Expectations were high after last year’s announcement of Elden Ring Nightreign, the first co-op game in the popular and punishing fantasy world. Nightreign asks groups of three players to survive three days of battles in a land teeming with hulking knights and all manner of monstrosities, concluding with an encounter with the brutally savvy Night Lord.
Thankfully, these weren’t literal 24-hour days. Within the game world, three days last for about an hour. But Nightreign takes a page from Fortnite and other games in the battle royale genre, meaning that players must also contend with a tightening circle of deadly blue flame.
Not knowing precisely what they would encounter, our three critics met in the beautifully grim Lands Between as “seekers of redemption … thrown together by forces beyond our control.” Staying alive until Day 3 would prove to be quite the challenge.
CHRISTOPHER BYRD Forgive me if I’m projecting, but I don’t think any of us were exactly keyed up to play Nightreign. When I saw the reveal trailer, I couldn’t help but think of it as a minor project meant to round out FromSoftware’s portfolio. Even now, it’s hard for me to see it as little more than a Fortnite-esque, multiplayer rehash of what the company has done before. Still, I acknowledge how well the studio has tweaked the formula to speed up the monster slaying and make it more conducive to fast-tempo multiplayer sessions. Has the game met your expectations so far, or even exceeded them?
HAROLD GOLDBERG I was looking forward to Nightreign. I hadn’t played Shadow of the Erdtree, the mammoth expansion for Elden Ring that was released last year. But I had put 100 hours into the original game. So I’ve been ready for more. I’m not against the idea of quick matches à la Fortnite because shorter experiences in the Lands Between appeal to me. As a single-player aficionado, however, I still want to explore. Meandering through the lush, odd world of Elden Ring was what kept me coming back. In our initial rounds of Nightreign, we weren’t leveling up, just battling. I suggested that we explore first to increase our odds. Do you think that helped?
YUSSEF COLE If exploration is something you desire, I really hope you get a chance to play Shadow of the Erdtree. I wrote about its impressively intricate puzzle geography in my review, and it’s dripping with tone and atmosphere compared with Nightreign. There is atmosphere in Nightreign’s cut scenes, which are full of existential terrors and stalwart heroes, but once you land in Limveld and start racing to kill everything that moves, it becomes a Benny Hill-style frantic rush to level up. Do you feel like this roguelike approach of short bursts of action and restarting every time you die works in a FromSoftware game?
BYRD We’ll have to see if Nightreign has a cut scene as memorable as that of Rennala, Queen of the Full Moon from Elden Ring. What I find missing from my experience here is the sense of awe that the earlier games generated by virtue of their spacious, meticulous level design. The locations in Nightreign are clumped together, which makes sense for something built around short multiplayer sessions — but I’ll be surprised if the game makes me feel anything like the wonder I felt when I first got to Anor Londo in the original Dark Souls. I do think the game’s roguelike structure works. The stakes feel high when you get to Night 3, and a defeat that sends you back to the beginning feels properly crushing. But is any of this surprising? Having played these Soulslike games for 15 years, what most sticks out is how nimble the characters are here. It’s a bit of a rush to plunge down a ravine and not die from the fall.
GOLDBERG I do like the ability to scale giant walls and rocky mountains, which makes me feel like Spider-Man in the land of the dead, as well as the oversize ghostly birds that carry us from the decrepit castle’s round table by their talons. But FromSoftware, known for innovation, is not doing anything particularly new. That surprises me. One addition I did enjoy: Teammate-initiated brutal attacks bring you back to life. That proved important while battling Cerberus, which splits into three beings with a whipping rat-like tail. I initially wondered what kind of food the genetically enhanced Ratatouille would cook for us before the gross thing grabbed me and chewed my head. Chris and Yussef had to smack me.
I admit I’ve rarely enjoyed a multiplayer experience unless it’s a player-versus-player battle like Mortal Kombat or Soul Calibur. Nightreign hasn’t changed that feeling yet. During the run to battle, I find myself trailing behind, observing the artful, strange surroundings while playing as a stomping giant. He conjures a squashing giant tombstone that is extraordinarily powerful if it’s placed correctly. But going slowly while searching for upgrades puts me in danger of the Night’s Tide, a shrinking circle of blue flame that surrounds the world and every boss battle. I find myself bound by its beauty, even as it threatens to kill my character. I want to touch it, a hulking, armored moth.
