Elden Ring Nightreign review

In the fight against Elden Ring Nightreign's riff on Mothra, I never expected it would eventually touch down and mount the head of its partner, a giant stick bug with claws, like a mech. For the rest of the fight they were operating in unison, a kaiju cowboy with orbital lasers piercing the sky. That's a problem pesticide can't solve, but, as it turns out, three guys with bows absolutely can.

There's nothing like fighting a boss in a Elden Ring Nightreign is a game about losing a fistfight over and over until you luck or strategize your way into an opportunity to bring three guns. The harder you've been hit the more glorious the payback, and Nightreign is a merciless bully.

Even if you've played Elden Ring, Nightreign will surprise you. Imagine the Lands Between as a stadium filled with familiar monsters and a team of three players as its contestants. It's an action RPG as a sport, cranked up to two times speed, and designed to be replayed every 30 minutes. Randomized loot and an ever-tightening battle royale-style circle apply constant pressure that you're only released from at the end of the match, whether you survive or not.

Nightreign is the most peculiar game FromSoft has made since the '90s. It's also its most abrasive.

Even now after putting well over 30 hours into it, I believe Nightreign is both a trend-defying remix of Elden Ring and also a pile of complete bullshit that I shouldn't have to deal with in the year 2025.

Dropping down into Limtown with the boys is the kind of thing someone would pitch on NexusMods

I can't help but respect the fact that it works, however. Dropping down into Limtown with the boys is the kind of thing someone would pitch on NexusMods, and yet that is exactly what I've been doing in Nightreign. We've been "looting churches," "clearing camps," and "popping crab" for the past week. Some of my most heated, frustrating moments—like when a boss "invaded" my run to steal entire levels from me before peacing out—were cooled by the fact that I was palling around Elden Ring like it was Fortnite.

There were also plenty of times I was convinced that maybe Nightreign is actually a terrible idea. Elden Ring didn't need a time limit, nor did it need a randomized loot system. The randomization often feels designed—or under-designed—just to screw you over. There's a difference between mistiming a dodge on a fatal attack and spending 10 minutes on a grueling boss fight because the map refused to cough up a holy weapon for a boss who is weak to holy. This game has optional events where you can spend half of a run fighting for a bonus reward that will be irrelevant to the final boss you've targeted for that session—or any boss for that matter. And the ability to meaningfully buildcraft is in constant tension with Nightreign's pace and its UI, which obfuscates key information around damage scaling and weapon abilities.

Do you know the difference between Dragon Communion Incantations and Dragon Cult Incantations? I don't either, but you have five seconds to figure it out before the circle consumes you.

Nightreign is kind of a mess. FromSoftware's inscrutable terminology and uneven balance makes the learning curve much steeper than it needs to be. Or maybe that's the beauty of it: A game not trying to entice you with daily bonuses or battle es, but a language to learn over the course of hundreds of runs. In that way, it emulates the joys of gaining acuity with any of the studio's other games. But that might also be why the structure of Nightreign falls apart for me.

If you hated running back to a boss in Elden Ring, try doing that with a whole-ass battle royale to survive on the way there.

It's hard to enjoy the journey when the destination is the only thing you're meaningfully rewarded for. Each character in Nightreign can equip three Relics with ive benefits that range from unnoticeable (dexterity +2) to game-changing (item effects or healing flasks are shared with all players). Most of them are trash and will have little to no bearing on whether or not you can kill the final boss, let alone reach them. But that's all that you get to take home after each run.

Build-brained

Nightreign wants you in it for the love of the game, and while I can appreciate that in a sea of games that practically bribe you to keep playing, it can also make the routine moments of a run kind of boring. Elden Ring has its punishing sections, but there's always something else to do. In Nightreign, you just fight bosses until you're strong enough to fight a different boss. When my team cut down the final one, I couldn't think of many reasons compelling me to do it all over again.

But later, I watched a recording of the fight and saw that the final sliver of health on a boss we'd attempted at least six times was extinguished by the tiny magical daggers summoned by my sword's ive effect. And that's when the gears started turning.

What if I found that weapon again and actually played the right character with the right items to emphasize that technique? What other effects have I ignored that could inspire entirely new strategies? I immediately wanted to go for another run as an experiment.

You get better at knowing what locations to hit each night, but if the drops don't serve you, the run can go sour quickly.

Uh oh. It's possible Nightreign rules, actually.

The combinations of weapons and effects you can put together in a run frequently activate my "RPG build" neurons. Part of the reason we even made it to the point where the final boss was nine magic glintblades away from death is that I discovered the "successive attacks negate damage" ive effect. On most of Nightreign's eight playable characters it's hard to activate, but it naturally synergizes with the dual-wielding knife specialist Duchess' playstyle. Though she's normally one of the squishiest nightfarers, a flurry of stabs into a boss and I could tank an attack that would take my teammates out in one hit. Paired with a Relic that automatically activates her skill to repeat damage done to a boss after landing several hits in a row and I was playing an immortal god. The problem is you won't find those buffs every run—or on the right character.

But when you do, the thrill of having that kind of power in a FromSoft game is delicious, especially when the difficulty is as brutal as Nightreign's. The RNG of it all and the number of bosses standing between you and the end demands a high level of execution and, frankly, luck. You get better at knowing what locations to hit each night, but if the drops don't serve you, the run can go sour quickly.

In Fortnite, the odds are stacked against you. One hundred players enter a match and only one comes out a winner. In Nightreign the odds are the same, except most of the time the game wins. This feels backwards to how I've always approached FromSoft games, but the elation of finally getting a win can be tantalizing. And that's all it takes to pull me back in. It doesn't matter whether it's a silly weapon I want to try again or a different character I want to learn, like the witch who can yank magic out of enemies to buff her allies. Every time I get a taste of victory, I forget the misery of spending 30 minutes to lose to a boss and hit the button to do it again anyway.

Brutal but brilliant

When the stars align—and they will—Nightreign is unlike anything else I've played

All of Nightreign's faults fade when the brutal difficulty and the randomized nature of it creates something beautiful, like when you discover the skeletons summoned by the little necromancer girl can revive you when you're downed.

Or when you're fighting a jellyfish god from another planet and your buddy in Skyrim armor screams as he rises into the sky on a giant rock, saving you from a big attack.

Or when you're low on healing flasks and praying for an easy boss and out from the dark portal steps a nightmare from an entirely different game, one you thought you'd never have to face again. Sometimes Nightreign is so cruel all you can do is laugh as it shoves your nose in the dirt.

But then it turns around and delivers catharsis. Everyone cheered in voice chat when Centipede Demon, the boss nobody re from Dark Souls, showed up to get obliterated by 14 years of action RPG combat advancement. When the stars align—and they will—Nightreign is unlike anything else I've played.

I just wish it wasn't so hard to play—not because the bosses are tough, but because of how indifferent it is to helping you experience everything that's so endearing about it. All the work is on you to find something that draws you back in, to find a reason to try again. For me that's a new build or a new character to focus on with a game-changing Relic setup. For others it can be helping out a friend struggling with the brutal difficulty. And for something as experimental and as weird as Nightreign is, that might be enough.

Nightreign is light on story, but it carries with it my favorite theme core to all of FromSoft's games: The irresistible nature to persevere against what feels like impossible odds. That I can spend three hours getting pummeled by a game as impenetrable as this and still feel the urge to give it another go has me annoyed that the same trick's working on me again.

Nightreign may be kind of a mess, but it's a mess made just for me.