Shadow Of The Erdtree review: 50 more hours of one of the decade’s biggest, best, and weirdest games

There’s a question that hangs over Shadow Of The Erdtree, the massive, exhausting, gorgeous new expansion to The A.V. Club’s 2022 Game Of The Year, Elden Ring—just as surely as a massive, sky-filling and twisted tree hangs everywhere you look over its shadow-haunted environment, The Land Of Shadow. To wit: How do you add “more” to a video game that is, already, one of the “most” video games ever made?

At some point, maybe a year or so down the line, we’ll have to have a look back at Erdtree, in an effort to understand how it operates within the context of Elden Ring—how the addition of its slate of late-game weapons, brutal new challenges, additional spells, and a handful of genuinely new combat mechanics change the basic flow and play of From Software’s insanely ambitious effort to marry open world exploration to its carefully crafted Dark Souls brand of action. (DLC packs like Dark Souls II’s The Lost Crowns and Bloodborne’s The Old Hunters have benefited mightily from this more holistic view on their additions to an established From game.) For now, though, we have to take Erdtree in the context it can’t avoid: Arriving (on June 21) more than a year and a half after its base game came out, and being received, in part, as a pseudo-sequel to one of the most celebrated video games of all time.

Which might help explain why the 50 or so hours we’ve spent with Erdtree largely mapped on to both the highs, and the lows, of our time with the original Elden Ring. Your initial appearance in The Land Of Shadow is undeniably breathtaking: Autumnal fields, speckled with spectral gravestones, spreading out before you in much the same way that that first glimpses of The Lands Between caught many a gamer by the throat lo these many months ago. Is that a 100-foot fire giant on the horizon? What are those cities? Where the hell do I go from here?

And, just like Elden Ring, you may find that the awe and grandeur of these vistas hit you in cycles—varying, typically, on how frequently the game has been kicking your teeth in at any given moment. (In a fairly standard example of From’s design ethos and/or sense of humor, the very first enemy you’re likely to encounter in the Land is one of the nastiest basic foes operating in the entire expansion. Prepare, as they say, to die.) Meanwhile, the fact hasn’t changed that creating vast new landscapes to gallop across on your beloved goat-horse Torrent also generates what is, essentially, a very hostile version of flyover country for your Tarnished to navigate, scouring maps occasionally featuring very little incident at all, while plugging away for one of the game’s billion or so odd little secrets in the margins. It doesn’t help that Erdtree only starts to get fascinatingly weird when you push out toward its further edges, putting its more normie feet firmly forward; when our first multi-hour session with the game culminated in us 1) exploring a ruined castle that was 2) filled with slightly new variants on armed infantry before 3) facing an absolutely devastating 2-phase boss fight against a soldier armed with deadly swordplay and powerful magic spells, well… We can hopefully be forgiven for finding something a bit rote in the experience.

It doesn’t help that the expansion sometimes fails to find really good ways to incentivize all that player exploration mechanically. New weapons or armor sets are intriguing—we ran into things like boomerangs, katana-lances, and other strange additions to the game’s massive arsenal—but by nature of being late-game content (you have to have killed two pretty powerful bosses to reach the DLC in the first place), you’re put in a position where experimentation often feels like an invitation to be punished. It’s nice that Erdtree generously grants you crafting materials so that you can upgrade (most of) your new toys, but when the game is also throwing bosses with gigantic health bars at you on a very regular basis, it can be daunting to take the plunge and mix things up. The upshot of which is that, not only are you likely to fall back on old reliable techniques (jump, plunge my Wolverine claws into some asshole’s spine, repeat until he staggers or I die), but you can also spend an hour or two exploring a mini-dungeon, defeat its inevitable boss, and walk away with a new piece of equipment whose only practical function is to deliver a tiny drip of lore through its item description.

(The exception to this general rule are Scadutree Fragments, which contribute to the system Erdtree uses to at least nominally balance the different power levels characters might be bringing to the expansion. Starting at 1, and then steadily increasing as you acquire, you can spend these Fragments—mostly laid down the expansion’s main narrative line, but occasionally hidden off the beaten path—to get a flat boost to both your offensive and defensive power. No upgrade or item in our entire time with the expansion was as precious as finding another one of these babies, and it’s a smart way to give players a way to boost their power every time they hit a wall; just go down a different world spoke, get a few more Fragments, and try again.)

