There’s a question that hangs over Shadow Of The Erdtree, the massive, exhausting, gorgeous new expansion to The A.V. Club’s 2022 Game Of The Year, Elden Ring—just as surely as a massive, sky-filling and twisted tree hangs everywhere you look over its shadow-haunted environment, The Land Of Shadow. To wit: How do you add “more” to a video game that is, already, one of the “most” video games ever made?

At some point, maybe a year or so down the line, we’ll have to have a look back at Erdtree, in an effort to understand how it operates within the context of Elden Ring—how the addition of its slate of late-game weapons, brutal new challenges, additional spells, and a handful of genuinely new combat mechanics change the basic flow and play of From Software’s insanely ambitious effort to marry open world exploration to its carefully crafted Dark Souls brand of action. (DLC packs like Dark Souls II’s The Lost Crowns and Bloodborne’s The Old Hunters have benefited mightily from this more holistic view on their additions to an established From game.) For now, though, we have to take Erdtree in the context it can’t avoid: Arriving (on June 21) more than a year and a half after its base game came out, and being received, in part, as a pseudo-sequel to one of the most celebrated video games of all time.

Which might help explain why the 50 or so hours we’ve spent with Erdtree largely mapped on to both the highs, and the lows, of our time with the original Elden Ring. Your initial appearance in The Land Of Shadow is undeniably breathtaking: Autumnal fields, speckled with spectral gravestones, spreading out before you in much the same way that that first glimpses of The Lands Between caught many a gamer by the throat lo these many months ago. Is that a 100-foot fire giant on the horizon? What are those cities? Where the hell do I go from here?

And, just like Elden Ring, you may find that the awe and grandeur of these vistas hit you in cycles—varying, typically, on how frequently the game has been kicking your teeth in at any given moment. (In a fairly standard example of From’s design ethos and/or sense of humor, the very first enemy you’re likely to encounter in the Land is one of the nastiest basic foes operating in the entire expansion. Prepare, as they say, to die.) Meanwhile, the fact hasn’t changed that creating vast new landscapes to gallop across on your beloved goat-horse Torrent also generates what is, essentially, a very hostile version of flyover country for your Tarnished to navigate, scouring maps occasionally featuring very little incident at all, while plugging away for one of the game’s billion or so odd little secrets in the margins. It doesn’t help that Erdtree only starts to get fascinatingly weird when you push out toward its further edges, putting its more normie feet firmly forward; when our first multi-hour session with the game culminated in us 1) exploring a ruined castle that was 2) filled with slightly new variants on armed infantry before 3) facing an absolutely devastating 2-phase boss fight against a soldier armed with deadly swordplay and powerful magic spells, well… We can hopefully be forgiven for finding something a bit rote in the experience.