Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree Review

2022 was only two years ago, yet it feels like a long time ago that Elden Ring released and captured the entire industry. Reviewers and players alike flocked to FromSoftware’s magnum opus, and the opinion was almost unanimous – this game was incredible and FromSoftware had truly mastered their craft. Sure, there was the vocal minority who would grasp at straws to disparage the game, but virtually anyone who played it came back with nothing other than adoration for it. Unsurprisingly, its one and only DLC in the form of Shadow of the Erdtree has been incredibly highly anticipated and now that it’s here, and I have had some time with it, my goodness FromSoftware’s standard is nothing short of stellar.

Shadow of the Erdtree takes place in the Land of Shadow, an area that lies deep within the Lands Between as you follow the pilgrimage of Miquella, a character whose name has been constantly uttered and mentioned during the base game of Elden Ring. You come across other people who are undertaking the same pilgrimage as you, and following the footsteps of Miquella, though they aren’t as receptive to your arrival as one would hope. A few of them outright state that the only reason they have yet to attack you is because you are undertaking the same pilgrimage as they are. At the very least, it seems as if you have allies born of circumstance, which is better than nothing.

Much like the game it’s attached to, Shadow of the Erdtree won’t receive any awards for its direct narrative and storytelling. It’s never been in the purview of these games (Dark Souls, Bloodborne etc), so FromSoftware allows the game to do the talking – and it has a lot to say. The Land of Shadow is bloody massive, simply put. Director Hidetaka Miyazaki stated that it was comparable to the size of Limgrave, but I cannot help but feel I have been lied to. This map isn’t just the size of Limgrave, it is far wider than Limgrave but also does not compromise on its depth or density. There is a lot to do here, and while it may seem empty at first glance, it is because Shadow of the Erdtree loves to keep things hidden to reward those who properly engage with its world and explore every nook and cranny.

It’s this depth and detail put into the world design that makes this expansion feel so good. Elden Ring was already fantastic because of this, but you would be forgiven for occasionally thinking that its scale was a little too much at points. Especially in the late stages of the game, the commonality of secret and hidden treasures feels notably reduced. However, that is also a symptom of the late stages being difficult to reward players due to how much more set-in-stone a player’s build would be at that point. Naturally, given how late in the game you would need to normally be to access this DLC (requiring the player to have defeated Starscourge Radahn and Mohg, Lord of Blood), meaningfully rewarding the player would be quite difficult, but this expansion manages to pull it off through one feature that has been wonderfully embraced by FromSoftware: power creep.

If you are an MMO player, the term power creep probably fills you with some form of PTSD, but hear me out when I say that there is a time and place for power creep to be utilised and this is one of those cases. The builds that you bring into the game will still work just fine, don’t get me wrong, but the gear and the skills that you can obtain here are insane. From incredibly powerful but familiar weapons, new spells, incantations, weapon arts, and entirely new weapon types as well as armour sets with great bonuses, The Land of Shadow has so much to reward the player with. What is perhaps the coolest part about a lot of the rewards that the player can receive is that the player often has to overcome some kind of challenge or fight where the reward is being used against them.

One of my favourite examples of Shadow of the Erdtree using its rewards against the player is Rakshasa’s Great Katana. Doing the fight for this can be incredibly obnoxious, but once you have cleared it, you can be equally obnoxious to everything else. Or how some of the remembrance skills and weapons are absurdly strong (I won’t mention any in particular for the sake of spoilers). Despite my build being concrete in its construction, I found myself always enjoying these new rewards and wanting to try them out, which isn’t something that I found myself wanting to do in the last quarter or so of the base game. In the base game, if a new skill or weapon could fit into my build, I would slot it in, but if it didn’t, then it would gather dust in my inventory.

A key system system that was implemented for this expansion is the Scadutree/Revered Spirit Ash Blessing. This system is most comparable to the power progression system of Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, except the resources used for upgrades are Scadutree Fragments or Revered Spirit Ashes. These fragments provide various benefits, with the former increasing the damage you deal and decreasing the damage you receive, and the latter providing the same benefit for your Spirit Summons and Torrent. This is put in place of the traditional levelling system, as FromSoftware realised that if a measure like this was not taken, then the scaling of the expansion content would be ridiculous.