After these early growing pains, though—and as we very, very slowly built back up the muscle memory of successful Elden Ring play, which remains a slightly quicker, more flashy version of classic Souls fights, enhanced mightily by the addition of jumps and a more varied set of defensive verbs—Erdtree has steadily grown in our estimation. The outer reaches of The Land Of Shadow contain some of the most gorgeous and fascinating environments that From (some of gaming’s best world-builders already) has ever crafted; a vast field of azure flowers is the least of these gorgeous chunks of fantasy world, and we’ll hold ourselves back from giddily describing others only out of fear of spoiling one of the game’s multiple jaw-drop moments. At the same time, Erdtree retains one of Elden Ring’s greatest virtues: A willingness to hide vast parts of its world behind secret doors, unexpected cave openings, and other esoteric actions. The diligent explorer—and we’d argue that exploration, as much as battle, is what the game is training for—will be rewarded, again and again, not just with trinkets or crafting materials (although again, you’re gonna get a lot of trinkets and crafting materials) but with the genuine prospect of seeing something they’ve never seen before.

All of this works hand-in-hand with From’s deliberately esoteric and mysterious approach to storytelling, always one of the elements that separates the studio from its many imitators. Erdtree’s story largely concerns itself with the hunt for Miquella The Kind, the least-seen of the original game’s warring pantheons of gods. Androgynous, child-like, and frequently described as being both incredibly philanthropic and phenomenally dangerous, Miquella (twin sibling of original Elden Ring superboss Malenia) has been a question mark for the last 18 months. By giving us a far deeper look at his actions and motives—and introducing us to a series of knights in his service, who quest for their missing lord—From addresses fascinating questions about the nature of goodness and rulers in a world operating at the whim of frequently alien gods. Elden Ring is, as ever, sparse in its storytelling—but still incredibly affecting, capable of implying vast universes of meaning with just a few elliptical statements.

We should also note here that we haven’t finished Shadow Of The Erdtree as we go to press on this review, despite (as we noted above) having spent 50 full hours with the expansion. (We’re pretty sure we’re just shy of its final fights, although there is at least one big chunk of our map that remains distressingly unexplored. Maybe if we scour the cliffs over on that half of the map again…) Certainly, we’ve plumbed only a fraction of its depths, even as we’ve fended off cosmic threats, engaged in fascinating duels, and weathered the latest in From’s ever-escalating series of kick-your-ass dragon fights. It’s certainly enough time to know that From’s approach to difficulty hasn’t changed much over the last year-and-a-half: Even with a character capable of beating the base game’s final fights, we’ve spent the last week and a half getting the shit kicked out of us by bosses that can, and will, take huge percentages of your health away with a single combo the first time you storm into their arenas. The thrill, then, still comes in learning these fights, steadily building up mastery, trying new strategies, and slowly, steadily climbing the mountain toward your goal.

If we’re exhausted at the (near-) end of it all, at least some of that can be attributed to our own review rush. But the fact also remains that From has taken when was already a 100-hour game and lengthened it again by half; there’s a certain inherent limit to how many times the company’s impressive array of tricks can continue to work when applied to a world that’s simply this damn big. (We don’t have an exact measurement of the size of The Land Of Shadow, but we’d estimate it’s as big as the original game’s starting areas of Limgrave and Liurnia combined, with multiple full-scale dungeons and numerous major boss fights secreted around the edges.) If you’ve found yourself missing 2022's best game, craving a return to its bleakly beautiful world, it’ll scratch that itch to near perfection. If that idea wears you the fuck out, it’ll do that, too. If you’re hoping for it to be a revolution, the same way Elden Ring was when it arrived back in 2022, well… That’s the one place where Shadow Of The Erdtree can’t quite escape its predecessor’s penumbra. But Elden Ring is a masterpiece; “More masterpiece” might exhaust you, but it’s never something you can afford to turn your nose up at.