Try pinky, but hole

April 12, 2022 4:04 PM

Tiny Elden Ring: Elden Ring, but zoomed out and tilt-shifted and everything moving in a low-framerate Harryhausen stutter.
posted by cortex (47 comments total)

Way cuter than I expected...that's a strong effect. Some of those locations are horrifying in-game.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 4:11 PM on April 12, 2022

Tilt-shifting never fails to blow my mind.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 4:12 PM on April 12, 2022 [11 favorites]

I love it, do it for every game.
posted by Going To Maine at 4:15 PM on April 12, 2022 [7 favorites]

I have no interest in Elden Ring whatsoever -- I already know I'm old and I suck at video games; I don't need an entire world/community to reminding me about it -- but oh man if THIS were the game? I would play the hell out of it.
posted by The Bellman at 4:18 PM on April 12, 2022 [6 favorites]

It's the framerate jank that really works here, looking like stop-motion animation. Given the art style I'd say it's more Brothers Quay than Harryhausen.
posted by Nelson at 4:29 PM on April 12, 2022 [3 favorites]

Extremely good
posted by churl at 4:29 PM on April 12, 2022

Dangit this game is freaking huge, I don't think I'll ever see half of what's in this video.
posted by curious nu at 4:48 PM on April 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

I love it, do it for every game.

The channel has done a bunch of other games icymi.
posted by juv3nal at 4:53 PM on April 12, 2022 [5 favorites]

The channel has done a bunch of other games . . .

OMG. OMTG. OMTGoW.
posted by The Bellman at 5:02 PM on April 12, 2022 [3 favorites]

ˢᵒ ᶜᵘᵗᵉ
posted by moonmilk at 6:19 PM on April 12, 2022 [3 favorites]

Powerful Laika vibes, imo. I love how the idle loops of some of the monsters transform into impatient pacing. And the shot of those villagers doing a stuttery little dance? Delightfully bizarre. I haven’t played the game yet, but I bet it’s something way creepier than how it feels here.
posted by Mizu at 7:36 PM on April 12, 2022 [2 favorites]

strong Octopath Traveler vibes here. love it, thanks!
posted by Old Kentucky Shark at 8:01 PM on April 12, 2022

After watching some Let's Plays my interest in this game has distilled down to zero abv but hot damn are these gorgeous!
posted by turbid dahlia at 8:07 PM on April 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

I have no interest in Elden Ring whatsoever -- I already know I'm old and I suck at video games; I don't need an entire world/community to reminding me about it

Don't let all the whole git gud Dark Souls culture put you off Elden Ring if you think it might appeal to you otherwise. It's not nearly as punishing as the mainline DS games. And there's a lot of fun to be had with it even if you never finish it.
posted by snuffleupagus at 8:08 PM on April 12, 2022 [3 favorites]

And the shot of those villagers doing a stuttery little dance? Delightfully bizarre. I haven’t played the game yet, but I bet it’s something way creepier than how it feels here.

Oh it's a wonderfully disconcerting moment in the game, yeah.
posted by cortex at 8:26 PM on April 12, 2022 [2 favorites]

A bit Midsommar
posted by Going To Maine at 9:17 PM on April 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

so good. needs boppy music, like the ol' Uniqlo screensaver vids
posted by slater at 9:42 PM on April 12, 2022

probably not a popular sentiment, but this is far more entertaining than the actual game!

goddamn this game is just a plotless grinder. wish i could have this king's quest version instead!
posted by wibari at 9:49 PM on April 12, 2022 [2 favorites]

Marcel the Confessor with Shoes On?

For those who don't know what this game is, or are afraid of it: YouTube channel couple duo Girlfriend Reviews
[tagline: "This isn't a review of playing {game} - this is a review of what it's like to live with someone playing {game}] flipped the script for this one and instead uploaded Should Your Girlfriend Play Elden Ring?
posted by bartleby at 10:34 PM on April 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

It's not nearly as punishing as the mainline DS games.

Seconding for emphasis. Of the first four major bosses: Margit, Godrick, Starscourge Radahn, and Renalla, I beat all four on my very first attempt, and the only one I’d had the attack patterns spoiled for me was Radahn (good thing, too, that spear throw is absolutely brutal).

Turns out Open World is *the* game changer for Soulslike games because of the option to fuck off and do something else if you get stuck on a particular boss.

