MAN FLY

Man Flies are almost all that's left of a town struck by a mysterious plague, scuttling over piles of bodies and occasionally seen "praying," perhaps because they hope their humanity will be restored, though there's no telling they have any idea what they're doing anymore; they could just be so far gone, they mindlessly repeat behavior from their former lives.

From the ribs up, the design is basically a bandaged and withered mummy corpse, but a bare spinal column connects to the lower legs and a curved, pointed abdomen. A pair of insectile bone limbs sprout mid-way down the spine, and a set of beautiful, green-tinged membranous wings are draped down its back. Very cool! I'm not going to delve too deep into the convoluted lore theories here, but there's a video from good old reliable Zullie the Witch detailing more aspects of these monsters.

BIG MOUTH IMP

A new variation on the impish, stone gargoyles from the main game, this imp's mouth is stretched around a relatively massive barrel-like aperture, which of course blasts fireballs. The imps were already a lot of fun, the addition of this wacky cannon-faced subspecies is even more delightful.

FURNACE GOLEM

This one was shown off a lot in the DLC's trailers, and it's definitely a striking visual; an absolutely immense "wickerman" kind of figure with a body that flares open into a huge open-topped conical basket. Its interior not only roils with flame, but it's packed full of human bodies forever reaching out through its woven exterior. For good measure, it's got a gorgon-like stone mask hung on the front.

GRAVE BIRD

LOVE these goofs! Grave Bird hangs out in graveyards, of course, and kind of looks like a heron or stork, but with a shorter gull-like beak. Its feathers look biological, but most of its body including the head looks carved from stone, with strange swirling designs on its helmetlike face instead of eyes.

"HIPPOPOTAMUS"

Sure, okay, a "hippopotamus." That's what we're looking at here. Why not. It certainly has a hippo's mouth, amphibious habits and lust for murder, but its huge, bulging cranium and beady eyes have a more elephant-like or even human-like quality to them, with pointed little piggish ears, a gigantic rhinoceros-like horn and a dark shaggy "mustache" that might just be dangling, rotten waterweeds. Its body is meanwhile coated in patches of shaggy white fur, its legs are crocodilian, it has a long furry tail and various bony spikes protruding from its skin. Weirdest of all are the porcupine-like quills it can extend from its back, and even launch!

As the world's actual deadliest land mammal after our own species, it's a lot of fun to include a "hippo" in this nightmarish fantasy realm, and it's interesting that it incorporates a number of other exotic beasts you might find wildly misinterpreted in some medieval bestiary.

PUTRID FLESH

Okay, this is just some putrid flesh, just a ball of rotten nasty purple meat, and there's virtually nothing else I can say about it. But I LIKE it, okay? I like blobs! I'm a blob kinda guy! There are Elden Ring critters I'd choose first as pets, but if you gifted me a real live Putrid Flesh I would honestly not be disappointed at all.

DEATHBLIGHT EYES

A pretty fascinating "variation" on the basilisk, kind of, in that the Deathblight Eyes are just a giant, floating, ghostly pair of disembodied eyeballs that can, as the name implies, afflict you with deathblight. I am a very big fan of hovering eyes, and even moreso when they're JUST eyes. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate an eyeball critter with tentacles and flesh and stuff too, but a totally bare eyeball that's still alive? SIGN ME UP! Sign me up for what? I dunno, just sign it already!! I like it even more when they're in a pair, which isn't nearly as common as a singular floating eye. I've actually seen this in just one other game, a family of enemies in the original Mother ("Earthbound Zero") known as Watcher:

And yes, of course Watcher (and its many variants!) are among my favorite Mother enemies. Good to see they're still getting work, and for triple-A hits!

If you track the Deathblight Eyes back to their origin point, though, you find a motionless statue of a Basilisk. My guess is that a Basilisk is used to create a magical security system.

ROMINA

Hey, it's your wife! At least, according to most of you on my Tumblr dash. We won't get into this one's backstory either, because it's involved, but while Romina is kind of mostly humanlike from the waist up, her GIGANTIC lower half replaces her legs with a big huge scorpion tail and a big huge centipede, not to mention a needly stinger right in between them for good measure. Now, I'm not sure if this is intentional or not, but what struck me about this design is that it represents every single kind of "stinger" used by a predatory arthropod. We call it a "sting" whenever the venom is injected by something other than the mouth, right? And a centipede doesn't really have "fangs;" its venomous jaw-like structures are really the first pair of legs! So you have the "stingers" of a chilopod, the stinger of an arachnid (scorpion), and the stinger of a Hymenopteran like a wasp or ant. Every other venomous arthropod I can think of is either an herbivore protected by stinging spines, or a predator that bites with its mouth. Am I the only one who cares about this? I've gotta be in like the top 100 people who care about this. Surely.

PUTRESCENT KNIGHT

I like how many Elden Ring bosses are something a little too large and almost a little too weird to be riding on a horse. A horse is such a familiar, mundane thing to see underneath something that looks like the corpse of a space alien.

Putrescent Knight is a rotten humanoid being with a giant, swollen barrel of a ribcage, one regular skeleton arm, one skeleton arm with a gigantic skull-lined crescent blade thing on the end, a long flexible skeletal neck and an ADORABLE little noseless, mouthless skull head. Basically just a bone sphere, really, with brightly glowing eyes.

Again, what a weird, weird thing to see riding a horse. It's a pale, spooky horse with no eyes, but a horse nonetheless.

METYR, MOTHER OF FINGERS

Remember FINGERS? All the weird spooky FINGER stuff in Elden Ring, and those giant crawling hand creatures? There's a whole area devoted to them, with giant petrified fingers sprouting from the ground and hand monsters lurking just about everywhere, along with some other new stuff we'll be getting to in a moment. This area leads to a boss battle against "Metyr," and her title, Mother of Fingers, implies she's where a lot of these monstrous digits actually come from.

