Previewing games is weird, sometimes. You can describe a game’s features, its setup. Provide hints as to its story. These are the easy hits. More difficult, however, is describing how a game feels.

You’ve come here to read about Elden Ring, I know. But indulge me for a moment, yeah? Feelings about games can be nebulous, and difficult - if not impossible - to properly quantify. They’re entirely subjective, and when based upon just a small slice of a much larger work can also quite easily be entirely wrong. And yet… I do trust my gut.

One recent example is Marvel’s Avengers. You never want to stick the boot in at preview too much - things can always get fixed - but I knew that game had problems, despite its massive budget, by the end of a 30-minute hands-on. I can’t even explain it. The game was expensive, lavish, and well-produced. But it wasn’t going to work. I just knew it in my bones. The same was true of Anthem. It was difficult to articulate until I could see the product in full, but I knew something was missing. The flip side can be true too, of course. When I first played Breath of the Wild in a highly controlled Wii U hands-on, I knew I was playing something special. And sometimes we get fooled; Cyberpunk wooed me right up until the reality of the console versions came crashing down. That’s a lesson for all of us.

So, what’s all this got to do with Elden Ring? Well. Typing this makes me nervous, lest I’m wrong, but here goes: it’s giving me that Breath of the Wild feeling. This one could be an all-timer; a game of the generation. That rare game that everybody is going to talk about for a long time, that’ll ripple right through the industry. It’s a big one.

I really don’t want to get into any spoilers in this preview, so I’m going to keep things very vague. I’m not going to talk about any bosses specifically, but I am going to talk about areas I saw, revealing area names, characteristics, and how I accessed them. I made a point of spending my six hours trying to see as much of the game’s world as possible – and I saw more than I could’ve imagined.

The opening of the game has a slight preamble before dropping you into the same setup as featured in the recent Closed Network Test. Since we all know the path there – up Stormhill to Stormveil Castle – I decided to go the opposite direction. Invisible walls gone from this near-final build, I could see the scale of the world, and realize Elden Ring’s trump card: how truly open-ended it is.

Far South of Stormveil I discovered another castle. The serfs here have rebelled. A woman on the path to the castle tells me of their rebellion; her father, a soldier, is still trapped inside. Making my way to the castle, I battle feral dogs and those twisted husks, remnants of the rebelling servants. They worship around a bonfire, atop which is presumably the castle’s one-time owner. There’s a whole mini quest-line here involving retrieving a sword from a powerful boss hiding at the rear of this location – and it’s accessible pretty much right from the start of the game, just in the opposite direction to the path Elden Ring’s narrative tries to prod you in.

Head due east from the path up Stormhill and you’ll find another, very different area, Caelid. As you approach Caelid the sky begins to darken, stained blood red. This whole area is bathed in a hellish hue, with a hill littered with ruined shantytown style buildings that feeds down into a deadly swamp of the same poison. Giant dog, werewolf, beast… things prowl along the way, and occasionally lash out at each other, giving you free EXP when one perishes. To some degree, the gothic nature of this area gives off Bloodborne vibes, even though it doesn’t really look like anything from that game.

To the North of where you start, as established, is Stormveil Castle. But here’s the most exciting thing I found in the hands-on: if you noodle around the outside of the castle enough, your curiosity can be rewarded with the most sacred of all things in a game such as this: a sequence break, or skip. This isn’t glitching; it’s a well-hidden path that lets you clamber up and around the castle, bypassing that entire dungeon and the battle with Margit the Fell Omen. It’s an alternative way to reach the outstretching new chunk of open world behind that castle, a lush forested zone called Liurnia.

What I’m poking at here should be obvious. Elden Ring is truly open. We talk about open world games a lot, of course, but a lot of the time these are linear games that are simply set in an open world. In an Assassin’s Creed, for instance, you can meander the world in whatever manner you wish, but the story missions will broadly take place in the same order, at the same time. In Elden Ring, you can pick a direction and run, and as far as I saw in these six hours, the game will never try to correct you back onto a defined ‘beaten path’.

The Souls structure seems practically made for this sort of setup. It’s always been open-ended and lacking in hand-holding - just in a linear world design. Now the same principle seeps into the world itself. Go anywhere, do anything. It also might make this the most accessible Souls yet, too; despite still being very difficult, the size and open nature of the world mean that you pretty much always have the option to fast travel to another area and explore in a different direction, returning to where you were stuck only when you feel powered-up and skillful enough to shoulder the challenge.

Occasionally the hand of linearity brushes your shoulder, but it’s rarely more than that. Sometimes when you rest at Sites of Grace (bonfires, basically), the mysterious handmaiden that helps you on your journey will appear and offer exposition. I’ve no doubt that figuring out exactly what progression triggers her appearances will become a major point of discussion for speed-runners early on.

Her appearances often unlock new things; it’s through her that you unlock your horse, Torrent, for instance. Then, later, she offers to teleport you to The Round Table, which is a curious addition: an off-map no-combat zone that you can teleport to from any Site of Grace that’s full of friendly NPCs who are also tarnished, like you. I only got to visit it once in my six hours, and at that time areas of it were blocked off including a mysterious open hall absolutely covered in blood stains. I look forward to seeing its role in the full game.

I’m wondering what else to say. The game plays like a Souls game, though as touched on in my previous hands-on, it feels more responsive and friendly, without any softening of difficulty. The shift to an open world format obviously works; the six hours flew by. I can’t wait to play the final thing.

I do have one more thing to share, however. In Lingrave, the game’s first area, I found myself in a forest, at the foot of the Minor Erdtree. I’d had to dodge giant bears and mounted knights to get there. I wasn’t surprised to find a mausoleum-type building in the shadow of the tree; these things are everywhere. But I was stunned when I went inside.

After a load-disguising elevator ride, I found myself in a whole new area: Siofra River. This wasn’t just some dungeon – this sprawling underground river runs directly under huge swathes of the open world map, and appears to link multiple areas through similar mausoleum buildings. It’s just massive, and gorgeous. This is hidden under the map – and again, you can access it practically from the start of the game, if you’re so inclined.

Despite being underground, the ‘sky’ is ablaze with a cosmos of stars. Wondering how this is possible prods one ever-close to a desperate lore-reading spiral. Honestly, as this area opened up before me, I said “holy shit” out loud.

Add all this stuff up and, well, there’s no mathematical equation here. Not off just six hours. What I can tell you, though, is the vibe that I get from Elden Ring is that this game could well be an absolute classic – and it certainly seems poised to be the greatest game FromSoftware has ever made. The next few weeks of waiting are going to be brutal.

Elden Ring launches on PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X, Xbox One, and PC on February 25, 2022.