If you’re looking for a very quick shortest path to OP, here’s what I can recall entirely off the top of my head, a couple weeks later:
- Astrologer INT build using Glintstone pebble.
- Get goathorse, get spirit summons, get wolf spirits but do not level them.
- Level your character a bit (double troll cart pullers near the first spell trainer lady, to maybe L20~25).
- Take the burnt dragon trapped teleport chest to the crystal caves.
- Get Meteorite Staff and Meteor spell (run, dear god, just run).
- Get Lhutveil the Headless (ignore all other spirit summons for the rest of the game).
- Level some (short dudes around Bestial Sanctum, which there is a direct teleport to, to L40~45 or so. Do not fuck with the miniboss outside the sanctum, do not try to get to this area via the bridge with the dragon).
- Magma Wyrm for Moon Katana (this is a much easier fight than it seems once you realize any 100Phys block shield + sidestep = nearly invincible).
- Roundtable, Upgrade Meteor Staff, Katana, Headless, flasks to +4 or +5.
- Get Dragon rot breath. Sustained held cast applies twice = guaranteed slow death for most things, bosses included.
- You should be good for Margit, Godrick, and even Radahn now. Meteor spam + Rot for easy wins.
- Radahn gets you access to Mogwhyn. Southeastern grace in Mog has a very, very easy cheese farm that lets you earn like 15K per 20s farm cycle. Couple hours of this will have you at L150.

Game is now completely broken, enjoy stomping the remaining content flat. Other Mefite players feel free to correct me since this was entirely from memory.
posted by Ryvar at 10:36 PM on April 12, 2022 [10 favorites]

Neat!

wikbari goddamn this game is just a plotless grinder

The young'uns I know rave about this. It looks like a "next-gen" Diablo clone to me. I've read reviews disparaging the map (are there mods?) implying tedium/ grinding/ 100%-ers/ FOMO.

To others, is this ... fun?

But then again, I'm still playing webtiles DCSS, and have bought 'Shadow Tactics - Blades of the Shogun,' 'Cloudpunk,' 'War of the Overlord,' and a couple of old 'Assassins Creed' games ('Black Flag,' 'Syndicate') over the last year.

No, I've not played, significantly, any of those. Also DX:GOTY, DX:one of the official remaster and last ones (the DXs were essentially unplayable for me).

(all while on very significant sales - I may or may not have played them, and others, in the past without a license)
posted by porpoise at 10:53 PM on April 12, 2022

Mostly I just wanna know if I ever get to borrow the tortoise pope’s hat
posted by Mizu at 10:59 PM on April 12, 2022 [2 favorites]

I bounced hard off every dark souls / blood borne / whatever game until this one. The open world really is the killer. I can ride my horsey and sprint away from most bad guys and just explore basically forever. This is waaaaaay different than the regular soulsborne games where you’re locked into really specific paths and if you’re stuck at a boss, that’s it. This is waaaay more forgiving for ppl (me)who want to play a diff way. (It’s still quite hard but it’s….possible and if you get stuck you can just…do something else!)

Also this video is lovely thanks for posting!!
posted by capnsue at 11:05 PM on April 12, 2022 [5 favorites]

As someone who's fairly indifferent to "realistic graphics" I'm just blown away by this presentation. Probably explaining this poorly, but even though the artifice is more explicit, making the games look like physically manipulable environments ups the verisimilitude and seems much more realistic to me. I get that the games' original rendering makes it possible, but watching these is like watching something made by the world's greatest minis artist for the world's greatest stop-motion film, which feels far more immersive than the originals.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 12:05 AM on April 13, 2022 [2 favorites]

This is great, and does a wonderful job of highlighting just how good the art and design are in this game. I particularly like the way it makes the giant carrion birds, which along with the huge bipedal dogs are some of the most horrific things I've ever seen in a videogame, look almost cute.

The young'uns I know rave about this. It looks like a "next-gen" Diablo clone to me. I've read reviews disparaging the map (are there mods?) implying tedium/ grinding/ 100%-ers/ FOMO.

To others, is this ... fun?

It's so much fun, and has very little in common with Diablo. You can grind, but most of the time you're better off exploring and discovering new things and new parts of the enormous world the game lets you wander around in. If I had to criticise it for something it would be for all the systems, mechanics and items carried over from From's other games, but if you've never played any of them before it's the perfect place to jump in.
posted by A Thousand Baited Hooks at 12:22 AM on April 13, 2022 [4 favorites]

Elden Ring makes it possible to skip a lot of content until you've overleveled it significantly -- including Stormveil castle. There's a lot to be seen to the south and the east of the starting zone, and then you can go around it. Figuring out how is part of the fun, if you prefer exploration to running the gauntlet of boss fights the game points you at.

