When I was a child, growing up in post-communist Romania, very few people owned cars1, and those that did usually had some real clunkers2. Every single weekend some neighbor would be outside from dawn to dusk, banging and fixing on his car for the umpteenth time, trying to get it road-worthy for the week ahead. This...

The most upsetting thing about Elden Ring is not the difficulty, it’s the sheer imagination of the world building. A lot of games are like here’s the snow zone, here’s the forest zone, here’s the desert zone. They’re really not much more than aesthetic changes, a touch of paint really. But Elden Ring says no....