A standalone spin-off from FromSoftware’s incredibly successful yet mostly single-player dark role-playing game Elden Ring, the multiplayer-oriented Elden Ring Nightreign is a curious beast, often feeling like an amalgamation of several different experiences all at once.
Each session begins with players, either solo or in teams of three, dropping into a small but dense world, working to urgently gain as much strength as possible as a rapidly closing ring tightens around them – a very Fortnite experience. Rather than other players, they fight a variety of monsters and explore locations lifted directly from the Elden Ring universe. After each match, they also gain upgrade materials to modify future runs and advance the game’s story, similar to a rogue-like game … so it’s a Fortnite/Elden Ring/Hades experience? This is getting complicated.
Every session is an engagingly frantic race against time to craft an on-the-fly strategy that takes you across the whole map. Each match is split into three days: on the first two, you pick areas to rush through, besting local bosses to gain minor buffs to your strength or loot weapons with powerful passive abilities, before escaping the rapidly closing ring that saps your health and is sure to end your run. Each night culminates in a larger and far more challenging fight than you’ve faced thus far, amping up the pressure even further.
It’s quite the stressful slog, but day three is what you’re battling towards. As the day dawns, you step into a barren arena, ready to face one of several tough-as-nails mega bosses specifically designed to be tackled by multiple players.
Nightreign is overwhelmingly designed for three-person teams. You can choose to head out on your own, but doing so is a severe challenge. There’s no one to get you back up if you accidentally die rolling into a boss’s attack, and many of the enemies designed to be tackled by a team of allies frequently overwhelm you.
Ultimately, this is a game all about momentum. The feeling of pressure as you navigate the world is palpable. Every second, you’re constantly questioning yourself: am I wasting too much time by checking what’s around this corner? Can we take down this boss quickly enough to warrant the reward? It’s an incredibly stimulating experience, as you rush to analyse your equipment and make build-defining decisions on the fly, but so much has been modified for the sake of speed that the nuance typical to FromSoftware games is somewhat lost.
There’s no choice of stats when levelling up, for example, with levelling now reduced to the mash of a button when you reach a rest point. And while the world has been painstakingly populated with smaller enemies, beyond taking down a couple in the first few seconds of a run to hit level 2, there’s little point engaging with them, since tackling bosses is the main way to get more powerful.
This momentum gives Nightreign its “just one more run” feel, but the pace feels more rapid than necessary, reducing much of the world to a distraction that wastes your precious time. It’s also why the bugs present in the review version we played feel particularly frustrating. Spending five minutes tackling a dragon that then flies through a wall and ends up being untargetable feels particularly unfair.
One of the more loathed mechanics from the Dark Souls series is the requirement for you to run back to the boss arena every time you die. When this was updated for Elden Ring, allowing you to respawn right outside the arena, fans rejoiced. Yet the Nightreign experience is such an extreme move back in the other direction that it feels almost Sisyphean. Every run requires you to spend around 35 minutes to reach the final boss, but those bosses often have unique mechanics that can wipe out unsuspecting teams in just a couple of hits. Dying to a new move you’ve not seen before, requiring you to spend another 35 minutes rolling that boulder back up the hill, feels grossly disrespectful.
Considering the success of Elden Ring in applying FromSoftware’s dense level design ethos to an open world, it’s disappointing that the developer appears to have missed the mark with Nightreign. Where that game iterated, Nightreign takes shortcuts. It is billed as a standalone release, yet so much environmental content is carbon-copied from Elden Ring – often thrown in haphazardly – that the world feels more like a particularly polished fan-created mod than a whole new title.
FromSoftware’s experiment in upending its established gameplay formula is admirable, and taking down gargantuan foes alongside friends really adds to the joy you feel at finally besting what at first felt like an insurmountable task. It’s just a shame that the game’s skewed pacing and overreliance on Elden Ring’s pool of assets so greatly mars the experience.