Elden Ring really, really rewards exploration; as much or maybe even more than BOTW, Skyrim or the Bethesda Fallouts...you can spend a lot of time just running around the open world gathering up various items and abilities and avoiding a lot of combat until your character starts to come together some.

The summoning mechanic also really changes things; aside from just being a fun combat pet system it means you aren't reliant on From's flaky and obscure multiplayer mechanics for help in big fights or tough areas (though that is still available too).

It's been nerfed a little but the Hoarfrost Stomp ash of war is very helpful for clearing standard enemies. And there are many other situational AoWs that can provide much easier ways to deal with vexing enemy types than simple melee (even if your character isn't much a spell caster).

Also, the main thing that makes Souls games punishing is losing the 'souls' or in Elden Ring 'runes' you earn from defeating enemies, and which serve as both experience points for leveling and the in-game currency. You drop your souls/runes where you die; you can reclaim them if you can get back to your death location without dying again.

As mentioned above, Elden Ring's inherent open-world design relaxes this in significant ways itself. You can nope out of encounters, you aren't always forced to run the same gauntlet to retrieve dropped ruins, the fast travel system lets you avoid a lot of unnecessary traversal (of what used to be interconnected levels in DS; more like getting around in a Metroidvania).

But, there's also a way to avoid it entirely when exploring somewhere you know there are likely to be hidden enemies, or during a fight you're losing, so:

[Click for spoilers re: avoiding death mechanic, capital city access & farming levels/upgrades easily]

This is through the "Wondrous Physick" potion you learn to craft -- alongside your main health and mana potion doses, you have one additional potion you can customize by combining status effects you find in the world. One of the available effects is a flasked version of the Golden Twig consuable -- which prevents rune loss on death.

So you can pop your Physick with that effect whenever you get jumped exploring or mess up a fight or are about to lose to a boss and you avoid the whole Soulslike dealth penalty.

Yes, you read that right. From Software has built in an infinitely rechargeable way to avoid the ARTIFICIAL DIFFICULTY arglbargl. I don't know why this hasn't drawn more notice.

The item you need to find is the Twiggy Cracked Tear. It's sitting in the open world, there's no fight for it. You do need to get access to the Capital City first, as the pickup is within its walls, but that can be done much earlier than the standard progress route suggests. And once you reach it, the Draconic Tree Sentinel that guards the main entrance can be killed by infecting it with Scarlet Rot via the dog summon and then kiting it until it de-aggros and dies rather than duking it out.

Beyond that there are a few well-known ways to gain runes easily so you don't have to grind when you want levels or to upgrade gear. First, in the northeast of Caelid there is a Night's Cavalry miniboss on a bridge that can be pulled behind you up a hill through a poisoned zone that will kill it. That provides something like 42K runes and can be done early in the game when that is very significant. Then, in the same area, there are relatively weak vulgar militia mobs than can be farmed easily for healthy amounts of runes, or there is the boulder farm.

After that you can go poke the chicken, which more or less lets you level or upgrade weapons on demand to the limits of your patience or podcast playlist.

posted by snuffleupagus at 7:06 AM on April 13, 2022 [3 favorites]

Elden Ring really, really rewards exploration

Well yes and no. Exploring the world is the best part of the game. And it's beautiful! But it's also really opaque. It's not at all clear as you walk around which areas you can handle and which areas you will be instagibbed by some runebear that pops up out of the ground. The game explicitly chose not to give any signposts for the level requirements for zones or monsters. Even those areas "to the south and the east of the starting zone" are a problem. Particularly if you wander too far to the east you hit the deadly poison area that kills you without you even really knowing why.

The other opacity is it's not clear where you should go. I've spent hours at a time wandering aimlessly, lost, without finding anything that feels like game progress. Sometimes those wanderings are joyful! Sometimes they're just frustrating. (Looking at you, Siofra River Well, which apparently isn't really worth the time until halfway through the game.) Catacombs also can be frustrating. There's generally a treasure at the end of them but there's no way to know whether that treasure will be useful to you. Most RPGs signpost this more explicitly, with quests like "you look like a wizard! You should go to this cave over here where a mage hangs out, I bet he has a nice staff." Elden Ring just puts a drawing of a cave on the map.

