In Search of a Distant Light: Metaphysical Speculation and the Horror of Decision in Elden Ring and Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree

In Elden Ring, the Shabriri Grape serves as a focal point for the metaphysical speculation that has become distinctive of the studio's oeuvre under the tenure of game director and now company president Hidetaka Miyazaki. As the player-character blindly pulls on the threads of Queen Marika's Golden Order, woven as they are throughout the Lands Between, they find themselves inducted into a metaphysical investigation. Elden Ring toys with questions of ontology and subjectivity that challenge the idealist branch of the Western philosophical canon, and in so doing introduces a ludic torsion that requires its players to come to terms with notions of the real and its organization that go back to the beginning of recorded critical inquiry. Elden Ring, redoubling the stylistics of its forebears, is distinctly hermetic in its narrative construction, and consequently it requires of its players a hermeneutic sensibility, a willingness to engage in the interpretation of the textual traces scattered throughout its gameworld, traces such as those which accompany the Shabriri Grape. To follow the guidance of this "yellowing, oozing eyeball," to set off in pursuit of the "distant light" it reveals, the player-character must go to the limits of their knowledge, indeed to the very limit of knowledge as such, to the original scission or abyss from which the world of Elden Ring was born.