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Elden Ring Nightreign is hard in a way that no FromSoftware game over the last decade has been.

Where the pacing of Dark Souls and Elden Ring normally reward patience, Nightreign demands a speedrunner’s frenzy. Where the intricate dungeons of those games encourage memorization, so that you can dart in to grab a killer weapon or key item your second go-round, Nightreign randomizes everything. The map could be overflowing with the types of weapons that’ll make a boss go down easily… or it might not offer you a single one.

And where FromSoftware’s recent games almost always offer a shortcut or spawn point that lets you quickly re-attempt a boss, a loss in Nightreign means you’ve got to repeat a whole 40 minute run for another chance.

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After some 30 hours of Nightreign over the review period, I’m convinced it could be a killer co-op hang-out game—but only if FromSoftware adds ways to play that make the game much easier.

And harder, too. Because what’s really missing is variety. While traditional Souls games thrive on the catharsis of surmounting ever-escalating challenges, that’s just not what makes roguelikes fun.

Moment-to-moment Nightreign isn’t actually as demanding as Sekiro or Bloodborne—but dying can feel much more deflating, because FromSoftware’s multiplayer experiment only offers the bare skeleton of a roguelike, with none of the supporting systems that tend to bring these kinds of games to life.

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When I first played it at FromSoftware’s offices in Tokyo last December, reaching and defeating the first Nightlord, Gladius, was a triumphant moment: we’d spent four hours getting our asses kicked as we learned the game and practiced coordinating as a team, which set us up to punch Gladius’s ticket when we got some great weapon drops on the next run. That felt great!

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Less great: Getting all the way to that boss and losing, with only a few random, likely useless rewards to show for the time. Losing in any roguelike can feel crushing—they draw from deep pools of weapons, enemies, and other modifiers to remain exciting and challenging, and sometimes those things conspire to ruin your day. But failing a Nightreign run often feels bad to me in a way that most roguelikes don’t, because it really offers you only one goal and one way to play: survive to the end and kill the Nightlord for better rewards, or fail and get worse ones.

Elden Ring Nightreign Review | It’s kind of a mess, but… – YouTube

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With each “day” lasting only a few minutes of frantic scavenging, and each finale a high stakes showdown against huge bosses that can typically kill you in a single hit, Nightreign is the tryhard zenith of FromSoftware design: if you’re not locked in, you’re probably already dead.

Sometimes I’m absolutely game for that, but the more of Nightreign I’ve played, the more long-term potential I think it would have if FromSoftware had actually committed much harder to its asset reuse and dumped tons more bosses from Dark Souls and Elden Ring into the game, with some of them blatant push-overs that I can pound into the dust while only half paying attention.

I also want the brutally hard bosses! But instead of being the only objectives to shoot for, Nightreign’s eight Nightlords should be the game’s highest tier goal, with easier and more varied challenges kicking around beneath them.

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It’s been funny watching some commenters quickly judge Nightreign as a trend-chasing cash-in when it has in fact resisted including almost any of the “genre standard” features that compel me to replay roguelikes again and again. Take the progression in Hades as a prime example: early on, just making it to the final battle against the god of the underworld is a struggle. But as your skills improve you also accrue points you can use to get stronger until beating Hades feels trivial—and instead of that final battle being your only goal, ggwp uninstall, the game blossoms from there.

You can unlock different forms for each weapon that change how they play. You can apply modifiers to each run that add challenges for better rewards. You can earn unique items for the time you spend nurturing relationships with other characters.

(Image credit: Supergiant Games)

Not only are all those things satisfying, but they give purpose to repeated playthroughs. Maybe you want to crank up a ton of difficulty modifiers and beat Hades at his most punishing—that’s a run you have to be utterly locked in for. But maybe after one of those, you just want to keep hanging out in Hades’ world and beat a low stakes run with a weapon you haven’t used much, or polish off that one character’s questline you still haven’t seen to the end.

In my favorite co-op roguelike, Risk of Rain 2, my friends and I would often set the difficulty to easy to see how ridiculously overpowered our builds could get—we’d forgo fighting the final boss to just keep looping through levels and see how much crazy stuff we could accrue. Other times we’d set the difficulty to hard and try to reach the final boss as quickly as possible to defeat him and tick off one of the game’s primary challenges—an accomplishment that took a lot of practice, as well as a good bit of RNG luck.

It would be so fun to be able to do the same in Nightreign. Let me set some theoretical sliders to easy so I can stay on the field for four days instead of two, stacking my entire inventory with legendary weapons and smiting field bosses with a single swipe of the Sword of Night and Flame. Or let me fight the final boss on the equivalent of NG++, and earn something special for the accomplishment.

(Image credit: Hopoo Games)

Checklists of challenges and unlocks are not typically FromSoftware’s bag, so I’m not surprised to see them absent here. But it would’ve been relatively simple to give players a lot more to accomplish in Nightreign with some light structural changes—some progression systems beyond random relics and the meager memory fragment objectives for each character, some lower-tier bosses to target for chill runs.

Let me walk through the boss door and see Pinwheel waiting for me to disintegrate all his bones with a single hit. Give each character a couple alternate starter weapons and alternate ultimate abilities to unlock by accomplishing certain feats in battle. Challenge me to kill every boss in a single run!

Nightreign may actually see more post-launch support than FromSoftware’s typical games—the studio has said it plans to add another character, more bosses and “additional DLC,” whatever that means. I hope, in this case, it means actually chasing a trend for once and cribbing from other games that have excelled at making randomness their whole deal. Just like PC Gamer reviewer Tyler Colp, I’ve had a lot of fun with Nightreign’s fast-forward remix of Elden Ring. I just want a lot more reasons to keep playing it.

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