Elden Ring — A 40-Year-Old Dad's Review Score: 9.7/10 — Possibly My Favorite Game of All Time I'm 40 years old. I have kids. I have a job. I have responsibilities. My videogame schedule doesn't begin at 3:00 in the afternoon anymore with absolutely nothing planned for the next eight hours. It begins at about 9:30 PM. The kids are finally asleep. Everything that needed to get done around the house is mostly done. I know I should probably go to bed. Instead, I turn on Elden Ring. "I'll play for an hour." Three hours later I'm fighting the same boss for the 37th time, I've lost 80,000 runes somewhere I absolutely should not have been, and tomorrow morning is rapidly approaching. And somehow... This might be my favorite videogame of all time.
I sometimes wonder whether I would have liked Elden Ring this much if I'd played it when I was 20.
I probably would have finished it faster.
I definitely would have slept more.
But I'm not sure I would have appreciated it as much.
Gaming is different when you're 40.
Time matters more.
There are nights when you don't play anything.
Sometimes an entire week disappears.
So when a game asks for 80, 100 or 150 hours, that's a serious commitment.
That's potentially months of evenings.
Normally that makes me avoid enormous games.
With Elden Ring, it had the opposite effect.
I didn't want it to end.
The Lands Between became this place I visited for a couple of hours after everyone went to sleep.
Some nights I defeated a major boss.
Some nights I discovered an entirely new region.
Some nights I spent 90 minutes getting repeatedly murdered and ended the evening in exactly the same location where I started.
And somehow even those nights became memorable.
Is Elden Ring Perfect?
No.
The quests can be ridiculously obscure.
The camera occasionally becomes the hardest boss in the game.
Some enemies and bosses are reused.
There are difficulty spikes.
The storytelling isn't going to work for everyone.
And if you only have limited time to play, you need to accept that this game may take you months.
There were definitely nights when I accomplished almost nothing.
But here's the strange thing.
Those imperfections barely matter when I think back on the experience.
I remember the discoveries.
I remember the bosses.
I remember riding into a completely unknown area and realizing the map was much larger than I thought.
I remember finally beating something that had destroyed me for three nights.
And I remember repeatedly telling myself:
"Okay, after this I'm going to bed."
I was rarely telling the truth.
Final Verdict — 10/10
I've been playing videogames for most of my life.
At 40, I thought I had a pretty good idea of what kinds of games I liked.
Elden Ring reminded me what it felt like to genuinely discover a videogame again.
No checklist.
No constant directions.
No guarantee that you're ready for whatever is around the corner.
Just an enormous, beautiful, horrifying world that seems completely indifferent to whether you succeed.
I probably died 500 times.
I lost an embarrassing number of runes.
I stayed awake far later than I should have on work nights.
I occasionally spent my entire gaming window fighting one boss and accomplished absolutely nothing.
And I'd do all of it again.
Because somewhere between putting the kids to bed, turning off the lights downstairs and sitting alone on the couch with a controller for a few hours each night, Elden Ring became more than a game I was trying to finish.
It became the game I couldn't wait to get back to.
After decades of playing videogames, I don't throw this statement around lightly:
Elden Ring may be my favorite game of all time.
Not despite dying 500 times.
Maybe partly because of it.
Dad Score: 10/10
Hours of Sleep Lost: 10/10
Reviewer Scores
- Gameplay: 10/10
- Immersion: 10/10
- Fun: 10/10
- Story: 8/10
- Graphics: 10/10
- Sound: 10/10
- Replay: 10/10