In keeping with the longtime tradition of including a pain-in-the-ass poison swamp level, Elden Ring will keep the fire lit with its own take on mud and suffering.
While there's nothing much to glean, swamp-wise, from the gorgeous gameplay trailer that dropped in the Summer Game Fest, Bandai Namco's Elden Ring website is here with the goods.
Traverse the breathtaking world on foot or on horseback, alone or online with other players, and fully immerse yourself in the grassy plains, suffocating swamps, spiraling mountains, foreboding castles and other sites of grandeur on a scale never seen before in a FromSoftware title.
Take note of the plurality of swamps here. We're not getting just one deadly swamp. We're getting two deadly swamps, minimum. Now that's a big Dark Souls!
It began with Demon's Souls' Swamp of Sorrow, with its murky waters that slow and poison you, hiding monsters between the heaps of trash and refuse. (It looks extra disgusting in the remastered version.)
Then in Dark Souls we traveled to the lower levels of Blighttown to The Great Swamp of pyromancer lore, where huge mosquitos, leeches, and sodden men with poison blow darts harried our way through the piss and shit and into Queelag's nest. And who could forget those guys that throw boulders at you right near the finish line. Fun!
In Dark Souls 2 we didn't get an actual swamp, but a few areas were in keeping of the spirit by being mildly annoying throughout. The Gutter is just a bunch of loose planks strung over a void in the pitch black, echoing Blighttown's first half, while Harvest Valley brings the poison to the party, but in gas form this time. Navigate a stone maze while choking to death. Neato.
Dark Souls 3's take on a stinky roiling brew came in the form of Farron Keep, the ruins of a castle dissolving in green goo. This one has it all: leeches, powerful mushroom men, goat wizards, murderous lycans pinned to crucifixes, and giant crabs. Great memories.
We can't even imagine what damp horrors await us in Elden Ring. Looking forward to it.
