started to treat the whole thing as if it was Fortnite.