COLE I envy your ability to stop and smell the Erdleaf flowers. I tend to get laser-focused on the map during runs, trying to plan out the most efficient routes through the game’s twisting and vertiginous landscape. The blue wall of flame ever encircles, but it’s more an annoyance than a thing of terrifying beauty. It’s the gamer in me! I want to enjoy the world, but I feel so rushed all the time. I’m counting numbers, sweating as I realize we’ll never be able to collect enough of the runes required to defeat the final boss.
But I suppose that’s the point of Nightreign. It’s not the singular experience of Elden Ring, going from location to location, boss to boss. Nightreign is less paint strokes and more pastiche. The impression is built up over time, by the details you catch in your cycles of play: the blue sunset glancing off the upper balustrades of a towering fort, the yawning darkness of a chasm hiding glittering treasures. The more I play, the better I understand the world. I’m just struck by an overwhelming feeling of frustration. The barriers Nightreign throws in to keep hard-core players satisfied prevent me from finding a groove that feels right, at least before that flame wall closes in.
GOLDBERG Those are beautiful descriptions of the lands we traversed. It was difficult for me to catch those alluring details in the cycles we played. My primary memory will be watching you and Chris from fields and fields away, like characters from Terrence Malick’s “Days of Heaven.” I would lag behind and try desperately to catch up after pausing to observe a crumbling sculpture or a grim creature moving just under the soil.
BYRD I’ve been thinking that I enjoy Nightreign less as an RPG, with all of the attendant “you better pull me into an engrossing world” expectations that the genre inspires, and more as an arcade game. It’s harder to find fault with its loosey-goosey take on the Souls formula if I think of it as a 21st-century Gauntlet. From that perspective, I find it easier to excuse the uneven enemy A.I. that results in some bosses seeming like they can barely keep track of all three of us and even walking in the opposite direction of a fight. To be sure, it’s nice that not every battle is a slog, and the game’s steady rollout of good upgrades limits the fretting over one’s loadout.
Harold, you mentioned FromSoftware’s reputation for innovation. Don’t you think that is a bit of an industry-perpetuating myth at this point? As Yussef said during one of our sessions, hasn’t the company been remaking the same game over and over?
GOLDBERG The infinite gray scale of game creativity is different for everyone. We can agree that Demon’s Souls and then Dark Souls took the world of games by storm with their constant dying mechanic, which is depressing for players until they learn to conquer it. Bloodborne, Elden Ring and the unexpectedly unusual Armored Core VI can be considered variations on brilliantly conceived worlds and the sometimes inscrutable narrative themes within. Innovation doesn’t always mean astoundingly new. It doesn’t for Stephen King, Emma Cownie or Terence Nance. But they still provide something thoughtful with each creative effort. So does FromSoftware.
Nightreign, however, feels like Fortnite meets EverQuest or World of Warcraft. It provides its own Elden Ring spin, which is to learn to work as a team, become battered by the enemy, learn from the dire challenges and endeavor to be better. I don’t think that’s bad. I’ll play until I become slightly proficient, but I still do wonder if I’ll return to Nightreign after the summer. The critic Alyssa Mercante told me it is “the game that nobody asked for.”
COLE I agree that teamwork is where Nightreign is at its most interesting. I’ll fess up to stepping out on our group and playing a bit with strangers, and it’s fascinating how different teams completely alter the experience. I’ve followed teammates who knew every secret and every exploit and breezed through runs. And I’ve been matched with players who refused to consider the objective (that common multiplayer bugbear), which just makes a run feel pointless and awful.
Multiplayer being central to Nightreign is both a blessing and a curse. Most of the time I feel kind of sour about the game: an uneven entry full of frustrations and limitations that doesn’t stand up to its long line of popular predecessors. But when matched up with a good team, I can almost see the vision of what this game might have been.
Playing with our group has certainly helped me feel more generous to Nightreign. We may not have beaten every (any?) of the game’s bosses, but I had a great time dashing madly with you through the blue flames.
Elden Ring Nightreign was reviewed on the PlayStation 5. It is also available on the PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S.
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