Playing "Don't Call it Elden Ring 2": Shadow of the Erdtree. Great, perfect, superlatives aplenty, obviously.
I'm both going slower and also intentionally missing out on more things this time around. Using pad and paper to take notes, plan next actions, etc, like I used to do with old CRPGs. I'm treating it like a detective story/travelogue. It's crazy how much thought and intention goes into every detail of this game. It has everything that traditional RPGs have but instead of lore books or NPC exposition it's mostly environmental and entirely up to you to notice it. Just looking across the landscape from a high vantage point gives you more story information than the average cutscene or expository text dump in other games. The placement of each enemy, item, every emblem or wall decal or dungeon entrance or treasure chest; all of it is in service of the story and the world building.
Example: I'm in a deep valley with water at the bottom, and initially it's giant crabs and other local-ish wildlife, some wolves in one area (which if you follow the wolves you find a cave with a wolves' den) and then as you go further along there are human-fly hybrids roaming around, and if you keep going you'll see more of them, then corpses strewn here and there, and eventually a pile of corpses strewn across some jagged rocks and a bunch of fly-men on top of it, and they're scattered and draped across the rocks so it looks like they all fell off the top of the cliffs above the valley. Later in the game (or earlier, you can find these places in no particular order), I am up in the high country and navigating the cliffs which overhang this same valley, and sure enough there's a ruined town up in the cliffs with burned houses, corpses, and more fly-men, as well as items which contain information about "The Fly Disease," the failing attempts at treating it, etc. You can find a big wooden platform at the edge of town, piled high with corpses to the point of overflowing off the edge of the cliff, and it's too far down to see but it's above the exact spot mentioned earlier.
Item descriptions of objects and enemy types, architecture, etc, in both areas, tell a story of a village in crisis managing an outbreak and ultimately failing to survive. There is more to the fly disease and I am certain that this is a thread one could pull on and successfully piece together over the course of the game, but I'm also fairly confident you could just ignore it and at some point you'll be in some random castle and there might be an area with fly men attacking you and you can just shrug, kill them, and move on like "oh look it's more of these guys," which is also fine and how I played the majority of OG Elden Ring.
OR, if you pay attention to where they appear, make note of items and there descriptions in-context, no matter how random it seems, there is likely a story and evidence of the reason/process by which they got there.
Similarly if you start seeing Marionette soldiers wandering around you know that Carians are in the area or have passed through recently, etc. There are entire quest lines and career paths for different character archetypes and play styles which you will only experience if you decide to role-play your character and choose your direction and your efforts based on your character's motives.
The new feature where it highlights the most recently picked up items is really helpful for this style of play. Whenever I am in a new area I have a little notebook and I'll start a new page. Enemies, items, architectural details, ecological factors, anything notable goes on the page and anything weird or notable gets its own little entry. As soon as I pick up a new item, I check the description and read it in the context of the environment in which it was found. These little info snippets make SO MUCH more sense when you read them this way; standing in the room with the corpse that had the item. Even "insignificant" items like a specific (but common) crafting material, in-context, usually adds to the sense of place and history and acts as clue. As I have done this, I keep finding new things which fill in mysteries around previous areas I've visited, giving me ideas for the next area I want to explore.
