I’m playing with randos. One is a big burly guy dressed in animal skins and crowned with ram antlers. The other is a katana-wielding ninja in sleek black armor. We are frantically racing around, killing and plundering everything we can in a fever dream remix of the Lands Between from 2022's megahit Elden Ring called Limveld. Unlike in that slow, plodding, methodical open-world RPG, we have just a handful of minutes to take in our surroundings, dispatch mini-bosses, and glance over item descriptions before a curtain of blue rain envelops and kills us. We survive to day three and are feeling confident as we face the first Night Lord, a three-headed wolf that eventually becomes three three-headed wolves who eventually sap us of all our flask charges and leave us bleeding out on the ground.
Getting good at Elden Ring Nightreign is an exercise in remembering the cornerstones of FromSoftware’s third-person combat and forgetting everything else about the adventure formula that the storied studio has spent over a decade honing into its very own subgenre. I eventually beat the dog but not the rest of the bosses who each have their own unique techniques and weaknesses, like a mashup of Elden Ring and Mega Man by way of MOBAs and battle royales. You collect runes, level up, find better gear, try to craft a build, and survive brutal fights, all condensed into 45 minute runs.
I’ve played about 10 hours so far and I’m excited to be able to pick it back up with my squad of close friends when the game is out on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC on May 30, because only then do I feel like I’ll be able to unlock what makes the the experience special and not just list all of the pain points currently getting in the way of that. It’s a friction-filled arcade experience just waiting to be played over and over again, every item, quest, and opaque reference explored to 100 percent completion. And one I’m not ready to judge until I’ve tackled it with friends.
Nightreign is a very particular type of multiplayer game, the one you try to get your friends to play with the lowkey aggressive enthusiasm of a used car salesman who’s about to miss his target for the month. You play up its Elden Ring ancestry, full of enemies and sights from one of the best games of the decade. The moment-to-moment combat remains familiar but dialed up with much faster movement and special ability cooldowns. Nightreign is full of haunting iconography and spectacular boss fights, hallmarks of FromSoftware games you can now enjoy together over voice chat in real time.
What you don’t tell them is that Nightreign is a messy mishmash of other genre mechanics that don’t always mesh together, especially with the grace and high degree of craft players have come to expect from the studio behind Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. You don’t mention the frenetic and occasionally repetitive scrambles to farm resources during the day in time for the boss fights at night, or the fact that Nightreign feels like a loot-driven numbers game that doesn’t want you to easily understand how any of its math works. You definitely don’t talk about how the matchmaking systems seem archaic, or how, despite the ability to play solo offline, that is not something your friends will ever want to actually bother with unless FromSoftware drastically nerfs the difficulty at some point.
Nightreign can occasionally feel like a mix of the best and worst parts of a Destiny 2 raid. When you struggle together for hours on a tough challenge, learning encounters and boss fights, training both your mind and muscle memory to play a specific role that will contribute to the overall group’s success, it can be the highest of gaming highs, magnified by the shared experience of what it took to get there and the personal stories and anecdotes that flow from that. But when victory never comes or weak links in the chain become impossible to conceal, people get angry, they log off, they uninstall.
That might sound like a major red flag for the millions of people who played and enjoyed Elden Ring and have either never heard of Bungie’s sci-fi MMO or have heard of it and learned early on to stay as far away from it as possible. It might also be why Nightreign is just $40, the same price of last year’s GOTY-nomination-worthy Shadow of the Erdtree expansion. Not because it isn’t a full-fledged game but because, unlike Elden Ring, it does not contain all of the tools you need to enjoy it right out of the box. Nightreign’s secret sauce is other human beings, and that is not something FromSoftware can patch in later after the game is out.
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