I am trying to go through and problem solve some of the most difficult, confusing things I ran into during my playthrough of Elden Ring’s Shadow of the Erdtree, and now I’m tackling an area that stumped me for a long while, the Church District Entrance in the Shadow Keep. You can get up there by following a tunnel from the south, but the flooded zone will instakill you with one wrong step or jump.
Elden Ring has always had dangerous platforming segments, but most of them are carefully calculating falls or smaller jumps. Here, you need the running leap jump that requires you to both sprint and jump at the same time, which is pretty difficult on the controller given sprint being mapped to O/B, and there’s a reason you don’t do it often. But this single jump is hiding the entire north and north east of the map, so yes, this is super important.
This is the path you take, starting with dropping down onto the log to your right and getting on the first rooftop. I am going to mark the two main spots where you need to running jump, not just regular jump, to progress:
The main hurdle for many will be that first jump, where you have to leap from one of the small arches and land on the narrow ledge on the other side. This is a regular jump, not a Torrent jump, to be clear, and you are going to see a lot of bloodstains there, and the “jump!” messages may seem like a troll. But you need a running start.
I’m not kidding when I say these single jumps open up probably 20% of the map. From the point where you drop down from the roof where that final arrow is, you can both drain the entire church area of water so you don’t have to navigate it again, where you’ll find two minibosses and some valuable items. Then, this also gives you access to the back end of Shadow Keep which you cannot get to otherwise. Immediately this will get you near two (very hard) bosses, a zone with five Scadutree fragments in the north, and the entire north east of the map through a secret entrance, but that’s an article for another day.
So yeah, maybe some of you can get this immediately but it took me way too long to fully understand which jump I was supposed to be making, especially since there has barely even been anywhere you need to run jump only to access. Hope this helped. Enjoy a giant chunk of the map.
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