Aside from the mechanical benefits of the aforementioned fragments/ashes, there is also the fact that they are used as the DLC’s equivalent exploration reward in place of Golden Seeds and Sacred Tears (which should be maxed out or close to it by the time you enter the DLC). It is by no means as cohesive as the rewards it replaces though, as rather than being consistent in the types of locations where the rewards can be found, it instead feels random and arbitrary. For instance, you will sometimes find that these items can drop from an enemy who holds a pot over their head, but not every time you come across these enemies will it drop, so it feels like you are rolling the dice on whether you are at the right enemy or not. Compared to how Golden Seeds and Sacred Tears are almost always found in the same types of locations. There were, of course, the odd exceptions, but they were outliers.

As is the case with every other FromSoftware expansion, Shadow of the Erdtree ensures that it challenges players in a way that the base game hadn’t. Previously, the Bloodborne and Dark Souls III expansions (The Old Hunters and The Ringed City, respectively) were regarded as some of the most difficult content added to a FromSoftware game. Bosses like Ludwig the Accursed, Darkeater Midir, Orphan of Kos, and Slave Knight Gael all proved to be far above what their associated games had demanded of the player, and Shadow of the Erdtree is no exception. It is clear that FromSoftware, especially Hidetaka Miyazaki, wished to push the boss and encounter design to its absolute limits with this expansion. Overall, it’s safe to say that The Land of Shadow is more challenging than The Lands Between was, but not always in a way that feels unfair to the player. It has its points where it teeters over the edge a bit, which I will touch on in just a moment. Still, it needs to be stated that FromSoftware has found a beautiful way to make Elden Ring even more terrifically difficult than it already was. The boss fights are fun and challenging, but always a spectacle. Presentation and gameplay blend seamlessly, and you have fights that are consistently awesome to watch and play.

Though a lot of the fights are good, you can still see the consequences of wanting to push the boundaries of what a FromSoftware boss fight can be. The biggest offender is the final boss of the DLC, who shall remain nameless for the sake of spoilers. Let me be clear, the fight is awesome and is by no means an insurmountable challenge. However, it is also a fight that feels like the game is actively working against you, with virtually non-existent windows for reprieve leading to battles of attrition almost always going in the boss’ favour. I’m not even saying that the boss needs to be majorly nerfed. Let it be extremely tough, it’s the final challenge the game has to offer in an expansion intended for mid-late game players. I want to hurt. It’s just that it, at some points, can feel unfair and that is simply something that FromSoftware doesn’t normally do. Adding a few frames to slightly widen the windows for players to be safe would make the fight still feel incredibly tough but also very doable. If there were a gauge that went to one hundred, this fight would be sitting at something like one hundred and two, it’s just slightly over the edge.

There are a few other bosses and moments that bring the expansion down, but those are symptoms of the bosses being in arenas that are too small for their physical size, and so the camera feels atrocious. Additionally, some of the bosses have attacks whose effects can majorly obscure them, which can make figuring out what the follow-up move(s) will be, or they will tank the framerate on some lower-end PCs. Those moments feel bad, I cannot lie, but I also need to admit that the framerate part was not something I had particular issues with.

It does need to be stated that even though I didn’t encounter many framerate issues, they do exist. This expansion has been rife with stuttering and hitching issues, especially in its early areas. The hitching I noticed almost immediately, but it also seemed to subside as I progressed deeper into The Land of Shadow. If you want to look at a big offender for tanking framerates, however, this would be a boss called Divine Beast Dancing Lion. It suffers from both its arena being too small and its effects dropping your frames pretty hard if you don’t have a PC with specs that far exceed the recommended specifications of the game. It does need to be mentioned that FromSoftware also has been much better with cleaning up the performance of their games of late.

What comes as no surprise is the fact that the music and general atmosphere of this expansion are phenomenal. FromSoftware is full of incredibly talented composers, with people like Tsukasa Saitoh, Shoi Miyawaza, and even Yuka Kitamura who announced her departure from the studio last year, providing incredible musical set pieces and scores to accompany your toughest battles and greatest triumphs. Truly incredible work.

Aiding all this is the beauty that is The Land of Shadow. FromSoftware’s artists have put in, once again, an impressive effort to make sure that the environments you traverse are both beautiful and haunting. The aggressively harsh colour palette that makes great use of contrast to create truly memorable environments, the unique and dilapidated architecture, and the way the vistas and skyboxes are used to draw the player into specific directions, it is all so brilliant and a true demonstration of how the people at FromSoftware have come to hone and master their craft. Not only is the environmental art incredible, but the new monster and character designs are equally so. Some designs will be immediately familiar, while others will throw you off completely, and the bosses are such a pleasure to observe. Some truly impeccable work here.