When Elden Ring: Nightreign — a roguelike, multiplayer-only spinoff of acclaimed RPG Elden Ring — was announced, the general reaction seemed to be "huh?" After all, From Software is most known for its focused, immaculately crafted single-player stories, and the sudden turn into procedurally generated multiplayer felt like a weird left turn at best and publisher meddling from Bandai Namco at worst. With the game having released just today, though, Souls fans have gotten the chance to see what FromSoft has been cooking, and the end product is… fine. It's fine.
While Nightreign plays just like Elden Ring for the most part, there are a few notable departures that take some getting used to as a seasoned player of the original game. Rather than creating your own character, you must choose from a selection of premade "Nightfarers," each embodying a particular Elden Ring playstyle. There's your strong guy, your all-around guy, your magic guy — chances are that however you played Elden Ring, there's a Nightfarer that approximates it.
The open world is gone as well. Upon teaming up with two friends, you're dropped into a procedurally generated island with a constantly shrinking ring around it, similar to Fortnite. The loop itself is simple: explore points of interest and gather gear as the ring shrinks, eventually face a boss at its center, then do it all again before facing the final boss of your match.
It's that simplicity that ensures Nightreign can never live up to its predecessor. Elden Ring encouraged world exploration and build creativity, but Nightreign actively discourages these avenues of self-expression with a literal wall of death. You'll never have time to hit more than a couple points of interest before night falls and the boss emerges, and experimentation becomes pointless when a party wipe means struggling through another hour of trash mobs just to retry a troublesome boss.
Elden Ring's first DLC, Shadow of the Erdtree, attracted controversy for its extreme difficulty, but this was tempered by death being essentially consequence-free and the ability to return to most boss fights in under a minute. Neither of these holds true in Nightreign, making each defeat utterly heartbreaking rather than an encouragement to get back up and try again.
With no real build control, I can't recommend Nightreign to theorycrafters. Being co-op only, I can't recommend it to PvPers either. The game's target audience seems to be those who enjoy Elden Ring's core combat but have grown bored of the original game's finite amount of PvE content — provided they're willing to spend days on a particular boss rather than hours. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but this isn't a structured, focused Soulslike experience — it's more of an offbeat experiment with the formula, the results of which we likely won't see until FromSoft's next game.
But at least they scored a trailer with Evanescence's "Bring Me To Life."
