Just finished Elden Ring. Fair play, it was pretty awesome.
Would say first though that I almost stopped after 7-10 hours when I was struggling to get anywhere with the game. I don't mind hard difficulty but the systems seemingly went out of their way to not explain themselves. It's all very good people saying the point is that you have to work it all out but I don't buy that, I'd not played the Souls games preiously and made a point of going in blind. Turns out that if I had played the Souls games in advance it would have helped with a lot of the basic stuff the game just seemed to take for granted you'd know. I think that's bad game design to be honest.
Once I got beyond that the game was amazing. I hit two brick walls, one was Melikith (who I gave up on, went away to lvl and gear and came back to) and Melania (who I actually found not as hard as Melikith but I was far more leveled and equipped by then. I didn't look up any guides until that first brick wall and then following that I just looked everything up to be honest.