Elden Ring Nightreign is paradoxically bigger and smaller than every Souls title before it – reserved in scope but bottomless in ambition. FromSoftware’s most experimental title yet wears contemporary inspiration on its sleeve without entirely separating itself from tradition, but it won’t be for everyone.
Multiplayer, an automatic turn-off for some, isn’t mandatory in Nightreign. You can take on its stupendously powerful Night Lords without enlisting another player’s help, but the option is somewhat deceptive.
The synergistic nature of its eight pre-built characters, enemy density, and unrelenting pace have all been designed with one intent: to make survival barely possible with a three-person team, nevermind as a lone wolf.
After spending over 20 hours taking in the sights of Limveld and uncovering its secrets, I’m glad that FromSoftware adopted an uncompromising approach. Nightreign is one of the most addictive co-op games I’ve ever played.
Elden Ring Nightreign screenshots
What is Elden Ring Nightreign about?
Affected by The Shattering just as Limgrave was in the original Elden Ring, Limveld is a parallel world dealing with unique repercussions of that event, namely the Night’s Tide.
To end the curse, you’re enlisted as a Nightfarer to stop its advancement and total consumption of Limveld. Survive for two days by avoiding the Night’s Tide, extracting power from Limveld’s hostile population, and scavenging gear to increase your chances of besting each Expedition’s big-bads, the Nightlords.
Built different
Granted clemency after successfully failing Nightreign’s tutorial boss, I’m whisked off to the Roundtable Hold and served some brief exposition by the residing Priestess.
I’m told that Limveld is on the cusp of falling to the Night’s Tide. If brave Nightfarers aren’t able to stem its flow and defeat the Nightlords perpetuating its spread, the world is doomed. Textbook FromSoftware despair, but it’s a good idea to hang your preconceptions of what a Souls game is or should be right here.
You’re not dumped in Limveld and given a vague objective to pursue in Nightreign. Rather, each Nightlord represents one Expedition, commenced at the Roundtable. Structurally, it’s reminiscent of Monster Hunter’s mission board. Choose a monster from the list, consider its weaknesses, and build your loadout before embarking.
Just one of these Expeditions, Tricephalos, is available as a fresh-faced Nightfarer. Survive its dangers until Day 3, and you’ll earn the right to fight Gladius, a building-sized, three-headed pooch that likes to play fetch with a sword.
But first, you need to get there in one piece, and Nightreign is just as much about the journey as the destination.
I chose Wylder, essentially a traditional Souls Quality Build, for my maiden Expedition. All of Nightreign’s eight classes similarly play into the popular archetypes you’d find in other Souls games. Raider is a roided-out barbarian who favors weapons larger than himself. Recluse is a pure spellcaster, and Executor (guaranteed to be a favorite) is a katana enthusiast with high Arcane scaling, perfect for Bleed and status effect builds.
Each has a set of abilities to supplement their intended playstyle that can be augmented with Relics – Nightreign’s method of permanent progression. Most are obtained by completing (or failing) an Expedition, or can be purchased from an NPC in the Roundtable Hold with earned currency.
Straight stat boosts, cooldown reductions, and altered Weapon Arts bulk out most of the available Relics, and even after 20 hours, I was still finding new combinations. It dawned on me while tinkering with a fire build for Wylder that Nightreign, despite its pre-set characters, provides just as much skill and build expression as its predecessors while eliminating the need to min-max a stat sheet.
Always on the move
Once you’ve defeated Gladius, several new Nightlords and their respective Expeditions will be unlocked. You can skirt by with skill, luck, and solid teammates for some of these, but they’ll only get you so far.
Fortunately, Limveld is rich with loot. Each day, your group will have a pre-allotted amount of time to scavenge weapons from enemy camps and mini bosses scattered around the map before the battle royale-inspired Night’s Tide closes around you.
While there’s nothing to stop you from adopting a divide and conquer approach, splitting up is rarely a smart idea. Limveld is unforgiving – its hazards are designed to be tackled by a group rather than alone. Nightreign does allow solo play and scales enemies to compensate for a lack of comrades, but doing so is more a lesson in frustration than fun.
Overwhelming numbers of enemies make skirmishes a headache without friends to help, and even with scaled-down HP, end-of-day boss encounters, let alone the Nightlords themselves, felt genuinely more difficult to overcome than any challenge FromSoft has produced previously.
Played as it was designed, though, the roguelike gameplay loop is addictive. My main concern before starting was a lack of map variety, but Limveld, while not a truly evolving world, packs numerous surprises to stave off familiarity.
Nightlords must die
As you progress through each Expedition, Limveld becomes progressively corrupted. Camps you’ve visited numerous times previously will contain different enemies, and entire portions of the map may disappear, being replaced with temporary terrain.
These Shifting Earth events come in numerous varieties, appear randomly, and yield rewards borderline mandatory for victory.
One late-game Nightlord, Caligo, became an insurmountable wall for my group until we discovered The Mountaintop, a massive, frigid winter wonderland spontaneously sprouting in the north of Limveld. Navigating its treacherous peaks and defeating the boss granted us near-immunity to Frostbite, reducing Caligo into a far lesser threat.
Varying wildly in difficulty, not every Nightlord requires such lengths to defeat, but what they all share in common is memorability. Collectively, they’re some of the most spectacular encounters FromSoft has ever designed. Nightreign’s final boss, which I won’t spoil here, puts even the grandiosity of bosses found in Elden Ring’s Shadow of the Erdtree DLC to shame.
Their complexity is in stark contrast to the much-touted return of bosses from the Dark Souls trilogy. I didn’t encounter them all during my playtime, but Gaping Dragon and Centipede Demon, two classics, felt remarkably dated in an otherwise modern game. With no redesigned move sets, they rather fittingly felt as though they were from another world entirely.
FromSoftware/Bandai NamcoNightlords are among some of the best bosses in any FromSoftware game.
It’s a decision that comes dangerously close to feeling like padding for the sake of fan service, but otherwise a minor gripe that doesn’t detract from what’s a triumphant spin-off.
Verdict
After Elden Ring set the bar impossibly high for what’s expected of open-world RPGs, Nightreign delivers a fantastic accompaniment to FromSoftware’s core portfolio. It’s unafraid to turn the established Souls formula on its head and ask if it can mesh well with other genres.
While the answer is a resounding yes, Nightreign won’t be for everyone. For series veteran fans with no interest in multiplayer, it’s a hard sell. Solo play is an officially supported mode, but it feels much like an afterthought.
Played with the intended group size, however, Nightreign is an irresistible co-op experience with far more depth than I expected.
