It's a classic appeal to authority. Rather than accept that people actually like what they're playing, they fall back to what they've been told is correct by their design professors. I find it darkly humorous that the UX designer who made that first "Elden Ring got 97 on metacritic. My life is a lie" statement on twitter never really reflected on it.

I have also noticed that anyone who says they didn’t enjoy the game just gets ridiculed and told they just suck at playing games.

I tried elden ring for 3 hours and hardly worked out what I was meant to be doing. Basically no guidance, UI didn’t really explain anything, etc. Went back to playing Skyrim.

It's not for everyone, and honestly that's fine. Not sure why people are ridiculing others for not liking it.

Yeah I just found the game to almost be intentionally obtuse. For context, I had never played any of the previous games in the series and I think they are probably the "required reading" before this one because I found that the UI and intro stage offered pretty much no explanation on what to do or how the fighting mechanics worked. But then it seems most of the players praise it for being so vague and minimal..

I want to like it, but am about the same. Even after a walkthrough on youtube to a boss that I just don't have the skills to even come close to beating... not my thing.

Treat it like a puzzle game :) The game isn't hard but you've got to be willing to keep trying. If that's not your thing, that's completely fine - it's just that I felt the same way when I first started playing Demon Souls and when I went back after giving up it finally clicked for me.

Yeah it's almost a rhythm game when you get to the bosses, or even the hard normal enemies. The boss will do some prompt and you have to reply with the ~correct sequence of inputs in the correct timing. You have to learn what actions to do over time/deaths.

I find it quite fun, but yeah there's a bunch of people who will hate it.

Sounds like modern architecture.