Elden Ring vs Horizon Forbidden West – Which should you get?
A duel of two very good games.
John Hansen 
Screenshot by Gamepur
Any PlayStation player who has been paying attention to the releases of Elden Ring and Horizon Forbidden West will know they are two highly talked about and recommended titles currently on the PS4 and PS5. That being said, not everyone has the time or money to invest in two fully priced giant open world games like these. With this in mind, which should you get?
Elden Ring
The selling points for Elden Ring mostly revolve around the George R.R. Martin written world in a FromSoftware game. This game is massive and challenging, like its predecessors (Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice). If you have played any of those previous titles and enjoyed them, you are likely to fall in love with Elden Ring like so many FromSoftware fans and easily lose up to 80 hours of game time into it. You’ll still have plenty of very challenging boss fights against a host of unique monsters, and this could be the only game you think about for a while if you are as enamored with it as some other people.
With the above being said, like any other game, Elden Ring is not perfect. There have been plenty of complaints thrown at the game’s lack of accessibility and how approachable it is. Newcomers are likely to become very frustrated and easily miss simple basic things a game would normally walk you through, like a tutorial. Some have also questioned the game’s quest design, performance, and stability overall, on PC in particular.
We really only recommend giving Elden Ring a try if you are a veteran of FromSoftware games and you know you will enjoy this kind of challenging game. The game can be very stressful, so this game was made for a very specific type of player.
Horizon Forbidden West
Horizon Forbidden West’s selling points are that it is a follow-up to the great Horizon Zero Dawn from 2017. As with many other first-party offerings from PlayStation Studios, the game is very cinematic, and the characters are loveable. That being said, traversal around the world is not the greatest, and if you haven’t played Zero Dawn, you could feel pretty lost in the story. Also, if you have played the previous game, Forbidden West can feel like the same experience all over again. While there are some improvements and changes, the game can feel like Horizon 1.5 rather than a fully fleshed sequel in parts.
As opposed to Elden Ring, Forbidden West is much more approachable. While there are harder difficulties, you can also fine-tune the experience to suit your specific needs. You can change the damage you and enemies deal to each other as well as a litany of different accessibility settings. Hunting robot dinosaurs is as fun as ever in this game, but the side puzzles can feel like the game is trying to hold your hand through everything too often.
So which should you choose?
Like any other time you have to choose between two games, the choice will come down to your personal preferences. If you enjoy challenging, unforgiving experiences, Elden Ring is about as good of a choice there as ever. Horizon Forbidden West should be your choice if you want to enjoy a cinematic experience with a checklist of things to do similarly to an Assassin’s Creed game. Both are great games and. have been massive success stories early in 2022, so there isn’t really a bad choice here, depending on your gaming tastes.
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