Elden Ring had a starting class named the Wretch that gets a club and some ratty underwear filled with dreams and nothing else, and there’s something special about the first few hours in Limgrave playing them, scavenging your first pieces of mismatched armour and build-defining treasures. The first time you hit a site of grace, that initial stat boost feels like a deific power surge. Insomuch as Elden Ring’s most memorable stories run tangential and emergent to its static lore, this early fraught scramble is the player’s self-woven tale at its most captivating. Soon enough, though, the feeling is gone. You’re as powerful as god, desiring nothing but more bulbous Albinauric skulls to toss on the pile.
Elden Ring: Nightreign feels unique among FromSoft’s modern catalogue for its flippant attitude toward a convincing sense of place, and so regrettably sacrifices much of its studio’s identity as committed worldbuilders, even while amplifying some of their more peculiar and interesting beats. It’s tempting, then, to ask why it exists in the first place. On a generous day, I’d say that Nightreign exists to recreate – over and over – that same, wretchedly gratifying early-game feeling. Where every scrap of progress feels like a milestone, dull smithing stones shimmer like silver, and each incremental bonk stat increase is a hero’s journey in miniature.
Either solo or as a party of three (you can’t play as a duo yet), you’ll each pick from a roster of eight distinct characters, then ride a spectral eagle to the outskirts of (original name do not steal) Limveld. You get about fifteen minutes to run around and get stronger, during which time a ring of blue flame periodically shrinks the size of the map until all that’s left is the arena in which you’ll fight that day’s boss. Do it all again the next day, then fight one of seven new-to-Nightreign bosses, and your run ends. Beat four of them, and you can fight the game’s big bad.
The rhythm of matches progresses like so: beat up the nearest trash mob for your first level up so you don’t get one-shot by a sneezing demihuman. Hit up some nearby churches for extra flask charges. Your quarry boss is weak to holy damage, so find a ruin marked with holy on your map to scrounge weapons. Night falls, you fight a sub-boss, and the sun rises again, resetting the ring. Maybe today you’ll find a stonesword key in chest, letting you fight an evergaol boss for big rewards. Perhaps you want to go troll hunting in a mine tunnel for smithing stones to boost your weapons. Maybe you want to stare into the shrinking blue ring and remember when FromSoft set trends instead of embracing them. Up to you. I’m not your Giant Dad.
All this occurs at a manic pace, denied as you are by the ring and falling night and the need to get stronger, fast, a precious spare second for the contemplation, thoroughness, or wonder that defined Elden Ring. Vistas are worth taking in only so you can scry the quickest route between two points. Ruins echo not layered, esoteric histories but promises of incremental power. The mighty and mournful creatures you meet are stunlocked into clownish judderfuckery as you fall upon them with restless triple bonksticks. Maybe you decide that you can take that ulcerated tree spirit even though the ring’s closing in, and there’s no grace to restore flasks between you and the boss. Maybe the tree spirit’s been souped up, one-shots you all, and you each lose a level and therefore minutes of progress in a game where minutes feel like miles.
You sprint towards the safe zone, cresting over hills in a rushed panic like the Fellowship set to Benny Hill. The boss fight is chaos as you try to identify friendspell from foespell in a jumble of phosphorescent wisp particles, plus those noises Elden Ring likes to make that sound like the exhalations of someone who finally made it to the urinal after a work meeting that ran twenty minutes too long. Cooldown timer abilities fire off relentlessly. The raider’s risen obelisk casts another buffglow into the mix. Movement and attack animations repeat themselves as phantom outlines as part of the Duchess’s restage ability. The Iron Eye zips around and looses arrows. You try to split aggro as befits whoever’s having a hard time. If someone falls, you run over and bonk them until they get up again.
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And you do it, and it feels great. Less in a “I have slain a terrifying yet oddly sad and whimsical creature on my journey to uncover the mysteries of this strange land” and more “lol top tier bullying there, mates”. Then you get to the proper boss, the new boss, and you get mollywhopped like pottery at a sledgehammer party, and you realise you’re going to have to repeat the equivalent of a forty-five minute bonfire-to-fog run to even see the move that killed you again. And that added repetition, I assume, is why Nightreign is comfortable charging 35 quid in the knowledge you probably won’t clear it in a weekend, even if there isn’t all that much new to see.
You will, at least, get some shiny rocks with stat buffs and other, more specific and situational effects. This is your meta-progression, alongside trinkets you’ll get for completing Remberance interludes. Each character has ritual objects with coloured slots, and you plug in these rocks and artefacts for effects that range from simple stat increases to more specific boons. Remembrances are short conversational sequences, often with a fetch quest attached to be performed in-match, that progress the associated character’s diary entries and reward powerful trinkets. I played the Duchess most, starting with a gem that gave my weapon fire damage and ending with a talisman that activated her damage-repeating Restage ability whenever I performed a dagger combo.
These extra abilities, the cooldown timers, a rock-clamouring double jump, automated levelling, and other mobility tweaks contribute to making Nightreign feel much closer to a focused and fixed action game than something more rooted in RPG flexibility. The action feels more controlled; in some ways more tailored, in others more unyielding in its shepherding you into specific playstyles. You won’t have to worry about equipment load, although many character abilities heavily incentivise sticking to your starting weapon class. One character has a double dodge. One can’t dodge at all, instead performing sidesteps. This halfway point between Elden Ring’s build diversity and Sekiro’s character action makes for a tight iteration on Elden Ring’s deliberate, demanding duels – if one absent the width of the former or depth of the latter.
There is beauty and strangeness to be found, both in Limveld (original name do not steal) and back at the roundtable hold. Towering, twisted root giants migrate across a bruise-purple skyline. Great cinderous chasms open in the earth, inviting exploration. The roundtable hold is lusher, crumbling, given tangible form as a shoreside fort. It’s a form that nonetheless flies in the face of, to my understanding, Elden Ring’s lore. But this is a game where you might encounter Dark Souls 3’s nameless king, for no apparent reason other than boss variety, so asking for consistency feels foolish. Thus, the beauty and strangeness feels tangential. Discrete. Isolated wonders rather that the thoughtful, esoteric puzzle pieces that usually define Fromsoft’s fantasy worlds.
One, among many, of the studio’s enduring legacies. Souslikes proliferate to varying degrees of success and inventiveness. Both Doom and Clair Obscur’s creatives namecheck Sekiro as a influence. Perhaps I lack foresight, but when asking myself what legacy Nightreign will leave, I struggle to see it as prophetic of anything. If pushed, I’d gloomily suggest it’s more of a harbinger.
I look at Tencent’s and Sony’s increased stakes in FromSoft parent company Kadokawa. I look at The Duskbloods, another multiplayer game that evokes a utilitarian pastiche of Bloodborne and Sekiro, rather than a world that demanded creation by a storyteller. I look at some of Nightreign’s encounter design, utter low points for the studio, seemingly satisfied to cobble together annoyances to simulate challenge in lieu of new, creative creatures. A wormface with a death aura. Plus some some giant crabs. Plus some rats.
I think of the themes FromSoft’s Miyazaki is so fond of revisiting, of monarchs clinging on to life and power well past their time, and becoming something warped and hollow in the process. And I can’t help but see an exhaustion in Nightreign, despite splotches of sprightly inventiveness. I’m left asking why I should want to throw myself at these bosses once again, absent much of the delight or discovery that would give these challenges context. Instead, this is challenge for challenge’s sake. A stripped-off part of FromSoft’s creative identity with little appeal absent the whole. And ultimately, I’m left wishing they’d sit back down at the bonfire and have a good, long rest, until a real spark makes itself known again.