Playing Elden Ring, scientifically determined to be the best video game released in 2022, involves a lot of time spent getting well acquainted with the game’s setting. After devoting hours to figuring out how to navigate being repeatedly beaten, stabbed, or ripped apart by a group of monsters in order to safely walk through a stretch of foreboding wilderness or dank castle dungeon, the player ends up with a mental map of the game’s world burned into their memory.
This makes the game a great candidate for a newly released, fan-made experiment: A GeoGuessr riff that trades real-world locations for ones pulled from Elden Ring’s Lands Between.
Created by a Reddit user who goes by TheEdenChild, the browser game works by pulling screenshots from Elden Ring and tasking players with pinning their location on the setting’s sprawling map. The default mode features five rounds without a time limit and includes the entire game map, but these settings can be tweaked and the location narrowed to five regions—perfect for people who spent so long being mauled to death by Caelid’s tyrannosaurus dogs that they now know its infernal topography like the back of their hand.
In a Reddit post about their work, TheEdenChild writes that they and a friend “have been on a mission to create a GeoGuessr-like experience for our favourite games” and had Elden Ring “high on that list.” They ended up, “after much trial and error,” achieving this goal. The end result includes “over 8,000 locations” from the game, leaderboards for tracking the most talented geographers, and multiplayer.
“We captured hundreds of raw images before stitching them together to create the 360 degree panoramas,” they write. “We also created a semi-decent satellite map of the world to allow more accurate guesses.” TheEdenChild writes that, “if you zoom in enough, you can see animals,” though, as far as we’ve seen, the bodies of horribly mutilated player characters aren’t visible.
Play the game yourself by clicking on over here.
[via PC Gamer]
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