Elden Ring

You wake as a Tarnished, a dead exile called back to a broken land to chase a shattered power. This is FromSoftware's hard combat, careful and punishing, set loose in an open world for the first time. There is no quest marker and almost no hand-holding. You ride out, get killed by something far too strong, go around it, and come back later. Much of the story is buried in item descriptions and the shapes of ruins, so most players never learn the whole thing. What stays with people is the sense of arriving somewhere they were not told about, that nobody pointed them toward.