Elden Ring: Nightreign

Elden Ring Nightreign does its best to let players have fun, get stronger, and take down big, bad bosses together. I can’t speak for the greater FromSoftware fanbase, but after these shared triumphs, I’ll have a hard time going back to doing it alone.

Elden Ring: Nightreign is both a love letter and a remix of everything FromSoftware fans adore. While the multiplayer focus won’t work for everyone, the sheer amount of challenge, variety, and the ever-elusive dopamine hit make it something special and something to be remembered.

Elden Ring Nightreign successfully condenses the Elden Ring experience, cramming challenging combat, exploration, worldbuilding, and character development into a fast-paced and thrilling multiplayer game

Elden Ring Nightreign is a bizarre game. It’s the Majora’s Mask of the Soulsborne family, with a mix-up of locations and bosses from Elden Ring with some Dark Souls trilogy foes sprinkled in. It’s got battle royale elements and roguelite features. It’s fast paced and as brutally difficult as it gets. It’s weird, it’s wonderful, and it’s fast becoming one of my favorite entries in FromSoftware’s pa...

The announcement of Elden Ring Nightreign last year was a surprise for most players. Following the release of what has become FromSoftware's most celebrated action RPG to date and its expansion, it has been reiterated multiple times that a sequel was not in development, suggesting that it would be a while until Tarnished could return to the Lands Between, counting teased IP expansions that most th...

Elden Ring: Nightreign offers a fast-paced gameplay and a return to the kind of raw challenge I’ve come to love in soulslikes. And that’s exactly what I wanted, the more time I spent with Nightreign, the more I found myself enjoying it.

Elden Ring Nightreign is a vastly different kind of FromSoftware experience. It’s taking the hallmark, tough-as-nails combat and applying it to a three-player co-op title that takes inspiration from battle royales and roguelikes. But with these core changes, does that FromSoftware magic remain? This may not be what most people want or even like from the developer, but it sure is a lot of fun.

Not every idea in Nightreign lands cleanly, but its willingness to push Elden Ring’s mechanics into unfamiliar territory is admirable. It’s a game made for a specific kind of player—those who crave a punishingly difficult challenge. If that’s you, this detour is worth the journey.

Elden Ring Nightreign is the spinoff no one expected but instantly makes sense. FromSoftware goes full experimental, tossing out slow-burn exploration for something faster, tighter, and more frantic. It’s a roguelike remix of the Lands Between where you sprint through 30–45 minute co-op runs, grab loot on the fly, crush bosses, and take down a big bad Nightlord before time runs out. The soul of El...

There's fun to be had with Elden Ring Nightreign, especially if you're a skilled Elden Ring player who loves a challenge or can get a good team together, but it does have a range of issues. The fact that there's only one map means repetition quickly creeps in, for example, and the Relic system simply doesn't feel as impactful as it should. Being a multiplayer-focused game, the lack of cross-play i...

Elden Ring is undoubtedly one of the most important games that FromSoftware has made, completing the studio’s ascent from hardcore niche to the mainstream. It is staggeringly successful, having sold over 30 million copies, and when you compare that to the 2.5 million of the original Demon’s Souls and the 10 million of Dark Souls 3, you get a feeling for how far this genre has come. So, it’s probab...

I've found that runs can go south very quickly unless every player is on the ball. Death is severely punished in Nightreign because if a teammate doesn't revive you, you'll lose a level and potentially all your currency if you don't run back and grab your stack of souls. Sometimes teammates will run off independently, die, lose levels, and be under-prepped for the Nightlord. This can happen at the...