This 100-hour dark fantasy nightmare is the perfect obsession for Game of Thrones fans

It’s the story, a knotty, complex family drama so twisted it’d pass without question in Westeros. FromSoft’s Dark Souls games are loaded with family drama too, but they tend to mix it with more esoteric happenings — witches tampering with the fire of creation, world-shaking clashes between knights and devils, that kind of thing. Elden Ring‘s lore gets just as mystical and weird as anything else FromSoft’s put out. Brief mentions of elusive cosmic gods in the game have spawned lengthy lore breakdowns from the game’s more devoted followers across the years. But no matter how out there Elden Ring gets, it always comes back to one family.

The trouble starts when mom finds god. Or, more to the point, mom is god after finding a different god that grants divinity of her own. Queen Marika becomes Queen Marika the Eternal, ruling her realm in accordance with the will and dogma of her celestial patron, the Golden Order. Marika takes a consort, banishes death, and brands any who oppose her order as heretics, which, it turns out, is a lot of people, including some of her children. And people who have the audacity to die and continue living. It’s a thing.

Wars break out. The academics cause trouble. Marika boots her consort and finds a new one to make an even more dysfunctional family with, sending his first wife into a depressive spiral and placing her under house arrest for good measure. The children are fighting and forming factions, and one of them’s being really weird with corpses. (And another one’s getting a bit too close with his half brother. Can’t have a Martin story without incest, I guess).

Suddenly, Marika vanishes. No one knows what happened to her and what her Golden Order has planned for the land’s future. That’s where you step in. Everything of importance in Elden Ring happens before you, a lowly, dead warrior granted new life through Marika’s grace (apparently life after death isn’t heretical when Marika does it), come onto the scene. Your job is following another mystical golden woman and doing what she asks. Surely this enigmatic godly woman has everyone’s best interests at heart — but if you think she doesn’t, you’re free to ignore her and do what you want.

The Dark Souls games combine linear level design with a non-linear style of storytelling. You pick up bits and pieces of the narrative potentially out of order from things like weapons, item descriptions, scribblings on a wall, or just the existence of a certain person or monster in a specific place. Elden Ring uses the same kind of storytelling, but, as an open-world game, is also non-linear. The pull of finding some perspective-altering new piece of history is one of the game’s biggest strengths and one of the best uses of the open-world formula. When you see some foul-looking hellhole or mystical-but-probably-horrifying-and-deadly castle on the horizon, it promises a new adventure, sure. But that adventure will also bring new knowledge about what you’re doing and how it fits into the story of this place.

Not all of it moves the foundations of the world. Some elements add to the overall story in small increments, like learning the history of an abandoned shack and the person who once called it home. It sounds silly, but FromSoft deftly handles its storytelling so even these seemingly minor moments are loaded with a richness of their own.

Others open entirely new paths, though, introducing you to competing factions and letting you decide whether their vision for the future — however pestilential it might be — is the most viable. One of Elden Ring‘s best quests is incredibly difficult to find without a guide, takes you across the entire map and into the bowels of the planet, and uncovers a completely new plotline that turns the rest of the story on its head. That one does shake the foundations of the world (and the celestial sphere, too).

It’s a massive game, with enough story to fill multiple seasons of a show, more than enough for HBO to run a few and then cancel the rest (though we’re getting an Elden Ring movie instead). Then there’s the Shadow of the Erdtree expansion, which takes between 25 and 40 hours to beat, for even more to chew on.