As good as or better than Hollow Knight in just about every aspect. Mastering the movement and combat in this game feels sublime. It's special and rare to play a game you can be completely immersed in for hours at a time and get lost in a world you can tell was handcrafted with love.

♥♥♥♥ Savage Beastfly

Only took 40 hours to learn it's pronounced shadow instead of scooby doo

Ten years ago, my first attempt at a souls game was DS1. But, I put it down because I couldn't get a hang of the steep difficulty and idiosyncratic mechanics. Fast forward to now, this was the second FromSoft game I ever tried and this time, I couldn't put it down after trying it. Being able to choose where you want to go and when you want to approach bosses leads to an extremely smooth difficulty curve because you can effectively control how challenging you want things to be. Couple this with an incredible amount of build variety leads to being able to craft all sorts of builds with nuanced and fun play styles.

After beating every boss in Elden Ring, I've gone and beaten all of DS3, all of Bloodborne, all of DS1, and even after those, all of DS2.

If there's one thing that clicked for me ten years later, it's that I had everything within me to git gud