Warning: The following article on Lords of the Fallen committing the cardinal sin of Soulslikes and not resetting elevators contains very minor spoilers for the game. Like, trust me, the disembodied voice at the top of this article. They’re minor.
The one thing I cannot tolerate in a Soulslike is wasting time. Which, given the number of hours necessary to really get anywhere in a genre that punishes players for simply looking at enemy funny, might sound counterintuitive. When you go into a Dark Souls or a Lies of P or anything resembling that structure of action-RPG, you’re making a deal with both yourself and the game that you’ll be spending many, many hours bashing your head against some of the more challenging fights. That doesn’t feel like wasting time because, in most of these instances, you’re still actually playing the game. Dying over and over is part of the experience, so sure, while I may have lost some progress, it never feels like wasted time.
Yet that patience is almost always undermined by the damn elevator. Playing Lords of the Fallen for days ahead of its release, I found myself quite enjoying it. It’s a significant improvement over the original 2014 game of the same name in almost every way and yet… the elevators, man. To summarize my gripe in three words: Elevators don’t reset. “What’s the big deal with that?” you query, no doubt waiting for your chicken to cook through in the airfryer or sitting in the bathtub, enjoying the bath bomb you just lumped under the surface. The problem with elevators not resetting is that it’s a waste of my time and an unnecessary and tedious punishment in a game already loaded with instances of brutal defeats.
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To be more specific and clarify some aspects of this complaint, there are several instances in Lords of the Fallen where elevators can be activated and used as shortcuts back to resting points, known as Vestiges. Generally speaking, they come just before a boss encounter, acting as a quicker route back to the place where you most likely died. That’s great, Soulslike 101. Yet Lords of the Fallen maintains a frustrating standard I had hoped we would’ve been squashed: When you respawn at the Vestige, you first have to manually call the elevator and wait around for it to arrive. Depending on which one you’re using, this can take several prolonged seconds.
I’ll grant that this sounds like a nitpick and to some extent it is. Lord knows one can’t generate content on the internet without picking fights on minutia most people won’t even notice. Those might just be a few moments but given how often you’re likely to die to the bosses in Lords of the Fallen, they’ll add up quickly. It’s made all the more painful by the fact that there’s no real incentive to do anything but wait. I could apply some buffs to my weapons but by the time I’m done, the elevator still isn’t here. Wasting time. So I’m left standing in-game and sitting in real life. There is an instance relatively early in the game where one elevator directly leads into another, which you’ll then also need to call. WASTING TIME.
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I was much more tolerant of this kind of thing when I was younger but, as most people will attest, time is fleeting. The older one grows, the more they become aware of how they spend their precious moments of life. I’ll happily die 20 times to a single boss but if your game is actively preventing me from trying the encounter again, I might as well just go outside and garden instead. Some dorks will likely be jumping up and down shouting, “Tedium is part of the difficulty! It’s testing your resolve!” to which I’d respond that you’re wrong and clearly don’t have to worry about picking your cat up from the vet at 14:00 PM, followed by weekly shop, dinner preparation and then getting a healthy night’s sleep. Seriously, go to bed. It’s late.
I’ll clarify that it’s not just Lords of the Fallen that does this. The issue was first pointed out to me by YouTuber video essayist Joseph Anderson who levied a similar criticism at Dark Souls. That game came out more than a decade ago and it’s tiring to know that despite all the advancements in game design and mechanics, we’re still choosing to wait for elevators.
Let me bookend this by saying that while this may be coming across as negative, Lords of the Fallen is a really good game. It stands as possibly one of the most impressive glow-ups when compared to the original experience. Which makes it all the more frustrating that such a prevalent, recognized issue made it into the release version. At the very least, I hope Hexworks manages to release a patch that resets the elevators.
Or at the very least adds some kitschy music for the long waits.
