Elden Ring Nightreign – A Completely Reimagined Souls Experience

REVIEW – After a closed beta phase that left players with many questions, we’re finally here: Elden Ring: Nightreign is released. You must have several burning questions: Is it a worthy successor to Elden Ring? Is the gameplay too difficult for roguelike fans (games with randomly generated dungeons)? Here’s our review to answer all those questions and help you make your choice!

 

For those who don’t know yet: Elden Ring Nightreign is not a Souls game (a high-difficulty action RPG). FromSoftware is taking a completely new approach to the Elden Ring universe with this roguelike, a new game that combines action and survival. Your mission is to survive for two days and two nights in Limveld—a region corrupted by the Lords of the Night that shrinks over time—to face one of the game’s eight major bosses on the third day. Although it is possible to play solo, the game is designed to be played in a team of three. So you won’t be experiencing this adventure alone.

Each expedition will be slightly different from the previous ones, as procedural generation (or random generation) will only be used for the environments and enemies you encounter. The world around you will remain the same. To make it easier for you to explore Limveld, you will have access to a number of special abilities, such as spectral eagles (a means of rapid movement through the air), sprinting, climbing small surfaces, and spirit jumps (long jumps that add verticality to the game).

 

 

Key Differences Between Elden Ring and Nightreign

 

At its core, Elden Ring Nightreign is a separate spin-off that blends the signature Elden Ring DNA with a focused, roguelike co-op multiplayer experience, though you can still tackle it solo if you’re up for the challenge. The developers describe it as a “short RPG,” but it’s more accurate to call it a full-on roguelike that reimagines the familiar sandbox setting in a brand-new way.

One crucial thing to remember: Nightreign is not a battle royale by any stretch. Sure, it uses the shrinking-circle mechanic that’s popular in battle royale games, but that’s really just there to heighten the tension—it’s not about competitive PvP. There are no competitive features, nor does it have the service-driven trappings of the battle royale genre. Saying Nightreign is a battle royale is like calling Portal a shooter just because you shoot portals—technically true, but pretty misleading.

Instead of customizing a single character, you’ll pick from eight pre-designed heroes known as the Whips of Nightreign. Each one has a unique backstory, signature skills, and set specialties that you’ll refine as you journey deeper into the game. These expeditions play out over two in-game days, and while there’s only one map, it shifts and randomizes slightly each time, giving you new paths and opportunities to gather weapons, runes, and buffs to prepare for the ultimate nighttime showdowns.

If you can survive those tense day-and-night cycles, you’ll face off against the brand new “Lords of Nightreign,” who are anything but rehashed bosses. Like Radahn in the base game, these massive, high-speed juggernauts are built from scratch—new animations, new mechanics, and no recycled assets here.

Whether you come out victorious or fall in battle, each run rewards you with relics and resources that unlock new passive abilities and enhancements. These can be traded at the Round Table merchant, your home base in Nightreign, adding an extra layer to the progression system and offering even more ways to tweak your loadout and approach with each run.

 

 

The FromSoftware “experiment”

 

With that overview, you probably have a pretty clear idea of what Elden Ring Nightreign is all about—but what you’re really here for is to find out if I think it’s any good. Personally, I’m genuinely impressed that a legendary studio like FromSoftware decided to go down such an unusual and daring path, especially at a lower price point—$40 instead of the typical $70. In an industry that’s increasingly risk-averse, that’s a welcome surprise.

Once I actually sat down to play, though, it became obvious that this isn’t going to be one of those games I rave about the way I have for FromSoftware’s biggest hits in the past. That said, it’s surprisingly hard to put down—I’m still hooked even as I finish this review, and I expect I’ll be playing it for a good while longer. I’ll get into the details of why in just a bit, but the main point is that Nightreign kicks off with an addictive “honeymoon” phase that easily masks some of its more glaring technical hiccups and rough design edges.

What stands out right away is that Nightreign uses the same sandbox framework as the original Elden Ring. Because of that, the controls, enemies, weapons, items, and spells all feel instantly familiar—barely tweaked, if at all. FromSoftware is notorious for recycling assets, of course, even if that’s not always the most popular choice among fans.

 

 

Time to rethink tactics: what Nightreign demands

 

At the start, Nightreign lures you in with a wild and addictive honeymoon period, where you’re so focused on the action that you might not even notice the technical rough spots. Sure, the basic mechanics are carried over from Elden Ring, but if you want to conquer this game, you’ll need to relearn a lot of what you thought you knew. The good news is that it’s much more forgiving in some ways: any character can wield any weapon as long as they meet the basic level requirement, and there’s no weight limit to worry about.

