Highlights
- Elden Ring’s Shadow of the Erdtree DLC faced difficulty spikes and mixed reviews, but a patch improved its Steam rating.
- A stone golem petting a lava slime in a dungeon offers a rare wholesome moment in the intense game.
- Players can choose to engage or avoid the stone golem and lava slime, highlighting the game’s unexpected friendships.
Fromsoft’s Elden Ring is a notoriously difficult game, but its latest expansion, Shadow of the Eldtree, almost drove players to despair due to its immense difficulty spike. In light of this, the DLC received a batch of mixed reviews from frustrated PC users who encountered “unbalanced” bosses and performance issues. Thankfully, to combat this, the studio released a patch that made the entire process a little easier to navigate, thus, raising its Steam rating to “mostly positive”.
Who Said Elden Ring Couldn’t Be Wholesome?
There aren’t too many encounters in Elden Ring that you’d consider necessarily “wholesome” but if you look hard enough, you might be surprised at what you may find. If you find yourself running around the dungeon in Ruined Forge of Starfall Past in Shadow of the Eldtree, keep an eye out for a stone golem who just so happens to have a cute little lava slime as a pet.
In this particular dungeon, these pesky lava slimes aren’t your friend and if they fall on you, you can say goodbye to a good chunk of your health, but it seems as though they aren’t as malicious as once thought. In the south corridor, a stone golem (a massive humanoid construct created to protect and guard against intruders) can be seen sitting in the corner happily caressing one of these fiery little creatures in what can only be described as a really sweet moment.
Of course, due to the giant rock enemy being made from stone, it can withstand the slime lava’s temperature, so ideally, making it the perfect pairing. Hey, I’m sure it gets lonely down there for the poor thing, so no judgment from us here.
Although players can jump in and take both the golem and its sizzling “pet” out, they can actually be completely avoided and left to get on with their new-found kinship. In other words, don’t be a jerk and leave them be – do you know how hard it must be to make friends in The Lands Between?