In this way Elden Ring breaks with tradition: not so much a long, dread-infused dungeon crawl, but a world of fragments which, like images in a prism, align themselves depending on the player’s position.The Burial of the Count of Orgaz (1586–1588)ĭomḗnikos Theotokópoulos ( Greek: Δομήνικος Θεοτοκόπουλος 1 October 1541 – 7 April 1614), most widely known as El Greco ('The Greek'), was a Greek painter, sculptor and architect of the Spanish Renaissance. Challenges can be approached in almost any order, dungeons explored, horrors experienced, secrets unwound at leisure. Whether they resemble a rocky hillside from which the remains of a gothic cathedral has been cast, or an extreme close-up of a fungally-infected corpse, the regions of the game provide visually expansive canvases onto which secrets, caves and ruins can be delicately placed. Unlike FromSoftware’s labyrinthine predecessors, Demon’s Souls (2009), Bloodborne (2015) and the Dark Souls series, Elden Ring presents the players with an open landscape, a vast territory which the player can freely navigate.Īs you explore, this world expands impossibly, down to purpling depths or up to crystalline peaks, testing your sense of scale and direction. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons Museo del Prado, Madrid Public Domainīut it is not just about Elden Ring evoking Bosch, because as I sank hour after hour into my journey across its ruined lands, I found myself coming back to those harsh and unusual crops that Boschbot churns out as the key to something the game was also exploring.

Hieronymus Bosch, Garden Of Earthly Delights, 1490-1510. The premise, which casts the player as a ‘tarnished’, a pitiful figure aspiring to ascend to sainthood through the murder of corrupt demigods, sets the scene for a diseased landscape of wartorn hovels and besieged castles, where wraith-like knights and twisted monsters pick at the remains of once grand ruins. But Berserk itself is a melting pot of pulp and classical imagery, welding Gustave Doré’s inferno or Caspar David Friedrich’s trees to the likes of The Evil Dead (1981), with Miura even drawing demons directly from the work of Bosch into his devilish bestiary.Įlden Ring then continues this amalgamation of pulp and religious art, and is filled with Boschian strangeness whether in its battles with misshapen monsters, interventions into rituals of obscure provenance or oscillation between the horrifying and the ridiculous. Developers FromSoftware have never been shy about their influences – particularly the heavy influence of the late artist Kentaro Miura’s dark fantasy manga Berserk (1989-2021) on their games’ weighty armour, massive swords, and horrifying beasts. Public domainįor those familiar with Elden Ring, the association here might already be obvious, but for those yet to visit the game’s ‘lands between’ it is worth unwrapping this connection. Bosch’s work, more than 500 years after his death, still retains an incredible power, but also a wonderful and much-debated sense of obscurity was he a grotesque humorist or penitent painter of horrors? A religious progressive or a fanatic?Ĭaspar David Friedrich, The lonely tree (Der einsame Baum), 1822, Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin.

There’s a vital energy to these unusual details, where chimeras of object and beast gurn at unseen targets, and blithe faces stare at severed hands or bloodied swords with saintly calm. Its Instagram and Twitter accounts post cropped close-ups of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden Of Earthly Delights (1490-1510) and The Temptation of St Anthony (1501) every few hours (and the results are hypnotic).īosch’s surreal, anachronistic paintings are an obvious delight, but it is in this form, where the close crops uncover secrets and create associations between framed subjects that they seem to shine. Courtesy perhaps it was in that flurry of Elden Ring screenshots that drowned my social media feeds with windswept landscapes populated by bizarre monstrosities, that I formed an association between the game and another, more personal online obsession: Boschbot.

Swords and souls paintings