When it comes to trending video games at this juncture, Elden Ring is one of the leading titles. Now, as someone who has been aware that "it's coming" for some time, I consider this situation somewhat amusing. For literal years, the idea was that From Software was working on Elden Ring with some people joking that it would succumb to the same fate as near-vaporware titles like "Duke Nukem Forever"; thankfully that timeline never became a reality and it seems FromSoft's side projects like Sekiro have only improved the body of features to be expected in all future "Soulsborne" games regardless of whether or not they come from FromSoft.

 

 

That having been said, I do want to discuss this game's relationship with time.

1. The game has only been out since February 25th 2022, just over a month's time at the time of writing, yet people have already verified that they have beaten the game. While this is not that much of an achievement for the hardest of hardcore gamers, I feel it is worth remarking that this game has a record clear time of under half an hour! Distortion2, a YouTuber who focuses on speedrunning this sort of video game genre, has managed to post a world record clear time of 28:59.
2. To put things into perspective, this is a title whose backstory was written by George R.R. Martin, a man who is still busy working on a book series that was famously adapted for a television show, before the books had finished, and reached a point in the narrative that its showrunners decided to run things into the ground and leave anyone who followed the show with a desire for collective amnesia of ever discovering the show. Even with this acknowledgement, here we have a game where other people saw what Martin had written and, this time with the man's consent permission, decided to wreck that world and render it into the present state of the game's world, the Lands Between. Now, some people have managed to beat this long-awaited and well-received title in less time than it takes to watch a single episode of "Game of Thrones!"
3. On another point of great deeds done in a flash of time, this specific video game has garnered over 12 million copies sold in just under a month since it was released. While that sort of math boils down to just over 387,000 units a day and this figure accounts for physical discs and digital copies across all platforms, data behind this breakdown points to a solid 44% of users enjoying the game on PC.

While clearing this title at a record pace involves a melange of quick reflexes, focusing on required bosses over the cool optional ones and knowledge of exploits and outright bugs, I commend the people who can pull it off while I consider myself lucky to have finally beaten Margit the Fell Omen after more than two hours of dogged stubbornness.