Of course, this flexibility comes at a cost: the developers expect you to do your homework. You’ll want to study the Night Lords’ weaknesses and dive into how your chosen weapons, spells, and abilities scale with your stats. The game helps by offering a hefty codex at the Round Table—a sort of built-in encyclopedia—along with a customizable battle arena to practice in. So while it’s easier in some ways, it also demands a lot more from players willing to fully engage with its systems.

This time, you can’t just blindly follow a Seppukku build you saw in a YouTube guide—there’s no guarantee you’ll even find that particular ability during a single run. Instead, you’ll need to judge every reward and item carefully as you collect them—like in any good roguelike—and learn to read the battlefield for the best chance to make a move.

Because the map is partially randomized before each expedition, over time you’ll naturally start to figure out when and where it’s worth going first, when to push your luck to grab that one last chest before the night sets in, and even how to guess which of the Night Lords might be waiting for you next based on small hints. This aspect of Nightreign is truly thrilling and shows just how strong the core design can be.

The core combat is basically the same as before, but your whole approach and mindset shifts in a big way throughout the experience—and overall, I think that’s a good thing. Is it better than the original game? That’s a loaded question, but if I had to give you my honest opinion, I’d say not quite. Outside of those incredible Lord of the Night battles, most of the other foes here just don’t have the same sense of weight and menace that made Elden Ring so special—and that’s ultimately a flaw in the design.

Gameplay in Nightreign is much faster and more to the point, with barely any of the classic dungeon-crawling feel in between. More than once I caught a boss just wandering around in the open world, and I was able to snipe it down with a bow from behind some convenient cover. Other times, my teammates and I took turns hammering away at enemies, leaning hard on each hero’s unique powers to keep them staggered.

Back in 2022, the original game was so much more exciting in this sense: fog gates closing around you, enemies lurking in corners, that careful dance of exploring catacombs that made each encounter feel like a real event. Here, most enemies feel like little more than punching bags for you to loot weapons and runes off of—and if an enemy is too much of a pain, you’re free to just move on.

Even so, I have to admit that Nightreign does an excellent job of propelling you from one encounter to the next without losing steam. The way it sets up the pacing—giving you just enough time to gather what you need before the sun goes down—is spot on. This constant push forward really works for it as an experimental spin-off, but personally I’d hate to see this faster, stripped-down style become the new normal for the series as a whole.

 

Tracking down the Night Lords

 

With such a laser-focused premise, everything in Nightreign—the story, progression, and map structure—centers around one goal: hunt down and defeat the Night Lords. Every hero at the Round Table is driven by that single objective, and the campaign moves forward through personal missions for each playable character.

The way it works is simple but effective: before each expedition, the game asks you which Night Lord you want to target. These new bosses are no pushovers—they’re massive, brutal, and each one has its own mechanics, weaknesses, animations, and custom models. You can tell a lot of time and effort went into crafting these encounters.

But this is also where I have to start airing out some complaints. First up, the technical side: how is it that a cooperative game in 2025 still doesn’t have crossplay?

It’s honestly wild that a co-op game in 2025 doesn’t offer full crossplay. Right now, you’re limited to cross-platform play within the same brand (like Xbox One and Series X/S) but you’re out of luck if you want to team up between PC and console—something that feels incredibly dated. And on top of that, you have to manually turn on global matchmaking in the settings, and the same old connection bugs from Dark Souls days are still hanging around.

Another big issue is how the game’s interface handles important information. Sure, there’s a handy codex that’ll tell you all the nitty-gritty details—like if a halberd scales better with faith and strength or just strength and dexterity. But it’s buried in a menu, and while it’s there if you’re willing to dig, it doesn’t do a great job of surfacing what you need right in the moment.

 

Information overload and unpredictable challenges

 

During expeditions, Nightreign bombards you with item after item, often without giving you much to go on. Especially when it comes to rare weapons, it’s not always clear if they really fit your build or if they’ll just sit in your pack unused. Sure, there’s a little icon that opens up a short description for each item, spell or skill, but it doesn’t really dig deep. While I usually love losing myself in a dense codex in a sandbox game, I doubt most players will want to treat Nightreign’s collection of item data like it’s the Pokédex.