I am writing this all in the voice of complaints but I've come to understand this opacity is a strength of the game, or at least a deliberate choice. This episode of the Triple Click podcast helped me understand it better, particularly the classification of open world games as Opaque vs Transparent. The Ubisoft formula is extremely transparent, for instance, and the podcasters talk a lot about how annoying and stressful it can be to have a map and quest log full of tasks you have to accomplish. Elden Ring's opacitiy is a breath of fresh air in its way.
posted by Nelson at 7:19 AM on April 13, 2022 [2 favorites]

Also, if the boss fights are the thing putting you off note that some of the in-game NPCs will steer you towards items that can be used to weaken some of the bosses (including the Godrick, the first big one that gets a lot complaint online).

And in the open-world minibosses can be engaged with, whittled down, run from and then re-engaged and won't regenerate health until you rest and reset the area. Which also enables the skyrim sneaky archer style if that's your thing.

[And regarding Radahn, who gates access to Nokron....]

He's vulnerable to Scarlet Rot too. Summon all the NPC phantoms, then hit him twice with the dragon breath Rot incantation during each phase and you can just run around the rest of the fight and let the NPC summons fight him until he dies. I didn't hit him with a weapon even once.

But it's also really opaque.

I'm sure it's true that I've played enough Dark Souls that some of the obscurity isn't there for me, and I've come to expect From to do certain things certain ways in terms of layouts and enemy placement. And when it was new, it was kind of novel and mysterious although I agree that can get old if you can't figure out why something is or isn't happening.
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:21 AM on April 13, 2022

I concur with Ryvar that magic is very much Easy Mode in this game, I started as a Vagabond (sneaky thief) and everything was impossibly hard, then I started a new game as an Astrologer and things are a *lot* easier. I haven't found either of the Meteor spells Ryvar recommends but I have the Meteorite Staff, which is (a) unupgradeable, but is ranked S for scaling on intelligence, and (b) gives an extra boost to Gravity spells, which includes both the Meteor spells, and Rock Sling, which is found near it. (Possibly this is what Ryvar means by "meteor"? The two spells with "Meteor" in their name are not found in Limgrave; Meteorite is somewhere accessible from the start if you can find the semi-hidden path around the castle, Meteorite of Astel is not.)

I have generally been running around Rock Slinging the heck out of everything in my path, with the help of NPC summons and the wolfpack ashes.

Also a very good way to quickly gain a ton of levels once you've unlocked the horse is to just go east, east, east, until you come to the Lenne's Rise Site of Grace in the northeast of Caelid, the red fungus zone. Wait until night, then run across the nearby bridge with a nasty enemy known as "Night's Cavalry" waiting on it; zoom by and run up the mountain path until it winds left to a cliff overlooking the bridge the Cavalry spawned on, then wait. The Cavalry will wander around a while, slowly taking damage from the poison traps in the area (which you might have wanted to bring poison antidote for), and then suddenly expire, granting you 45k runes. Which is enough for a bunch of levels. Sadly this only works once, as Night's Cavalry doesn't respawn once killed.

Also, note that the dragon power Ryvar suggests requires Faith to cast, not Intelligence. Check a wiki to find out how much you'll need, I mostly like Fextralife's for reference for From's games.
posted by egypturnash at 7:28 AM on April 13, 2022 [5 favorites]

The channel has done a bunch of other games icymi.

Red Dead Redemption 2 has lots and lots of ordinary people just going about their day riding carts and the like, but the cherry on the top is the trains which have a proper toy train set vibe seen this way. It's just so cute. Made my day.
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 7:54 AM on April 13, 2022 [2 favorites]

Elden Ring is amazing. It has it's weaknesses (the UI, the camera, the ludicrously opaque—but not essential—NPC quests, hitboxes on giant-sized enemies, and more). But I love the game so much.

It is not at all like Diablo. That's preposterous. I like the Diablo games, too, but these games have very little in common.
posted by SoberHighland at 8:07 AM on April 13, 2022 [1 favorite]

The Borderlands franchise feels more like Diablo, with its loot randomization.

I don't see a tilt-shift up for the just released Tiny Tina's Wonderlands, I'd expect that to be cute given the Borderlands style and the title's premise of being inside a tabletop campaign.

The RDR2 one is really delightful!
posted by snuffleupagus at 9:06 AM on April 13, 2022

and Rock Sling, which is found near it. (Possibly this is what Ryvar means by "meteor"? The two spells with "Meteor" in their name are not found in Limgrave;

Sonuva… yes, you’re completely right and this is the result of attempting to write all that from memory after not having touched the game for weeks. Apologies for the hubris.

