There are dozens upon dozens of secrets to discover in FromSoftware’s 2022 RPGElden Ring. The developer is notorious for hiding important items and areas in places players may never think to look. From the notoriously well-hidden Ash Lake in the originalDark Soulsgame to Archdragon Peak in the trilogy’s capstone entry, FromSoftware isn’t afraid to hide significant portions of its games in places only the most daring of players will care to explore. That’s certainly true ofElden Ring, but, as one Redditor has discovered, some of The Lands Between’s greatest secrets are hiding in plain sight.
In a popular post submitted to theElden Ringsubreddit, Reddit user u/DSquariusGreeneJR discusses an odd similarity between the iconic architecture of the Pizza Hut fast-food restaurant chain and the look of a strange shack found in Volcano Manor. The post, captioned “I know a former Pizza Hut when I see one,” gained well in excess of fifty-thousand upvotes in just four days, and it seems to have piqued the interest of plenty of players.Getting intoElden Ring’s Volcano Manoris a task in and of itself, but only the true Elden Lords can claim to have visited the fabled Volcano Manor Pizza Hut.
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One particularly hilarious respondent quipped that the Pizza Hut was banished to Volcano Manor after the Demigods of The Lands Between tried and failed to out pizza the hut. Another offered a link to the subreddit r/FormerPizzaHuts, a site dedicated entirely to chronicling businesses that have roofs of a suspiciously familiar design. Of course, tempting as it may be, few would brave a lake of lava just for deep-dish pizza, though those few undaunted tarnished may want to employ aglitch that allows players to walk on lava inElden Ring.
Weirdly enough, this out-of-place pizza establishment is far from the only real-world comparison players have made toElden Ring’s The Lands Between. The Scarlet Rot-blighted Caelid region is often jokingly referred to by players as Florida or Ohio for reasons that aren’t exactly obvious, but the region also picked up notoriety thanks to a genuine event that took place in Spain in late March. At the time, parts of Spain were being impacted by a dust storm from the Saharan Desert which caused an eerie red huereminiscent ofElden Ring’s Caelid.
There’s also something to be said for Pizza Hut’s connection to gaming as a whole; in the 1990s,Pizza Hut distributed PlayStation demo disksthat showcased up-and-coming titles, and it likely inspired a lifelong love of gaming in many young patrons. While the homage was almost certainly unintentional, this obscure reference inElden Ringmay have brought things full circle.
Elden Ringis available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
