There’s Nothing Else Quite Like Elden Ring Nightreign – For Better and Worse

My team’s run was going exceptionally well, we’d beaten some tough bosses and amassed the perfect pieces of equipment. Then a dark veil descended on the world and a plague of locusts attacked. Unbeknownst to us, these locusts hid a deadly secret, and could outright steal the levels you’d gained. It was a brutal ambush that crushed the team and made us quit the match entirely.

Elden Ring Nightreign is the most punishing multiplayer experience I’ve ever played, and I don’t entirely mean that in a good way. While Souls games have always had a major multiplayer component, putting the focus solely on a cooperative experience is a fascinating idea — and Nightreign does feel exceptionally experimental. While there are minor elements lifted from Battle Royale games, it quickly proves itself as something wholly unique.

There's absolutely nothing out there like Nightreign, and when its elements all come together, it’s the same adrenaline-pumping high you get from the best Souls moments. The fifty hours I spent with Nightreign were filled with more fun than frustration, but I’m more excited to see what FromSoftware can build using the lessons they learn here. It’s hard to deny the game stumbles a bit in its experimentation, suffering from the growing pains of a first multiplayer experience.

Bring A Friend Or Two

Elden Ring Nightreign is a three-player cooperative multiplayer game, with each match called an “Expedition,” where you survive two days and then take on a big boss at the end, known as a Nightlord. While a lot of the experience feels mysterious at first, there’s a very clear formula that becomes apparent the more you play.

This also isn’t your typical multiplayer experience that you’ll want to keep playing for weeks. It feels more like a “campaign” that you’re playing through with friends, as when you beat a Nightlord there’s little to no reason to do it again — instead encouraging you to move onto the next one. That’s not inherently a problem, of course, as Nightreign feels intentionally designed as a game you play through once, and you’re done. In the era of multiplayer games that all have to be the game you play for months, if not years, that’s actually quite refreshing.

In each match of Nightreign, your team drops into the lands at a random location, and you need to quickly battle enemies, take down bosses, and find the best equipment — as a ring of deadly fire slowly encircles you to a specific point on the map. The impending doom means your team needs to make split-second decisions on where to go and what to do.

Do you head to the church across the map to grab an extra healing flask? Or do you try to tackle the castle and enemy camp along the way, hoping you have enough time to beat the bosses and scour the location for items? Every major camp or castle on the map has a boss, and that boss drops a reward cache, giving you a choice of three benefits to choose from. Sometimes these will be weapons, other times stat boosts — like raising your Stamina recovery speed, or giving you longer invincibility windows when dodging. This means that there’s a layer of randomness and unpredictability to every match, forcing you to adapt your character build on the fly.

The game can only be played with three players as there’s no duos option, although FromSoftware has said it’s looking into adding one.

There is a solo play option, but after extensive testing, I found that soloing simply isn’t viable for anyone who’s not the best of the best of Souls players. Enemy health and damage do scale, but the real problem is that Nightreign is clearly tuned for three players. In solo mode, there are too many enemies, and you simply can’t cover enough ground by yourself.

All of the stats and complexity of Elden Ring are here, it’s just that all the progression is crammed into a tight hour-long window, forcing you to make snap decisions about your character build.

The same can be said for the random events that pop up across matches, like the Locusts that wiped us out. Other events include Margit the Fell Omen appearing to ambush you, or a Frenzied Flame Orb appearing in the sky threatening you with the Frenzy status effect unless you find cover — like a terrifying Eye of Sauron.

Of course, the other major element here is the character classes, which each fill a specific role. You choose from six different classes, eight total after all are unlocked. While every character can equip any weapon, each class has different stats that increase automatically as you level up. The archer Ironeye gets more dexterity and stamina, while the tank-like Raider focuses on HP and strength. Every class has a Character Skill on a short cooldown and an Ultimate Skill on a much longer cooldown.

The key to mastering these characters is knowing how to properly use these skills and how to create a build tailored to their stats. The Wylder, for example, really excels at speed and fast melee attacks with a fantastic grappling hook that lets you zoom straight to enemies. The Duchess is a bit trickier, with a skill that reapplies the last damage dealt to an enemy, meaning timing is everything.

