Summary
As games veer evermore into realism, it gets harder to make out what’s part of the scenery and what’s not. The loose bricks in oldAssassin’s Creedgames or the polygons plastered on top of hand-painted backgrounds inFinal Fantasywere obvious, but it’s getting difficult to make out what’s interactable with each generation.
The solution? Yellow paint, which isn’t always yellow, and isn’t always paint. We saw this more literally inHorizon Zero Dawnwith cliff edges that you could climb marked in yellow, clearly signposting a path. And we saw it inResident Evil 4 Remakewhereeven barrels and boxes were splattered in the stuff.Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, a less traditional FromSoftware soulslike, introduced a ‘yellow paint’ of its own, though it was subtle enough to fly under the radar.
It has become such a point of controversy thatStar Wars Outlaws even let you turn it off.
Sekiro uses far more subdued white chalk to mark ledges you can climb up and hang onto. The game’s movement was a huge step forward for FromSoftware, introducing a dedicated jump button, grappling hook, and fluid parkour, and so white chalk was used to guide players from area to area more clearly.Elden Ring Nightreign, the roguelite spin-off to Hidetaka Miyazaki and George R. R. Martin’s seminal open-world soulslike, has movement far closer to Sekiro’s, so it also uses subtle white chalk to mark climbable spots.
White Chalk And Parkour Return
Elden Ring Nightreign isn’t just a roguelite, it also has battle royale elements with itsFortnite-inspired Ring of Fire. Across the three days of each match, the circle closes in until an Erdtree appears above the final boss in the final zone. Get caught in the circle at any point and you take damage. This makes exploration far more rapid pace than the comparatively laid-back Elden Ring.
With more pressure piled on top, there are some key changes: every map marker appears at the start, there’s no fall damage, and you can parkour. If you fall into a ravine, you won’t get stuck finding a way out until the circle suffocates you. Instead, there are key spots marked with white chalk that you can scale up. In the above image, you can see one such spot, the escalating stairway of graves.
See Related:Elden Ring Nightrein Wiki
The white chalk on each ledge is more pronounced up close, but after an hour or so, you’ll see those graves piled against a cliff and immediately recognise them as a way up. They, and the white chalk scrawled along their edges, make the improved movement of Elden Ring Nightreign feel far more intuitive. And hopefully it’s subtle enough to avoid the usual complaints yellow paint so often brings.