Also it’s Lhutel the Headless not Lhutveil. At any rate:
Summon Lhutel, wait for him to get aggro
Apply 2x Scarlet Rot via sustained Dragon Breath
Run in circles spamming Rock Sling
…will easily kill most things in the game with very little risk. Multi-boss encounters are *rough*, however, when you’ve been cheesing it thusly for the last 30 hours.
posted by Ryvar at 11:15 AM on April 13, 2022 [1 favorite]

I’m not really a fan of open world games, but I’ve been having fun with ER. I rather prefer its too-little-narrative approach to Skyrim’s too-much-narrative one, though neither is ideal. Have definitely lost far too much of my life grinding in the Glintstone mine at this point. It seems much easier than the toe I dipped into Dark Souls, but anyone taking about one shotting bosses is, I think, significantly underestimating their own skills.
posted by Going To Maine at 12:46 PM on April 13, 2022

Rather the opposite. Which is kind of a case in point; Elden Ring intends to permit this sort of thing.

It took a huge amount of work (like multiple NG runs, and often glitches) to get these sorts of tricks to work in Dark Souls.

You can start trivializing story encounters in Elden Ring after a few hours of fetching once you know where everything is and how to get there. By design. (Although this strat does require Mt. Gelmir, so it's not for early in the game.)
posted by snuffleupagus at 12:48 PM on April 13, 2022

I’m not saying the game is unbreakable, nor am I denying that Elden Ring is easier than Dark Souls. I’m saying that people who are good at hiring Elden Ring bosses are underestimating the skills that they possess. Anyone who is recording YouTube videos about how to break the game is, I think, pretty definitively not a standard player.
posted by Going To Maine at 1:00 PM on April 13, 2022

Rather than One Weird Build to Break the Game, let me suggest a somewhat more boring way to make the game easier and less frustrating: just level up. Level up and invest generously into vigor (health). One shotting a boss with a gimmick build is cool, but you know what's cooler? Not dying in two hits. When boss's attacks takes 1/5th of your health instead of 2/3rds, the game is a lot less frustrating.
posted by Pyry at 1:17 PM on April 13, 2022 [3 favorites]

I absolutely adore this art.

As to Elden Ring, I hated it at first, and then learned that it's a platformer where you need to figure out the moves, and it's totally ok to die a bunch. Now it's a ton of fun.

I absolutely love that there aren't a bazillion little dots on the map and pathfinding to everything. Just let me wander around, and yeah, sometimes get crushed. It makes it a lot more exciting to experience, "Oh my god i'm still alive and going further in this direction than I ever have before!"
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 3:25 PM on April 13, 2022 [2 favorites]

Dying is just part of the game! You don't lose when you die. You're sort of an undead kind of hero, and you will always resurrect, keeping the items you found. Sometimes it makes sense to make a "suicide run" and run past enemies just to grab stuff, even though you know you're gonna get demolished afterwards. But then... you resurrect, and you get to keep and use the stuff you just stole.

Almost every weapon has a different move set. Some poke, some swing and poke, some smash, etc. One weapon is a giant rusty anchor! It's so fun to try this stuff out. And the armor/outfits can be extremely weird and fun to run around in.

These 'souls' games just use dying as part of the mechanics of the game. Just get past the fact that you are going to die a lot and be resurrected and the game becomes fun! I know that sounds weird, but the game is incredibly addictive. Don't worry about dying. It's going to happen. But it's (mostly) a single player game, and you can die as much as you want. Can it get frustrating? Yes, at times it gets frustrating. But you can resurrect and go run off in another direction and go do something else. Frustration is a part of almost every video game. Put it down for the night, come back later, and you'll get past that hard part.

Sure, it's difficult at times. But you practice your skills and it gets easier. There's no clock saying you have to finish the game in a week or whatever. Run around, explore, kill stuff, find weird things, read bizarre item descriptions. Take in some of the best art direction of any games ever made.

I know Metafilterians largely prefer Nintendo games. But I've tried some of those, and they can be extremely difficult! I remember playing Breath of the Wild and dying over and over to some Centaur guy. It's not that different than Elden Ring. Platformers like "Mario Product 48b" are wildly difficult for me. But you resurrect and start over—just like in Elden Ring.

