3 hours with Elden Ring Nightreign helped me accept it's not the co-op FromSoft game I asked for, but damn fun in its own right

Elden Ring Nightreign clicked the moment I hit level 2. My squad had just dropped into Nightreign's remixed version of Limgrave. Unlike in every other Souls game, I didn't have to create a character or weigh the options of starting equipment. I was a bird man named Guardian, and all I really had to know about Guardian to get started is his passive ability that makes him good at blocking. We dropped 100 feet onto a camp of soldiers, sliced them up in seconds, and beelined toward a site of grace to level up.

The From Software leveling experience is one reason why I like Souls games, but don't love them. Agonizing over where to dump points into stats to make meters slightly longer isn't my idea of satisfying progression, so when I touched a site of grace in Nightreign and watched my stats automatically increase according to my character's specialties, I thought, "This rules, and it's gonna piss some people off."

I hope I'm not dealing fatal psychic damage when I say that, structurally, Elden Ring Nightreign has more in common with Fortnite than Elden Ring. There's the battle royale-like closing circle, of course, but the flow is similar too. A full Nightreign run takes place over three in-game days, with days one and two lasting around 15 to 20 minutes. The daytime is basically one long looting phase: Your three-person squad runs around the map clearing mob camps, looting, killing lesser bosses, leveling, and maybe solving the odd 10-second puzzle. At night, you challenge a harder boss and then the sun rises for the next day. Leveling up? One button. Loot? Simple as grey, blue, purple, and so on. Dying? Not a big deal, just revive your buds by slashing at their corpse. Need to cross the map to outrun the closing circle? Just hop on a spectral bird and glide there.

One foot in the Limgrave

As someone who somehow clocked 106 hours in Elden Ring without seeing credits, it's jarring to see where From has hacked away at its complexity to reconfigure the RPG into a run-based hack-and-slasher. Armor isn't a thing, enemies don't respawn when you die, there are no NPCs in Limgrave to chat up other than the occasional merchant, and there's seemingly little progression between runs. Nightreign breaks more Souls game rules than anything before it. In that way, this really does play like a super ambitious mod, and so far it's pretty good.

Though my "so far" isn't very far at all. Day three is when you can challenge the major boss to complete a run, but due to some unfortunate networking issues at the Las Vegas event I attended, we never got past the day two boss without somebody dropping out. Bandai reps assured attendees this wasn't indicative of the final game, which I'm sure is true, but honestly, I don't think it was the last time I'll be kicking my desk after a botched Nightreign run—spotty multiplayer would be nothing new for a Souls game.

One aspect of Elden Ring that made the jump to Nightreign relatively unchanged is combat: My first round with Wylder, a knight character that Bandai described as beginner-friendly, was immediately comfortable, like loading up an Elden Ring save from 2022. I'm not one to tinker with builds for hours in these games, so it's great to choose a predefined Nightfarer and just roll with it. Eventually, I gravitated toward Guardian, the birdman who begins with a big shield and halberd, two items I entirely avoided in the base game.

The improvisational nature of Nightreign's builds alleviates the pressure of maintaining perfectly complementary gear: All characters can hold all weapons, so I spent three hours experimenting with swords, axes, crossbows, and spells I never considered in the base game.

Round and Roundtable

Build variety is bound to be Nightreign's greatest strength as it pulls from an already deep pool of weapons, Ash of War skills, bosses, and whatever new stuff director Junya Ishizaki's team has cooked up for the $40 standalone, and there's a thrill to its accelerated power curve. My GamesRadar cohort (and dedicated Souls fan) Austin Wood was consistently finding some of the most powerful Elden Ring weapons on day one and two of a Nightreign run. By the time the sun set on day two, I felt more powerful and capable than I ever did in base Elden Ring.

I'm less convinced by the repeatability of Nightreign's map. It's a remixed version of Limgrave with new structures and randomized elements—Bandai mentioned the full game will have a chance to spawn unique points of interest we didn't see, like a volcano in the middle of Limgrave—but ultimately, this is one map, not particularly huge, and too familiar to feel truly new.

Nightreign will be an interesting litmus test of why people come to Souls games. If it's all about swinging big swords and dodge-rolling away from impossibly hard bosses, Nightreign is gonna be a feast. But if it's From's quieter moments that stick with you—exchanges with weird NPCs, taking careful steps deeper into a vast fortress, contemplating The Lands Between's cryptic questlines—well, Nightreign ain't got time for any of that. The circle is closing! Your buddy just pinged the next monster camp! Stop looking at that beautiful skyline, there's XP to grind!

Graceful descent

At times, the circle was a real buzzkill. So much of Nightreign is about freedom and empowerment—the superhuman sprint speed, juiced weapon stats, overpowered ultimate abilities—but there's no time afforded to stop and smell the scarlet rot.

In one run, we decided to explore a mine shaft hoping to find the advanced upgrade material for our weapons. In Elden Ring, mines gave me the creeps—it was always a "shield up" affair as I tiptoed around corners expecting the worst—but here, I was first through the door sprinting straight down the tunnels, skipping ambushes entirely and rushing toward the miniboss at the end. It's not how I usually like to absorb FromSoft's worlds, but there's not much of a choice when you're killing against a clock. In a world where From makes its game especially for me, Nightreign would be more like a base Elden Ring lobby with the Seamless Co-op mod installed.

The lack of a social hub or even a true pre-game lobby seems like a missed opportunity. You can explore the Roundtable Hold solo and chat up the Nightfarers between runs, but I'm kinda shocked there's no way to invite your buds to a group and visit the hub together before a mission. Instead, we're still punching in private lobby codes like "8888" and praying to lock hands with our friends in the matchmaking void. Honestly, why isn't this part of the game just exactly like Monster Hunter?

Which isn't to suggest a co-op, fleshed-out Elden Ring arcade mode is a bad idea—we had lots of fun in our short burst—but Nightreign's fixation on pure combat and forward momentum is already showing its limits. A couple hours in, after getting comfortable with the flow of days one and two, that long daytime looting phase was starting to get dull. Anything smaller than a boss didn't really pose a threat unless we got careless, and the more efficient we got at wiping out mob camps, sprinting to the next one, and upgrading our flasks at churches, the more it felt like the majority of playing Nightreign is thwacking various loot piñatas with a stick until the real fun begins.

As our final run of the day—our furthest push into the day two boss—was once again cut short by a dropped connection, I was glad to get the chance to rein in my Nightreign expectations so far ahead of its May 30 release. I want to play more, try the four Nightfarers we didn't have access to, see other map variations, and finally finish a damn run. But I won't be looking for Elden Ring qualities that Nightreign isn't here to supply.