By Jonathan Wojcik and Rev Storm
ENTRY 17: ROYAL REVENANTS
One of the most hated jerks in the game! The revenant is like a bunch of pale, stretched out corpses fused together, though with only one ghastly, moaning face, draped in cloth and wearing a crown. It's fast, extremely aggressive, it can teleport, and wherever it teleports it just starts vomiting poison.
Youtube's Zullie the Witch was once again the first person to delve into the game's code and show us what a monster looks like naked, revealing just how wacky and misshapen this big jackoff really is; I like how there's a whole torso branching off the middle, with just one arm and no head. Nice!
The weirdest finding, however, is that these things are mostly hollow, and their underside appears torn open from within. you can also tell they're hollow from their faces, with no eyeballs in their sockets and seemingly no teeth or tongues in their mouths; they're basically just
shells, but why?! The game's code apparently refers to these creatures as "horribleness grubs." This is a much better name than Royal Revenant, of course, but why "grubs?" Zullie and others speculate that it means these are the "larvae" of something else, that perhaps they were supposed to mature into a different, even more terrible monster.
...But the way they're ripped open and empty implies to me that their metamorphosis has already happened, that the "revenant" is like the exuvia left behind when an Arthropod molts, or possibly the remains of a parasitized host body, animated by undeath.
Any number of other monsters in Elden Ring could be the thing that crawled out of the Royal Revenant and kept on growing, but thus far, there are no obvious connections anyone has been able to find.
The Revenants are also reminiscent of "grafting," a concept throughout the game that we'll talk about more in our next entry, but not explicitly the same exact thing. In fact:
Though we met the Revenants first on Rev's original playthrough,
Wraith Callers are an enemy that can be mistaken for a reskin of the same model, and the two creatures are sometimes even encountered together. These are, however, an altogether different model with a more symmetrical body, distinct animations, and all body parts accounted for. Eyeballs and everything! The Revenants are clearly the undead husks of these beings, who are also obviously
not grafted together artificially, but just what turns a caller into a revenant? What the heck chest-bursts these goons, and
where does it go?!
NAVIGATION:
