This post contains spoilers for the end of Elden Ring’s Shadow of the Erdtree DLC.

I’ve never really thought of myself as a Souls Guy but I guess I am. I’ve put hundreds of hours into these things across Dark Souls, Bloodborne and Elden Ring. I navigate Lordran and Yarnham in my daydreams.

I’ve been writing for literally a decade now about Bloodborne and its impact on me, how it changed how I thought about what games were for, how I talk about them. I’ve spoken to friends about how, look, it’s not you against the game, right, it’s you against yourself, you know? You learn a lot about your own brain from how you overcome these challenges and stay calm in the face of frustration. It’s meditative, like.

Shadow of the Erdtree is an excellent DLC. It contains some really wonderfully designed areas and boss fights. Shadow Keep and the ascent up Jagged Peak are series highlights. It expands upon the story and setting in interesting ways. It’s hard, but not undoably so. I enjoyed the challenge, right up until the last boss, and at this point me and myself were pretty united against the game.

Promised Consort Radahn is, to start with, the archetypal Hard Souls Boss - fast and complex movements, long combo chains, hits like a truck. It’s learnable, though, and at this point I can get through most of the first phase without getting hit, usually applying bleed. It’s neat.

Then there’s a cutscene, then it’s bullshit. My guy moves at the speed of light, throws fake ghost attacks at you so you don’t know when to block or roll, has area-of-effect moves that seem borderline impossible to dodge short of just running to the edge of the arena. This is not strictly unique in the pantheon of Souls bosses, but it’s the intensity of it that gets you. I’ve managed to drop him to around a third health before and I’ve no idea how I did it; I think I just got lucky. I can barely land a hit on this lad.

Lots of my favourite moments in games start out like this: impossible, until, slowly and then all at once, they aren’t. The dash in Hyper Light Drifter, the Blood Starved Beast in Bloodborne, finally cracking a raid puzzle in Destiny - these are all incredibly rewarding and justify their own existence with the benefit of hindsight.

Radahn starts out impossible and, many hours of attempts later, remains impossible. I can’t do it.

When I get stuck in a From game I like to look up whatever discussion exists online about the thing I’m stuck on. I tend to play these games slowly, so there’s usually a good amount of chatter by the time I get to it. Often the bosses are “solved”, in that there’s a sort of known-best technique you can use if you get stuck. Nothing like this seems to exist for Radahn. Threads about how to beat him are full of complex builds and loadouts, but there are also lots of commenters saying, simply, “I gave up”.

This is unusual for the Souls community; bloody-minded perserverence is kind of a religion to these folks. What’s doubly unusual in Radahn’s case is the number of responses to these declarations of resignation with, “yeah, fair, me too”.

I’m in a Discord chat with some pals who are all very good at these games. They had encouraged me through the hardest parts of the base game, through Maliketh, through Malenia, through Commander Gaius. With Radahn, they’re encouraging me to walk away now I’ve stopped having fun. “You’ve already seen everything”, Sam says.

It’s true, I have seen everything. I haven’t beaten every single optional boss, but I’ve done most of it, I’ve maxed out my Scadutree whatsit, I’ve been to everywhere on the map. I’m not really motivated to beat Radahn, especially knowing this is the end of the game. There’s nothing more to see.

Ten years ago, at the peak of my Souls obsession, I think I was motivated mostly by the challenge, the desire - the need - to prove myself to myself, to overcome that adversarial relationship with my own brain and push through. I don’t think I have that same drive any more. I’m here for a good time. I’m not so arrogant as to say I’ve nothing to prove, but I’m not going to do it by beating Radahn.

I feel the need to justify my decision - that’s what this post is, I guess - in part because I feel like I need to explain it to a past version of me. It’s also because I’m breaking a rule I set for myself at the start of this year, which was that I was only going to play one or two games at a time, and I couldn’t pick up a new one until I finished one. I’d made space in my head for the understanding that some games would get abandoned because I didn’t want to finish them, but I hadn’t reckoned with the possibility that there would be some where I couldn’t.

Because you and I are friends, I will admit to you that I am quite a checklist-driven person. If I was more into film I’d be a demon on Letterboxd, believe me. This rule I’ve set for myself this year has genuinely been quite fun - I engage more with a game if it’s the only thing I’m playing, and I don’t have to play tedious catchup with the story or mechanics - but pushing through to beat Radahn just so I could mark it “done” on my checklist would be a waste of my limited hours on this earth. My friend William recently wrote about games that do and don’t respect your time. I think Elden Ring is respectful of my time, but it’s on me to respect my own time too, if that makes sense.

I also know, due to the way I tend to play games, that giving up now means I’ll probably never come back to this. Maybe that’s OK. I might not have finished Shadow of the Erdtree, but I am finished with it.

There isn’t even an achievement for beating him anyway.