Until I played these souls games, I had a negative attitude about them. But once I tried them? I was hooked. Maybe wait for a sale... then try for yourself. The hype is hype to be sure, but there's a lot of good reason for much of the hype.
posted by SoberHighland at 5:39 PM on April 13, 2022 [4 favorites]

I’m saying that people who are good at hiring Elden Ring bosses are underestimating the skills that they possess

And a lot of the time they don't believe you, because you just don't hear as much from people with average or below average skills. Do they become games reviewers? Usually not. Do they have their own Twitch stream? Usually not.

There's even a lot of incentive to shut up on social media, because if you admit that you struggle with a game there's a decent chance you'll be mocked or lectured about how you just don't understand the game. By now, I think most people know you're supposed to die a lot in From Software game, but some people die a lot more than others.

I've noticed this tendency to underestimate my skills in myself. I'm not even that good! But I have friends who are worse, and sometimes I just don't understand why they're having so much trouble with something. Like, if it's easy for me to recognize a visual cue and parry in time, it feels like it comes naturally; it's not so obvious that to someone else, that visual cue might be harder to recognize or reflexes might be slower.

And I see it from the other side, too. Reading the comments about some of the games I play, people are talking about doing it on ultra-hard with only basic weapons, whereas I feel like I've just about got it covered on normal or regular hard mode with my advanced weapons. Nothing against them, but I'm sure they'd be baffled about how often I miss my shots or get hit by bosses because I ran out of stamina.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 5:59 PM on April 13, 2022 [2 favorites]

ok, umm, so asking for a friend but when you say you can go explore instead of just nonstop combat, do you mean there are really towns somewhere out there with NPCs and plot and conversation trees and legit RPG stuff like in skyrim (or like, ultima vii) or... do you mean i can look at pretty scenery and then back to combat?
posted by wibari at 9:48 PM on April 13, 2022

Very much the latter, but Torrent is very good at avoiding fights
posted by Going To Maine at 9:50 PM on April 13, 2022 [1 favorite]

Don't let all the whole git gud Dark Souls culture put you off Elden Ring if you think it might appeal to you otherwise.

Thanks, but I don't. Make me spend more than a minute interacting with almost any modern game and I feel like I'm being coerced into performing macro data refining; I'm just not into it unless it's exceedingly silly and even that will only give me a few extra minutes of willingness to play. Frankly, I'd almost always just go outside for a walk. The graphics resolution out there is second to none and the UI is super intuitive.

I can enjoy others' enthusiasm for the form, though, and the treatment linked in this post is really nice.
posted by flabdablet at 12:48 AM on April 14, 2022 [1 favorite]

The cryptic aspect of the game does conceal it, and maybe especially from the people who might benefit most from it as inexperienced with the franchise and general video game conventions, but the thing about ER is that it really does let you just nope out of Dark Souls style combat entirely.

You can play it like playing a caster in an Elder Scrolls game. Stand in the buff circle and blast everything with one button, block with the other and without ever caring about movesets. I think I'd get bored with that before completing a play-through, but it is available.

That said, there's no reason to force yourself to play a game that just doesn't appeal to you.

For those on the bubble, the 'girlfriend plays' framing is a wee bit regrettable but this might help. "Noobus Humanus: Elden Ring" (mild spoilers for the first few hours of gameplay, a few characters)

The comments do note that she's no longer a true noob and suggest 'casualus' so that's interesting too.
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:30 AM on April 14, 2022

You can play it like playing a caster in an Elder Scrolls game. Stand in the buff circle and blast everything with one button, block with the other and without ever caring about movesets. I think I'd get bored with that before completing a play-through, but it is available.

You can't really do this. I've been playing Astrologer for a good 80 hours or so. You're still gonna have to dodge and duck and/or block. Many enemies will still flatten you if you just stand still. Standing in the buff circle and nuking stuff with Comet Azur is a stunt that's really only possible at high level or New Game+.

But to the larger point, yes you can play as a Mage type and pew pew spells while your summons tank the boss. Personally I like the Greatshield Soldiers.
posted by Fleebnork at 9:10 AM on April 14, 2022 [3 favorites]

Fair enough! That's a lot more time than I have experimenting with sorcery; and I had a good amount of leveling done before I did. I found it let me tromp around the overworld and clear basic dungeons mostly shield-blocking and kiting and tossing black flame...little dodging or paying attention to closer timings.

It's not for everyone and it doesn't need to be, but I'm glad they made it for more people. It really is an amazing game.
posted by snuffleupagus at 9:30 AM on April 14, 2022

Not black flame, glintstone and gravity stuff. (Black flame is fun too though.)
posted by snuffleupagus at 9:43 AM on April 14, 2022