The first thing that stood out to me when booting up Elden: Path of the Forgotten, was how eerie the game environment was. Playing as Elden, you wake up in your bed before traversing a world brimming with otherworldly creatures and monsters. While you start the game with a simple sword, you can find different weapons later on and unlock some simple magic abilities too. These are necessary because there are huge waves of enemies to fight throughout the game, and they’re all pretty tough competition.
As far as other human characters in the game go, you don’t really encounter any apart from a handful of people who are either already dead or on the brink of dying. Who or what killed them isn’t clear and, while you do learn more about the world’s setting as you progress through the game, you don’t gain a lot more understanding about the things happening around you through language. Speech, place names, books, and notes are all written in an incomprehensible language that Elden nor you as the player can understand. Rather than through text, the story unfolds through the environment, and I instead found myself taking story cues from the buildings, monsters, and scenery that I encountered. This, together with the ghostly soundtrack and the visually stunning world the game is set in, makes for a strange but engrossing gaming experience.