If FromSoftware has demonstrated anything about its game design in the last decade-and-a-half it’s that it has a bottomless well of ingenuity when it comes to designing characters, enemies, and bosses in the darkest corners of science-fiction and fantasy. Between the progenitor Demon’s Souls and the upcoming Elden Ring Nightrein, FromSoftware has never faltered in its ability to produce alluring and nightmarish monstrosities, and a lot of the time these designs have happened to mold themselves brilliantly after a particular animal, reptile, or insectoid.
FromSoftware has dabbled heavily in spiders via bosses such as Demon’s Souls’ Armored Spider, Dark Souls’ Quelaag, and Dark Souls 2’s Freja. Spiders have been featured as ordinary enemies in FromSoftware’s action-RPGs, too, even in Bloodborne, and Elden Ring’s co-op spin-off, Nightrein, has teased more to come. But while Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree traded spiders for horrifically unique arachnids, Elden Ring and its DLC are far more ingrained in reptile and serpent imagery. Following Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice in this regard, FromSoftware has outdone itself with its scariest motif yet when it comes to snakes.
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice Brought Beady-Eyed Snakes into FromSoftware’s Fantastical Picture
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is one of FromSoftware’s rarest outings. Fleeing from FromSoftware’s tried-and-true RPG genre trappings, Sekiro is an action-adventure game with a scripted protagonist, multiple skill trees instead of customizable stats, and a single sword supplemented by different abilities and prosthetic tools.
Likewise, being set in a fictional Sengoku-period Japan, Sekiro tackles much different imagery and atmospheres in its snowy slopes and massive castles. Still, Sekiro immerses itself deeply within creative and ghastly enemy designs between Long Arm Centipede Sen-Un, Headless, and the Demon of Hatred. Two identical, recurring foes that aren’t technically bosses in the traditional sense, however, are Sekiro’s Great Serpents.
Behaving more like environmental obstacles than actual bosses, Great Serpents pose a huge threat as colossal beings that Wolf can’t hope to slay like he would any ordinary enemy.
Nonetheless, having these enormous, coiling, eggshell-white serpent gods belong to Sekiro’s world stamps an indelible signature on the game apart from all of the ancillary snake motif imagery seen elsewhere. The snake motif and Sekiro are now synonymous with the former complementing the latter and, while that could have sustained Sekiro alone, FromSoftware decided to double down on snakes when it came to Elden Ring and its Shadow of the Erdtree DLC.
Elden Ring and Shadow of the Erdtree Have Allowed FromSoftware’s Haunting Snake Motif to Persist
Indeed, the most enduring snake imagery found in Elden Ring is undoubtedly Volcano Manor’s God-Devouring Serpent/Rykard, Lord of Blasphemy, whereas in Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree it is Shadow Keep’s Messmer the Impaler/Base Serpent Messmer. It can be easy to overlook this recurring motif due to how sprawling and diverse Elden Ring’s dark fantasy influences are between the Lands Between and the Land of Shadow, but it’s interesting and of note that FromSoftware would immediately follow a tremendous snake presence in Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice with a similarly comparable one in Elden Ring.
In particular, Messmer—a mandatory boss tucked away in Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree—was the crowning achievement of Shadow of the Erdtree’s pre-release marketing, complete with a statue that players could purchase, and therefore its snake imagery has been displayed with a wholehearted flourish.
FromSoftware has never been a studio whose formulas, while systematic and patternable at times, have ever been wholly repetitive or predictable. As such, it’s impossible to estimate whether its burgeoning snake motif will carry over into Nightrein, much less whatever brand-new action-RPG IP it happens to develop and add to its growing catalog of community-dubbed ‘Soulsborne’ titles.
- Released
- June 21, 2024
- ESRB
- M For Mature 17+ Due To Blood and Gore, Language, Suggestive Themes, Violence
- Base Game
- Elden Ring
- Developer(s)
- FromSoftware
- Publisher(s)
- Bandai Namco Entertainment, FromSoftware
- Multiplayer
- Online Co-Op, Online Multiplayer
- Engine
- Proprietary
WHERE TO PLAY
- Platform(s)
- PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S