The challenge of the Night Lords left me feeling a bit conflicted. I wouldn’t call it unfairly tough, but there’s a sneaky sense that the whole thing depends less on skill and more on what gear you managed to scrounge up beforehand. Most of the time, success boils down to asking yourself: “Can I crush this monster in under ten minutes?” If the answer’s no, the fight usually drags out into a drawn-out war of attrition that’s as boring as it is brutal.

These bosses don’t mess around, either—they’re quick and deadly, able to string together long, punishing combos with terrifying speed. Even if you’re playing well, eventually you’ll take a colossal hit that no potion can fully patch up. And the new revive mechanic for allies is no picnic: unless you’ve got a passive skill for it, your friends come back with just half health, forcing you to slam a flask the moment they’re back on their feet.

Personally, I found myself stuck on a single boss for days at a time—only to finally beat it and think, “Huh, that was almost too easy…” just because I got lucky with my gear. This kind of wild swing in difficulty is going to shape how players feel about the game—some will love it, others will bail out of frustration—and honestly, I’m not sure how you’d fix it without gutting the whole roguelike flow.

After every run, win or lose, you’re given a handful of colorful relics that grant passive boosts to your hero. Say your chalice has one orange slot and two green ones? You’ll have to slot in exactly those colors to get any benefit. You can also buy fresh relics and new chalices from a merchant at the Round Table hub.

Here’s the rub: you don’t have any real say in how these relics turn out. It’s pure RNG most of the time, with only a few fixed drops you can count on. It’d be so much better if you could spend runes to reroll a relic’s effects or beef up weaker ones by adding new traits. As it stands, it’s a constant cycle of getting stuck with junk or relics that don’t quite click with your playstyle or the boss waiting at the end of the run.

 

FromSoftware's next game will follow in the studio's tradition, and will also feature characters that will remind us of some of their previous games.

Richer stories and unique heroes

 

But despite these rough patches, the story itself has some real charm—even if I’m not sure I’d want to see this exact approach return in a full-on Elden Ring 2. It’s still FromSoftware, so the plot is told in that cryptic, puzzle-piece style, with fragments of text and mysterious dialogue, but this time it’s a bit more direct and accessible. Quests get logged in a journal that you can pull up any time in the hub, and in some cases, they unlock whole new areas or cutscenes.

What really grabbed me is how each hero has their own story and personal questline—little glimpses that broaden the world of Elden Ring in some intriguing ways. You learn about new races you never saw in the main game, and characters who aren’t just another big boss to topple. Plus, each of these heroes has a unique fighting style, and some of them are downright brilliant.

I especially liked the Executioner, a blade-master from Crisol who can shapeshift into a beast and fights with a cursed katana that brings back memories of Sekiro’s legendary parry mechanic. And the Mage has an awesome gimmick: they can absorb elemental damage in the environment to craft new spells that change based on what they’ve absorbed. These details add a lot of depth and variety, and they’re some of the most fun parts of the whole game.

 

Technical performance: consistent but unremarkable

 

Although the map remains the same, we can still welcome the appearance of unexpected events, such as rare terrains, Cataclysms, and raids. These untimely activities completely disrupt our daily routine and make us want to venture off the beaten path. Rare terrains, which are aptly named, introduce new biomes accompanied by new activities and bosses, adding a touch of freshness to our travels. That said, we would have liked these surprises to be more frequent. Over more than fifty games, we only encountered about ten events related to raids or the Cataclysm, which leaves us wanting more.

 

-theGeek-

Pros:

+ Superb, fast-paced co-op experience for trios
+ Inventive, thrilling Nightlord boss encounters
+ Diverse classes that encourage different playstyles

Cons:

– Solo runs are nearly impossible thanks to poor balancing
– No crossplay or duo matchmaking; strictly three-player co-op
– The relic system’s randomness can be chaotic and frustrating


 

Developer: FromSoftware
Publisher: FromSoftware
Genre: Action RPG, roguelite, co-op
Release date: May 30, 2025.

Elden Ring Nightreign

Gameplay - 7.2
Graphics - 8.1
Story - 6.1
Music/Audio - 8.2
Ambience - 8.2

7.6

GOOD

Elden Ring: Nightreign is FromSoftware's bold attempt at a faster-paced, cooperative experience that feels both fresh and true to its roots. While the technical performance is solid, the lack of visual upgrades and the chaotic relic system hold it back somewhat. Still, the thrilling new Nightlord bosses and the unique character abilities make it an engaging ride for many.

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