OK, to celebrate 200 in-game hours (including afk time at sites of grace <3), time for a review!

Short review: G.O.T.Y.

Long review: ... Too long but did read? ;)

GRAPHICS: Looks like paintings by Zdzisław Beksiński. Stunning. Ash embers in the air. Snowflakes, mists, and sprinkles of the golden grace.

PERFORMANCE: There used to be complaints from players early on about lag etc., so I was a bit concerned when buying the game. I read forums to get more info and actually beforehand did a couple things that were supposed to make it run smoothly. I never had any noticeable issues, I'm not sure if maybe the game froze once or twice during my entire 200 hrs of playing.
What was quite annoying though, is how the camera works and that you cannot look left if you are walking right. Something we do all the time in games like Rust, here requires a constant struggle using physical force, pressing on your controller to counteract the camera stubbornly turning itself. At first camera work made me dizzy, but I got used to it and it's fine now.

MUSIC: Love it. Classic, choirs, monster-harpies singing beautifully songs in Latin. They sing so beautifully that it makes you not want to kill them.

GAMEPLAY: I'm in love with how the game surprises me and plays with my expectations, exceeding them so many times. From location and dungeon design - surprising, using the entire 3 dimensions, so you see one level of a map or dungeon while being on another level of said location, looking around and trying to figure out: how to get there? How do I get there to collect that one shiny item? By circling around? Finding an elevator or ladder? Teleporting? Glitching the game? Finding a secret passage? Jumping through the roofs? Jumping in and out of windows? Double jumping on your horse in crazy killer whirlpools, or jumping the horse into the steep slope of a mountain like you did years ago in Skyrim?

The amount of MECHANICS in the game is so great that there are few players who have used ALL of them in a single playthrough. Most use only 2-3 mechanics of their preference through the entire game, ignoring the remaining mechanics, while other people select just one of them and record YouTube videos about their extreme playthroughs: only spells/only summons/with a pot on my head throwing pots at monsters and summoning a giant pot-friend, the Jar Knight Alexander... you get the idea. There are Ashes of War - spells or skills that can be placed on weapons, that you can take off the weapon and move onto another weapon, adding elemental/DoT (fire, glintstone, gravity, bleed, poison, rot, holy, lightning, etc.) or spells like invisibility, or buffs, then there are talismans, there are arrows of different kinds (and like five or more categories of weapons that you can shoot projectiles from), there are objects you can use from your inventory or from your fast-access pouch to cast spells, summon, etc.; there is food giving you different kinds of buffs; there are at least three different kinds of potions (HP, Mana/FP, and whatever the hell you fancy brewing yourself from the ingredients you unlock and earn through gameplay)...

MAP EXPLORATION: The map is an unknown that pokes your curiosity, requires exploration, and keeps surprising. As I mentioned above, big locations like biomes and small locations like caves or dungeons resemble big and small logical puzzles interlocked with each other. Everything you see on your map, you must first discover or figure out by talking to NPCs, reading item descriptions, giving old ladies sitting on creepy chairs your fingers for them to see your present and future... An oportunity SOOO missed by games like ESO, where everything is given to you on a plate, map shown explicitly and overwhelming you with the amount of quests and markers that give you OCD. In ELDEN RING, the markers appear when you touch grass, meet NPCs, or mark the markers manually on your map. You will never know how big the map actually is, unless you discover every part and region and plane of it yourself (or someone spoils it for you on stream or in a YT video).
The variety of enemies, monsters, bosses, with so many diverse movement sets that never cease to surprise you is probably richer and more numerous than in the entire Assassin's Creed series combined...

EMOTIONS: When you are fighting a new boss, you are feeling hopeful, persistent, frustrated, angry, sometimes you need to grind, level up and come back later, the boss makes you try harder, patiently learn and dodge their sets of attacks, experiment with new techniques and mechanics, constantly switching your gear, talismans, elixirs, equipped spells, companions and weapons, in extreme cases even completely respeccing your character... Then your persistence or experimentation or grind, or all of the above, finally pay off and you kill that boss, finally, your adrenaline rises, you remember them having killed you so many times before, sometimes with very little HP left also on their part... You actually feel a lot of joy and satisfaction, when you finally manage to beat a difficult enemy, or manage to reach a checkpoint, area or location...

And what do you think about Elden Ring? Am I missing something? :) Tell me in the comments :)