Elden Ring

This game is absolutely incredible. The enemies are well designed and fun to fight, the world is massive and fun to explore, and the sense of progression is perfect and doesn't feel too slow or too quick. The narrative is admittedly hard to follow at times, but is great once you piece it together. However, being the first Fromsoftware open-world video game, it comes with its own caveats. The lack of a quest log baffles me, and makes side quests extremely hard to follow if you have a lot of them at once. Eventually I would just forget the side quests that I didn't consider important enough to remember; there are so many quests, and if you end up prioritizing something else and not doing a quest until, say, a couple (real life) weeks later, it's easy to forget what they were about or what you were supposed to do. It doesn't help either that the game doesn't tell you when you start or finish these quests. There really is no way to keep track of your quests whatsoever. And although this may piss off the diehard Fromsoftware fans, the multiplayer in this game is abysmal. When playing with the mod 'seamless co-op', multiplayer is incredible. In vanilla though, your co-op partner is weaker and has less flasks, you're unable to use torrent, you are locked in specific areas, and the worst part; invasions. I hate invasions. I don't want to be attacked randomly by a player with a PVP build when me and my mate both have builds for fighting enemies and bosses. I just want to explore the open-world with a friend and kill every boss and/or enemy we come across in true Dark Souls fashion. With seamless co-op, me and my friend have killed every boss in the base game of Elden Ring, and it was a great achievement I remember to this day. Without the aforementioned multiplayer mod, this would have been immensely frustrating. I also found the open world extremely boring once you get to the snowy region of the game; I found the map started looking like much of the same wherever you look. If it weren't for these caveats, this game would be pretty much perfect, and easily a 5/5.