As fun as it was finding all the little out of the way passages (and sometimes bosses) in Hollow Knight, I still think Elden Ring reigns supreme when it comes to secrets and discoveries. Again, these aren’t secrets in the same way that Stop ‘n’ Swop and normal Easter eggs are, but rather locations and encounters that are just hidden or locked behind an obscur quest or something. That is to say that Elden Ring and its DLC are absolutely filled with stuff that’s easily missable if you’re not careful, and these are some of the best.
So Ruins and Even More Caves!
One of the things that made Elden Ring such a great experience, I think, was the sheer amount of stuff to find throughout The Lands Between. You could pretty much stand at any point on the map, pick a direction, and find something cool to explore. It was a sense of exploration I hadn’t felt since my first journey through imperial province of Skyrim almost ten years prior, and this time I got to do it together with my friends!
Heroes graves, legacy dungeons, trapped chests leading to the worst places in the world (you know the ones), we sought them out with an almost crazed vigor. My personal favorite of all of these, I think, was the Leyndell Catacombs thanks to it’s tricky looping layout and a long argument with my friends as to whether were lost! Haha!
Siofra River
Siofra was a location that I didn’t actually discover by myself. Rather, it was a spot one of my friends had happened across while he was working on something else and wanted to check it out once I’d finally woken up. After a suspiciously long elevator ride, we alighted to find not the small cave or dungeon that we were expecting, but an entire underground world populated with enemies that were all only to happy to fill us with gigantic magical arrows.
This was still pretty early on in the game, so I’m pretty sure we wound up retreating after just barely making it to the second site of grace down there, but it still left such an incredible impact! I mean, the place isn’t crucial to the main quest, so you could easily miss it if you weren’t all that inclined to explore, yet FromSoftware let us all just find this gigantic space! Incredible!
Volcano Manor (via Abductor Virgin)
I wasn’t all that interested in the Volcano Manor questline during my time in Elden Ring, but man was getting there the first time an absolutely crazy experience! One of my buddies had heard that a certain Abductor Virgin (those chained blade-wielding robotic iron maiden-looking enemies) located at the bottom of the chasm in Raya Lucaria Academy (where the big water wheel is) was special. So we went and found it as a group and discovered that it, for some reason teleports those it captures to the lava field outside Volcano Manor!
Why FromSoft would do it is anyone’s guess, but I’m glad they did because that was one of the cooler discoveries we’d ever made. Was getting throught that lava field an absolute pain in the rear? Absolutely! We had several close calls as we tried to find the correct path through an extracate ourselves from the hairy situation we’d found ourselves in. Would I do it over again if I could? Absolutely!
Mohgwyn Palace
This was yet another place my friends and I wound up in by accident. See, we’d visited White-Faced Varre (the “you’re maidenless” guy) for after completing the quest he gives after meeting him for the second time and got the Pureblood Knight’s Medal. Curious as to what it did, we used it and immediately found ourselves on the doorstep of Moghwyn Palace! Eager to explore, we first set out into the low area around it only to have three giant spectral skeletons appear out of the ground and come after us!
Entering the palace didn’t go so great either thanks to the mobs of red albinaurics and sanguine nobles. Yep, this was indeed another spot to return to later, but it was also yet another awesome surprise from Fromsoft. My friend and I cam back after gaining some upgraded gear and another few levels, and we used it to do some rune farming before trying to take down Mogh…which wasn’t happening since we didn’t have the necessary physick component (and wouldn’t until much later). Still a highlight to bse sure!
Miquella’s Halig Tree
It still boggles my mind that FromSoft hid this behind not only a long-winded and kind of obscure quest, but that they also required you to put two and two together and figure out a puzzle while being stalked by the Black Knife assassin’s! The Halig Tree is by far the most challenging of Elden Ring’s legacy dungeons and home to both its toughest enemies and boss (“I am Malenia…”). It’s a place so packed with content and lore, and yet they still made it a very missable place. It’s an absolutely brutal location to play through, but it was pretty much THE ultimate reward for taking the trouble to seek out anything and everything of interest.
This one was, thankfully, not one my friends and I just stumbled upon. We had an idea that it was going to be a big and tough place and came thusly prepared, be weren’t prepared for just how big and just how tough it was. Getting through the Halig Tree has to have been the single toughest and most rewarding thing we did over our playthrough of Elden Ring, and to think we might have missed it if we were just a little less diligent! Crazy isn’t it?
What were some of your favorite secrets in Elden Ring? Let’s talk about them below and make sure to hang around afterwards for more Sneaky Secrets in September!
Image from the Elden Ring website
VIRTUAL BASTION 