Elden Ring's Frenzied Flame could have been scarier
1400 words (6 min)
The Frenzied Flame has a fantastic introduction in Elden Ring. Coming right off learning that Melina has to sacrifice herself to burn the Erdtree, you’re given another option in Shabriri, an eerie character who presents the opportunity to burn yourself instead of her. His dialogue starts out calm and reasonable, an offer that would be more compelling if Melina was more three-dimensional and the player’s emotional connection to her was more fleshed out. As Shabriri goes on, however, his voice becomes unhinged, revealing the true madness behind his request. The slow rise in intensity in his voice lines is extremely well-done, as is the character’s presentation. Shabriri is possessing the body of Yura, a helpful character you would have met several times before and watched die in front of you. While Yura’s voice was gravelly and hardened, Shabriri’s is rounded and soft, with a knife’s edge that slowly creeps in. He claims, dubiously, that Yura gave him his body. He stands with his hands covering his eyes, creating a creepy ambiguity about what his face looks like now. It’s a striking first look at the Frenzied Flame.
Unfortunately, Shabriri is the best of the Frenzied Flame’s horror elements. Other parts of the game try, but fail, to capture the same subtle menace. For example, the Frenzied Flame village is full of people and rats taken by madness, which is eerie on paper, but not in execution. The frenzied villagers act like zombies, possessed by some greater force—like every other villager in the game. A different village that pulls off being creepy far better than the Frenzied Flame village is Dominula, full of dancing, laughing women, which is so unexpected that it becomes unnerving. The rats are a great piece of imagery to be connected to the Frenzied Flame, associated with desperate, fearful, animalistic violence, but they also don’t act any differently than the other rats in the game. If the other rats had AI similar to Dark Souls’ rats, which often ran away before attacking, while the Frenzied Flame rats attacked immediately (or vice versa), it would have created a stronger contrast and better characterized the Frenzied Flame. The flaming eye on top of the tower near the village is also an excellent and unique piece of imagery, but far too easy to disable by killing the villagers beneath it. Madness is also not a very interesting status effect. It works similarly to blood loss, draining both HP and FP. What makes blood loss scary is how aggressive the enemies are—they’ll drain a huge chunk of your health and then keep going, killing you in seconds. Madness-inflicting enemies are not as aggressive, making a madness proc more of a mild annoyance than a serious issue. The animation that plays when you’re afflicted with madness is evocative, implying that the status effect will do more damage than it actually does. If it altered gameplay in some way, like by changing your movement or animation speeds, or even caused enemies to hone in on you similar to the “Shabriri’s Woe” talisman, that might have been more interesting and more in line with the madness theme.
The descent to the Frenzied Flame Proscription is another strong moment of storytelling. Melina’s repeated warnings are alarming, coming from a character who has been so calm and collected, although I wish her voice acting had more emotion behind it in general. One of my favorite lines of hers is “[The Frenzied Flame] is chaos, devouring life and thought unending. However ruined this world has become, however mired in torment and despair, life endures. Births continue. There is beauty in that, is there not?” It speaks to the horror of the Frenzied Flame as something far removed from the natural cycle of life, as well as Melina’s love for this damaged, but not wholly broken, world. However, the gameplay of the descent drops the ball again. It’s yet another frustrating platforming level, and dying over and over on something that should be simple only takes away from the atmosphere. The area is also full of contorted dead bodies. These would be effective if that imagery wasn’t used everywhere in Elden Ring. In Dark Souls, what made the New Londo ruins so horrific was that it was the only location with a massive pile of bodies, so compacted they almost appear to be part of the architecture until you look closely. They paint a grisly picture of violence swept under the rug to maintain the illusion of control, a recurring theme throughout the game. Many of the areas in Elden Ring that would be horrifying on their own—the body dump with Omenkillers in it beneath a fort, the giant ant nest full of rotting corpses, the Gate of Divinity in the DLC—are undercut by the overuse of these piles of bodies, and the Frenzied Flame Proscription is no different.
Another piece of overused imagery that takes away from the Frenzied Flame’s potential impact is fire itself. Fire is used in at least three distinct ways in the game: the Fire Giant and Melina’s burning of the Erdtree, Messmer’s flame, and the Frenzied Flame. While you could make the case for the Frenzied Flame being a disturbing inverse of Melina’s flame, the imagery is too similar to make the Frenzied Flame uniquely terrifying (although I do like its yellow color, presumably a reference to The King in Yellow). Messmer’s flame is more compelling as a dreaded, all-consuming force because its effect on Hornsent and Messmer himself is fleshed out, giving us a three-dimensional character to associate with it. The villagers afflicted with the Frenzied Flame have no real personality or story behind them, unlike the Hornsent, and the only NPCs associated with it are Shabriri, who is criminally underused, and Hyetta, who is interesting but most of her dialogue revolves around asking for “grapes.”
The DLC expanded on the Frenzied Flame with the Abyssal Woods, a somewhat undercooked horror stealth area. Entering the area greets you with some ominous messages, as well as Torrent being too frightened to appear. I’m not sure what he’s afraid of, considering that the main gimmick of the area, the Aging Untouchables, aren’t very difficult to sneak past. The suspense of not knowing what’s coming, only that you have to hide, is much more effective than the enemies themselves, who aren’t particularly scary. They aren’t even in a huge chunk of the woods for some reason, only in the area around Midra’s Manse. Like the descent into the Proscription, the Abyssal Woods takes what could be an unnerving area and undercuts it with slow gameplay mechanics that are irritating to mess up. Dying once and having to restart takes any tension the area was building and replaces it with tedium.
The Abyssal Woods ends in Midra’s Manse, a small but entertaining dungeon. It tells its story through environmental details well, but the disconnected nature of the DLC makes this story less impactful than it would have been. The best storytelling in the DLC is associated with Marika’s backstory and Messmer, with details that give them depth intertwined throughout the map. You feel the weight of the suffering of both the Shamans and the Hornsent everywhere, and a remarkably complex story is told through minimal explicit detail. In contrast, all of the storytelling related to Midra is confined to a single area—not even the entire Abyssal Woods, just his house. This lack of build-up makes Midra feel flat. Obviously, he’s an optional hidden boss, and not every character can be deeply connected to the world around them, but he’s so visually interesting that I wanted more from his backstory. This disconnect also takes away from the impact of his boss fight. His introductory cutscene is one of the most disturbing in the game, but, on an emotional level, you don’t really get the sense that this is the culmination of years upon years of torture endured out of devotion to a cruel love.
As a horror fan, I was intrigued and ultimately disappointed by the Frenzied Flame. It had the potential to be one of the most unnerving elements of Elden Ring. After a strong start, it was undercut by overused imagery and clunky game mechanics. The DLC devoted one of its best bosses to the Frenzied Flame, but outside of Midra’s fight itself, his presentation was lacking. Elden Ring is such a large game that some of its side content will inevitably miss the mark, but it’s a shame that it’s something that had the potential to be so horrifying.