Metyr's design is hauntingly weird, eerie, and kind of a little cute, which we'll summarize from tail to head: said tail is two giant, gnarled, diseased looking fingers coiled around each other, lined with lots of tinier curled fingers. The body is an egg-shaped mass of flesh with over a dozen fingers for legs, the front of the body is a big putrid looking mass of flesh erupting with, you guessed it, tons of tiny little fingers. She has two arms, which actually do look like arms, but you'll never guess what they have clusters of at the end, which I guess is also true for YOUR arms, so, touche.

Metyr's "head" is much weirder than just another hand or single digit. Picture a fat finger or thumb that's so irregularly swollen and lumpy, it almost looks like an entire malformed, hunched human body, the final joint bent upward, and its well defined swirly fingerprint serves as the "face," which even glows from its center!

The battle against Metyr feels like a homage to the battle against Rhom in Bloodborne; she isn't really that aggressive, herself, behaving more as if she just wishes you would leave :(

JAR INNARDS

Holy shit...THAT'S what's inside the jar guys? Or at least, one possible result of their creation? We knew they were full of organs and meat, but the "Jar Innards" monster is odder than that; a big sloppy balloon-like glob of veiny organ flesh with a number of crooked human limbs, including a blindfolded, long-haired face. This ties in to a specific character and other lore, but again, I recommend the lore videos from a number of fine youtubers!

SPIRIT EEL

CUTIES. Oh my god. Of course these were immediate fan favorites; they struck gold with these little fellas! Their internal name references garden eels, which are pretty popular aquarium attractions in Japan, and these creatures behave in a very similar fashion, peacefully bobbing and swaying from holes in the ground. They look a lot more like earthworms than eels, however, complete with a paler stripe down the middle like an earthworm's clitellum. They have teeny, tiny little humanlike arms farther up, a few wisps of long white hair, and a blunt, rounded head end with three identical, dark holes for a "face," like the holes of a coconut! PRECIOUS!

Don't make them mad, though! If you bother a Spirit Eel, its head swells up and glows pink before it pukes up a bunch of ectoplasmic strands, kind of like the defense mechanism of a sea cucumber or the feeding proboscis of some ribbon worms! You won't find much to their lore even if you look, though; no known text in the game ever references them. There's not really any clue as to what they represent.

AGING UNTOUCHABLE

These enemies are notoriously, infuriatingly difficult to fight or even to avoid, but DAMN they're cool! An Untouchable is a shriveled, hunched human figure in tattered robes, with a gnarled little cane, weighed down by an enormously swollen head that looks kind of like a roundish cage or basket of black veins and hair, surrounding a luminous yellow core with a number of smaller yellow nodules hanging in its hair clots.

And when you get close...

Hey, that's clearly another Bloodborne shout-out! The core swells into a big, warty mass of irregular yellow eyeballs, calling to mind the Winter's Lantern, Brain of Mensis and Amygdala!

These beautiful weirdos even drop an item called Winter Lantern Fly, a single little blob of their glowing tissue and hair hanging off a few tattered wings reminiscent of corn husks. According to its description, the volatile eyeballs are called "Frenzied Flame Grapes."

SCADUTREE AVATAR

This is the next to last thing I'm going to review, but in my opinion, it's the raddest addition to the entire game. This incredibly tough boss is one giant, wilted mass of plant matter with a titanic dead sunflower for a head, possessing a few little orange lights as "eyes" in the center. Sunflowers, especially when they've passed on, already look like strange and otherworldly monsters, so it's about damn time a big withered up sunflower get a shot at being a video game monster, let alone such an imposing one.

LAMPREY

At last, another video game shows appreciation for these lovable jawless fish. When was the last lamprey in a release by a major video game studio? Was it in fact Pokemon: Black & White over a decade ago?! Elden Ring's giant lamprey enemies are as grim and threatening as you would expect from a Souls game, huge and looming things with an unsettling dash of human anatomy. The design features looong arms with large hands, a ribbed torso-like upper half and a long, dangling tubular head with eight mournful looking humanlike eyes in two rows down the front. This is also a bit of a pun, because the Japanese term for Lamprey references "eight eyes," though that actually refers to their little circular gill holes!

Of course the lamprey has the signature rasping sucker-mouth you expect, though it's not as circular as the real thing; the swollen, reddish gums and clustered multi-layered teeth are arranged a little more into two opposing halves, which is to say, just a little more human. You'll also find Lampreys that are a bit paler and pinker, Lampreys with tattered remnants of clothing, and an associated item that references something "squirming" inside someone's body; these used to be PEOPLE! That, or they're born out of people, but could still be distinct individuals, who knows. Especially odd is that these are associated with the field of giant fingers, and tied to all that weird finger sorcery, but what's a Lamprey have to do with fingers?! They don't have them! They don't even know what they are! I mean, these do, but that's because they borrowed them from humans!

Their overall shape helps them blend in a little with the big fingers at a distance, so there's a few fan theories that these are humans who tried to become finger-beings. Why did that, instead, turn them into cartilaginous aquatic chordates? You REALLY have to screw things up for a jump like that. That's like wanting bird wings and turning into a frog, except birds and frogs are a lot closer to one another in evolutionary time than lampreys are to anything that ever had a finger.

TOXIC MOSSLING

A little straggler I totally missed, until a handful of people pointed it out all at once! Toxic Mossling is a crafting item found in poisonous swamps, but it also qualifies as a newly added creature, because it's another case of Elden Ring depicting a real organism in some fashion for the first time in any known video game: a BRYOZOAN!

I write about these HERE!