… or maybe it’s a sign that I need to go back to The Lands Between.
Recently, I’ve been plodding along through the recently re-released RPG Risen. Befittingly for such an understated game, the re-release didn’t even call itself a ‘Definitive Edition’ or ‘Remaster’ or ‘Game of the Year’ (any game can do it), or similar. It’s just ‘Risen,’ a largely forgotten yet deceptively deep RPG from 2009 that you can now play in its full 4K glory (or lack thereof).
There’s a lot to like about Risen if you can get around the jankiness (it is made by quintessential ‘Eurojank’ developer Piranha Bytes, after all). It’s got a reactive world, solid voice-acting, and interesting player choices to make. It’s also pretty damn hard in a way that many games were moving away from at that time. Out two years before From Software hit the big time with Dark Souls, Risen was at the time one of the few games sticking to an old-school kind of toughness.
I discovered this the hard way by getting caught up in a vicious battle of attrition across easily a dozen quick-loads, when I got utterly fixated on taking out a seemingly bog-standard pack of wolves. Situated a little bit off the beaten path to the main city in the game, I didn’t even have to fight them, but having got utterly obliterated by them the first time, something about the fight just gave me flashbacks to this time last year, triggering in me an Elden Ring-like obsession with mastering the move sets, timing my strikes, and besting my foes through good old-fashioned patience and trial-and-error.
With a bit of flattery and imagination, the combat has quite a FromSoft flow to it. Enemies deal high damage, there’s a distinct lack of flashy, flippy moves if you’re a melee build, and you evade attacks by either blocking with your shield or doing a very Bloodborne-like slide-dodge thing. These wolves have some serious poise too; brute-forcing them isn’t really an option as they can just cut you off in the middle of your attack with a vicious triple-bite. You also can’t pause to heal, so need to do the whole ‘back away then find the right moment to gnaw on a hunk of bread’ tactic.
So it really is quite Elden Ring-like, as you dash about, look for those precious openings, and try desperately not to get hit. Sure, you don’t have a stamina limit so can just turtle up in a permanent block, but on the other hand the four-directional dodging and strange wolf animations where they seem to be quite far away one second, before somehow breaking the spatial continuum and jerking into a position right in front of you, gives these beasts that ‘Margit when you’re Level 10’ feel.
Through many tense moments, bated breaths, and silent screams of frustration, I slowly began to figure out the janky, jerky rhythm of those damn wolves, kiting them around, learning that sometimes they’d do a triple attack, sometimes a single attack followed by a delayed second attack, and eventually slaying them one by one.
I don’t know how much time it took me to achieve this–somewhere between 15 and 90 minutes–but damn did it give me that Soulsian rush. Weirdly enough I put Risen down after this encounter and haven’t gone back since–I think I’d reached my eurojank threshold for now–but perhaps my desire to fight some random-ass wolves in Risen for however long it was reveals a deeper longing. Having not been there since my initial ascent to Elden Lord some eight months ago, maybe I can hear the Lands Between calling me back…
