Elden Ring is one of the great video games that have hit stores over the last month and has become an instant success, thanks mainly to the talent of FromSoftware and a legion of fans who have been eagerly awaiting it for many years months. And such has been its impact that it remains at the top of the Metacritic ratings with ratings that do not fall below 96. Something never seen in these dark times of review-bombing .
die another day
If you are playing Elden Ring , surely you have already tasted what it feels like to die over and over again when trying to overcome an enemy that separates you from a succulent reward. Even some of those times, they will have occurred because at that moment you wanted to pause the game to do something urgent in your house but, when you realized that this is impossible, it was already too late.
Indeed, Elden Ring does not allow pausing so in those moments when you are prowling through the inventory menus or the creation of objects, the enemies continue to stalk you. This creative decision is quite consistent with the general tone of the game because, for this title, FromSoftware wants to convey to the player that they are part of an open world, alive and in which carelessness leads you to lose all the runes you have collected. As if it were an MMORPG in which it is impossible to take a break in the middle of a fight against an enemy in a legendary dungeon.
In any case, the Japanese, we don’t know if voluntarily or not, have left an open door to have a kind of pause mode that we can use anywhere on the map and regardless of whether we are in combat or in any other site. So we are going to explain exactly how to do it.
How to pause the game in Elden Ring?
As many users have published in forums like Reddit, there is a very simple way to activate this pause mode that will only work for the times when we have to leave the game for a few minutes and go to another part of the house. We do not recommend activating it when you are in the middle of a battle because the seconds between when we stop attending to the enemy and the moment in which the action stops, we could lose a fundamental amount of HP.
Now that you are in the middle of the game, what you have to do is go to the Elden Ring Inventory , where the objects appear and press the “Help” button, as indicated in the screenshot that you have just above. Keep in mind that the screen belongs to the Xbox Series X|S versions, so on PlayStation it will be a different controller. Now, a menu with three options will appear on the screen. Of all of them, we are left with the “Explanatory menu”, which will provide us with more information on how to use that part of the game.
The moment you press that option, you will see how you can no longer move the character that appears on the bottom of the screen since all the action will be frozen until you get out of there. A somewhat rudimentary method but it will work for you to keep your hero safe and sound from the dangers of the Elden Ring while you go to get something from the fridge. No?