Elden Ring Nightreign looks like Elden Ring, the 2022 FromSoftware hit,?and it seems like it should play like Elden Ring, an action-RPG about fighting massive bosses in a cursed open world. And in a lot of ways it does feel cut from the same cloth as its predecessor, but there are also some very important ways in which it doesn’t. The biggest of those is speed.
Unless you’ve mastered Elden Ring across multiple playthroughs, it can have a deceivingly plodding pace. You can run, jump, and explore anywhere you want. But Elden Ring, like other FromSoftware games, quickly teaches you to be wary of leaping before you look. Unexpected hazards and low-level enemies threaten to kill unsuspecting players around every corner. Through trial and error, Elden Ring trains its tarnished to be cautious, watchful, and prepared.
Nightreign is the opposite of that. The multiplayer roguelite is not technically a battle royale, but it can often feel like one. Giant birds carry you through the sky and drop you off at specified locations. A damage-dealing ring of blue light is constantly closing in around you and your teammates across a randomized map based on the original game’s Limgrave. You then race to grind XP and collect loot before a day-night cycle ends with a showdown against a past FromSoftware boss at the center of the map.
I played a few hours of Nightreign’s network test last weekend and was surprised just how much the game encourages you not to dilly-dally. In addition to moving much, much faster than you do in Elden Ring, you also have to race against the clock to level up and find better gear in preparation for the scaling difficulty of the ensuing encounters. I thought our random trio would be methodically canvasing the map for secrets and fighting at one another’s backs. Instead, exploration was a chaotic scramble to ransack the map.
That is not the type of experience I associate with Elden Ring, but that doesn’t make it a bad one. In some ways, Nightreign is closer to a multiplayer Hades than a traditional Soulsborne. Its action is more arcade-y, and the runs progress quickly and efficiently. And what can feel like a shallow free-for-all in the beginning comes into sharper focus during the boss fights which pit players against everything from Margit, The Fell Omen to a pack of three-headed hounds that spit fire. Here the pace slows back down some and offers a deep challenge more inline with the learning curves and the satisfying games of cat-and-mouse I associate with Elden Ring proper.
My squad and I weren’t able to finish any runs, ultimately dying each time to the Cerberus Night Lord with only half its health depleted. While you can revive companions by hacking away at their downed corpses, health potions are still finite and the last leg of the boss fight eventually depleted both our resources and our resolve. But even in failure I immediately wanted to plunge back into Nightreign and start a new run, not usually the feeling I get from repeatedly dying in a FromSoftware game. That tells me Nightreign, while unorthodox, is on the right track, perhaps especially for those like me who enjoy the studio’s games but aren’t ride-or-die fans of them.
It helps that each run, win or lose, nets you new Relics that can be equipped for better stat bonuses on subsequent attempts. It’s this loop, coupled with multiple classes (eight in the full game) and the teamwork around boss fights, that gives Nightreign a bit of Destiny 2's loot flavor within its larger roguelite RPG framework. It’s not trying to be a live-service game, but it is the kind of thing I see myself getting the crew together to play in between Rocket League matches and Helldivers 2 missions. It’s already been revealed that additional bosses and character classes will eventually arrive in DLC. For now, I’m looking forward to digging deeper into what’s already there when the full game drops on May 30.
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