Shadow of the Erdtree wastes no time explaining to the player that the 100+ hours they’ve put into the base game of Elden Ring means the total of naff all within the Realm of Shadow.
“Wow, this looks stunning. I wonder what that is, over there. Oh, that looks like a large fire giant – I’ll return to that later. Let’s go this way instead. WHACK… BAM… DEAD!”
You enter the gorgeous new locale and can go left, right, or forward. To the left is a boss that cares not for your pitiful attempts to stagger him, as he launches smack after slam at you, without the common courtesy of ever being so much as phased by your measly attempts to hit him back. Dead ahead is a large, giant, basket-headed monstrosity that seems to be secondarily made of pure volcano, but getting to him first requires avoidance of a stealth attack from a bird man wielding two disc-shaped blades in a manner that could be loosely described as a ballet of deadly celerity. And so, your final option – short of hopping on your trusty spirit steed and bypassing all these nightmares – is to head East, over towards a bombed-out church that presents you with an item that will suddenly explain why your character is being treated like a toddler in a Royal Rumble – a Scudutree fragment (apparently pronounced “Shadow Tree”).
Scadutree fragments are part of the DLC-specific levelling system, alongside your character’s standard experience point-based progression. When you arrive in the Land of Shadow for the first time, you are Scadutree level zero, the equivalent of hitting every enemy with a malicious-looking feather, while they bonk you square in the jaw with a JCB. However, as you explore the world and discover more of these fragments, you can level this new stat up, allowing that steep incline working against you to eventually level out entirely. It’s a classic From Software move – teach the player repeatedly throughout multiple games, including this one, that they should explore before committing to a path.
One of the most brilliant aspects of Elden Ring’s core design was the notion that if you hit a metaphorical wall, unlike in their previous games, this time you can run in any other direction and find something else to do, returning to your pain point after you’ve become big enough to ride that particular roller coaster. In the base game, it was implied, but in the DLC, it is borderline drilled into you. Of course, it is possible to beat any challenge in the DLC at Scadutree zero, but that’s neither intended, nor a realistic possibility for the majority of players. It’s From’s way of saying, “Get this into your head now – you will need to change the way you play to progress through this content, at least if you want to avoid lobbing your controller at the furniture in frustration.”
Once you (and very definitely I) get this idea through your thick skull, Shadow of the Erdtree opens up to become one of the best pieces of gaming content I’ve ever had the privilege of playing – DLC or not. Many have described it as ‘effectively Dark Souls 4’, and there certainly is some merit to that (admittedly silly) comparison. Erdtree contains a new open world map, not strapped on to the original – which itself was vast and far more than any reasonable player’s expectations, but a whole new one. For players of the original game, this comes in at around the size of the first three accessible regions combined (Limgrave, Caelid, and Liurnia of the Lakes and frankly, you could probably add in Siofra, Ainsel, Nokstella and Nokron) – it’s massive.
There are three Legacy Dungeons, plus several lesser castle, fort, or village equivalents, and a significant number of dungeons accessed via caves, that of course continue the Lands Between trend of having contracted some maniacal company to construct elaborate elevators within that descend into a hellscape. The map is varied, too, with all your standard Mario levels covered – sand, grass, castle, volcano, etc, and every environment is visually stunning.
If you’re looking for boss fights, Erdtree has you covered, weighing in at a ridiculous 83, compared to Dark Souls 3’s paltry 25 (which includes its two DLCs)! Many of these bosses are considered optional but never really feel superfluous, mostly due to the sheer number of runes each one drops, dumping wholeheartedly over anything the base game would grant you, short of a handful of bosses toward the end. So yeah, it’s easy to call this a new game in and of itself – the numbers make a strong argument for that statement to hold water. While outside the scope of this review, this certainly fills me with hope for whatever From’s next fantasy action RPG may be, as I highly doubt they’ll be working on something on the scale of Elden Ring again anytime soon, but something similar in scope to Erdtree? Yeah, give me some of that.
The DLC introduces loads of new weapons, weapon arts, NPC questlines, armour sets, spells, spirit ashes, and even a few brand-new weapon categories. Also, very intelligently, the 12 or so big bosses throughout have different strengths and weaknesses. So unlike the majority of the base game, you are heavily incentivised in Shadow of the Erdtree to regularly change up your build, to experiment with different abilities and move sets… which feels great. The game almost vomits weapon upgrade materials and larval tears at you – the item used to respec your character’s experience points – allowing so much more play than you’d ever get in any other From Software game and allowing you to simply have fun with weapons you would ordinarily have thought twice about burning precious upgrade resources on.
This is arguably the most challenging game FromSoftware has ever released but it’s also the most fun to play with. They effectively dump you in a sandbox filled with toys and tell you to let loose – it’s pure joy. Some of the most challenging boss fights in the history of video games exist within this 40-ish hour DLC, and it never got old figuring out their weaknesses and trying things I’d never put points into before to capitalise on them. One optional boss in particular, I won’t say has a pathway up to it that is hilariously peppered with items that may as well flash at you, saying “I AM AN ANTI-BOSS WEAPON FOR THE NEXT GUY, USE ME,” and I’ll be damned if it didn’t work gloriously when I finally switched up my build to use the items I typically wouldn’t go near.
None of this is to say the game is without its faults though. As with all From Software games, the camera is still the player’s number one enemy in tight spaces and some of the boss fights are just plain horrendous, though fortunately, this makes up a minority. The new levelling system is probably not explained comprehensively enough, given the number of players at launch that missed the beat. I must admit that the sheer speed of the bosses and many of the common enemies, attacking so frequently that the player seldom has an opportunity to drink from their health flask, is a design choice I can’t get behind. However, I overcame it – but that doesn’t make it right.
Truly, this game is difficult, but Elden Ring does a better job than most of its predecessors in this regard, by giving players the tools to fight back against that difficulty in the form of summons, buffs, and weapon arts. These tools won’t bend the game over in front of you to give it a good spanking, but they will at least help less experienced players enjoy the ride that everyone else won’t shut up about.
Ultimately, Shadow of the Erdtree achieves something that From Software’s previous DLCs never managed – it enthralled me. I’ve enjoyed the others, greatly, but ultimately I always thought of them as superfluous to their respective games. Erdtree doesn’t feel superfluous. It feels like the second part of the story, the area of the game they didn’t have time to fit in at launch, and somehow we never even knew was missing, but now that it’s here, I couldn’t possibly play through Elden Ring again without this being an integral part of the journey.