The story of Nightreign is intentionally cryptic, and only loosely tied to Elden Ring itself. The lore is mostly doled out through the characters' classes with journal entries you can read. And as you play as each class, you can unlock “Remembrances.” Activating a Remembrance makes you enter a kind of dreamlike instance with that character, where in the next match you play, there’ll be a special icon for a task you need to complete. Doing that task both continues the story and can lead to valuable pieces of equipment. But the frustrating part is that only one person can have a Remembrance active at one time, so you’ll need to play a lot if you’re hoping to see everything.

The classes are, by far, my absolute favorite part of Nightreign — as the differences between them are pronounced the more you learn the game’s systems. Finding synergy between different classes can also be an absolute blast, and if you get the right team together, these matches are some of the most satisfying Souls moments you’ll find anywhere — with an overwhelming feeling of accomplishment when you manage to survive and overcome the final boss. But, unfortunately, there are some major caveats to all of that.

Cracks in the Foundation

Nightrein has two major problems in my mind: a lack of meaningful progression across matches and an overreliance on being obtuse. What I mean by that second part is that, in the tradition of Souls games, Nightreign doesn’t explain anything, and even more than that, oftentimes feels like the multiplayer experience was made to be as difficult as possible.

Experimentation and exploration have always been key to the identity of FromSoftware’s Souls games, and that’s the same here — but coupled with a multiplayer experience, it just doesn’t feel as meaningful.

That moment I mentioned about the Locusts is a prime example. A single mistake can absolutely spell doom, and all of the bosses feel tuned in such a way that if you’re not at a minimum level, there’s simply no way you’re winning. That risk-reward aspect would be fine if things were better explained in Nightreign, and didn’t rely on you piecing together everything.

It took multiple, multiple matches to figure out that the Locusts are actually an attack from a hidden boss, and if you defeat it, you can actually gain your stolen levels back. Simultaneously, it’s easy to accidentally run into a boss way over your level and get decimated. Then there are a number of elements in the world that simply have to be figured out — how to open magic towers, what a handful of icons on the map mean, where to find more powerful smithing stones, etc. These elements of discovery work well in a game like Elden Ring, where you go at your own pace, but oftentimes feel at odds with the multiplayer experience — especially if you’re playing with random people who might all have different ideas of what to do.

That idea ties in with the game’s Relic system, where cross-match progression comes into play. By completing matches, you’re awarded with Relics, which give you a wide variety of effects, from stat boosts to brand new moves, to ancillary effect like your healing flask also healing your allies. It’s hard to overstate how much variety there is to these relics, but that also means you don’t get a good sense of what they’re actually doing for your character —until you’ve played dozens of hours and start getting the ones that obviously add new moves.

Because of that, the overall progression feels lackluster, and more crucially, it feels like you’re literally just banging your head against the wall if there’s a boss you can’t beat. In Elden Ring, there’s an element of being able to explore, test out different strategies, and discover new skills to overcome bosses. But in Nightreign, because of the rigidity of the multiplayer experience, each boss has a specific gimmick you need to exploit — and you just have to beat your skull against the wall until you get it. The biggest problem here is that the sense of reward doesn’t feel as consistent; you don’t have a real sense of getting better and progressing. I get that Nightreign is an integrally different experience, but improved pacing and a sense of reward would really go a long way.

Embracing the Pain

For as many frustrations as I have with Nightreign, I genuinely don’t regret my time with the game. Getting together with friends is absolutely the way to go for this one — commiserating on a voice chat over both the misery and ecstasy.

Nightreign is truly a bizarre little game, something that tries to tread the line between casual multiplayer experience and complex Soulslike. It’s messy and experimental, but that’s all part of the game’s identity. All the problems I have with the game feel like a consequence of simply trying something so ambitiously new, so while I do think they are “problems,” it’s something that’s natural to the process. There's something genuinely compelling at the heart of Nightreign, it just needs a little more work to uncover the gem hidden beneath the rubble.

More than anything, Nightreign feels like a sandbox for FromSoftware to try something new, implement ideas, and see how they land. In the grand scheme of things, it makes me far more interested to see what the studio can cook up with the Nintendo Switch 2 exclusive The Duskbloods, which is also multiplayer-focused. In that regard, Nightreign feels more like a stepping-stone for the studio, and as long as you go in with tempered expectations, there’s still a healthy dose of fun to be had.

7/10

Elden Ring Nightreign launches on May 30 for PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC. Inverse reviewed the PS5 version.

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