Eldest Souls Preview – Challenging The New Bosses In Eldest Souls: Depths Of The Forgotten

Last summer’s challenging action game Eldest Souls gets a beefy – and free – expansion today called Depths of the Forgotten. New and old players will find three new areas that contain powerful bosses waiting to be defeated. In addition, there is a Boss Shard expansion with 12 new infusions, four weapons, customization of weaponry, and other lore bits that flesh out the story. 

As someone who enjoyed Eldest Souls (check out my review), I was excited to revisit the game and test my skills against Depths of the Forgotten’s new challengers. The challengers thrashed me as expected. Here’s a breakdown of what each one entails.

The Rotting Crown

This decaying mass of royal flesh loves swinging a long-reaching ax that shaves off a huge chunk of health if you’re on the wrong end of its blade. The Rotting Crown, a former monarch summons his zombified minions for service. These shambling corpses primarily serve as a distraction, but they’ll unleash a small, damaging blast if you get too close. The minions will not be affected by your attack. You can strike the two big bells located on opposite ends of the arena to create an interesting element of interaction. The Rotting Crown unleashes arena-wide, pattern-based attack and lobs energy orbs. It was crucial to manage the small fry and monitor bell cooldowns, while simultaneously taking huge shots at my boss when I could. Similar to the bosses found in the main title, the boss requires you to multitask and it can seem overwhelming. With each effort, however, I was able to see more possibilities and the Rotting Crown made for an interesting addition to our existing foes. The entire battle against The Rotting Crown can be seen in the video. 

The Disowned Daughter

Eight-legged terror The Rejected Daughter disembowels her victims with twin, scythe-like hands. She’ll even spin her whole body to bounce around the stage like a grotesque buzzsaw. She loves to use venom-based poisons to inflict pain on players. For example, she sprays the arena with dangerous green zones. The only way to purify these areas – and yourself should you become poisoned – is to drink from one of three fountains. The wells are recharged after every use. To make the fountains unaccessible, the Rejected Daughter sometimes blankets the field with her webbing. Her web also slows your movements, meaning you’ll need to focus on attacking the web sacks generating the threads to free yourself. I found The Rejected Daughter to be the fastest-pacing fight of all three. This is due to the fact that she has to handle status ailments and its implementation, as well as because spiders can be pretty cool.

Zylad is the Lord of Steel

As his name suggests, Zylad is an armored-clad warrior wielding a vast arsenal of weapons. Various types of swords, shields, spears, scythes – you name it, Zylad probably uses it, and he isn’t shy about throwing all of these killing instruments at players. Since they’re all floating around the arena, surviving means keeping your eye open to see which one makes a move while keeping tabs on Zylad himself. Zylad’s deceptive and unpredictable way of combining weapons attacks makes him one of the most difficult to defeat. It was often that I thought he would go zig-zag where he went, and Zylad has a special fondness for large-reaching attack with wide ranges. It doesn’t matter that it feels great to bring him down.

Deeps of The Forgotten is a great reason for Eldest Souls lovers to get back to their roots and endure more challenging bouts. If you’re up for the challenge, you can play the expansion now on all platforms you can play Eldest Souls. That’s PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch, PC.