Today's monster DOESN'T SIT STILL. How are you supposed to enjoy looking at it in-game, let along get any adequate screenshots, when it won't stop ZIPPING AND WIGGLING AROUND LIKE A MANIAC
GET BACK HERE AND SLOW DOWN!! CALM THE HECK DOWN! QUIT IT!!!!!
...But even when you find a fairly up-close screenshot, it's hard to really tell what it is you're looking at. It's vaguely reptile-shaped, pulling its long lizardy body with a pair of large humanoid limbs. It also appears to be made entirely of gnarled wood, but it's thickly encrusted with lichens, fungi, whispy hair-like moss and the gruesome, slimy red tissues of the scarlet rot, which visibly throb and pulsate over its entire twisted, crumbling body.
It's such a convoluted, messy design that it's easier to describe as what you'd get if someone skinned godzilla and rolled him around in the garbage. You would never expect such a thing to move like a caffeinated weasel, but the disorienting combination of its frantic energy and anatomical anarchy is certainly memorable; nothing like fighting to the death against a tornado of gory compost.
It's pretty close to a somewhat broad category of creature I came to think of as a "crawling shambler" when I was a kid; any large, messy heap or blob that has to drag itself around by its forelimbs. A regular shambler, mind you, is any large messy heap that just walks. I guess there's quite a few things that "shamble" in Elden Ring. Almost most things, really.
Since youtube's Zullie has uncovered a lot of other data we used for this feature, I'll also directly add one of her videos here, since she outlines how the tree spirit may actually represent the evolution of an unused Dark Souls boss!
