‘Elden Ring Nightreign’ Review: Rage, Rage Against the Dying of the Light

Sprinting through grassy fields, I find my two companions standing at the edge of a cliff. How odd. Because shouldn’t we be rushing forward? After all, there’s a ring of blue fire closing in on us, growing tighter and tighter as we approach the evening, when we’ll be tasked with slaying some gnarly adversary before taking on the next day’s trials.

But they continue lingering, so I join them on the precipice. I look down, and far below, a crater of biblical scale has sundered the earth and spewed out a torrent of lava. Though time’s not on our side, the three of us stand utterly still, staring at the chasm from atop our perch. The entrancing beat of sightseeing is just a flicker in the inferno of Elden Ring Nightreign, one of countless moments of wonder that the game so consistently and spontaneously conjures.

Directed by Ishizaki Junya, Nightreign is a thrilling roguelite riff on FromSoftware’s open-world masterpiece Elden Ring. A solid run, which you can embark on with a pair of allies or alone, lasts about 45 minutes: two days searching for equipment and supplies, two nights battling bosses, and a final, brutal confrontation with one of eight Night Lords. The game’s action jolts Elden Ring’s foundations with substantial kineticism; there’s the familiar rolling around, jumping, and hacking foes to pieces, but you run at blistering speed and nimbly vault over obstacles. Most exhilarating is the selective rejection of the laws of physics: No fall, no matter how severe, can hurt you. The result is a bracing freedom of movement.

After forays, you relax in the Roundtable Hold, the weirdly cozy central hub from Elden Ring, where you can customize Nightreign’s eight playable characters, practice their abilities against a merciless sparring dummy, and glean fragments of lore. When you’re ready, you queue into an expedition, which previews its respective Night Lord with an intimidating blurb and a symbol identifying its weakness. Then, you hope that whatever watches over the Lands Between blesses your comrades with a can-do attitude and a way of exploiting the Achilles’ heel of your prey.

My fourth run begins with us scattering in perfectly opposite directions. Progress comes haltingly, so we try placing pins on the shared map to align on destinations. We’ve clocked that, with no in-game voice chat, cartography provides the surest means of coordination. We hustle to points of interest across the continent: caves, churches, strongholds, and other treasure troves. Random drops of items and boons may liberate jaded min-maxers from their build-planning impulses, but there’s still considerable room for optimization, as the cerulean flames inch inward and periodically lock off swathes of the landscape, encouraging rapid prioritization.

Over the course of the run, we, a trio as aimless as headless chickens, start to sprout skulls, brains, and a sense of orientation. When enemies knock out one of our friends, we revive them by, in a quite amusing twist, hitting them. We even pull off the kinds of serendipitous feats that imbue FromSoftware’s often agonizing work with commensurate elation: slipping past blades and bursts of magic to resuscitate a fallen teammate, destroying a monster with the flourish of a critical finisher, eking out a narrow victory through an incalculable dovetailing of skill and luck.

The run dies a slow death on the second night, but it nonetheless abounds with the feeling of satisfaction that distinguishes exceedingly layered multiplayer games (my mind immediately goes to Valve Corporation’s esoteric Dota 2): the reward of learning how to navigate, and possibly overcome, a ruthless environment with total strangers.

Whether following success or failure, it’s a pleasure to return to the Roundtable Hold, which serves as a charming microcosm of FromSoftware’s eccentric worlds. An adorable sentient jar sells wares; the keeper of the grounds, an animated marionette, installs a dresser that allows you to change your outfits; and the player characters occupy their individual nooks, doling out one-liners about their crapshoot of a quest, unwinding until you choose to summon them for an incursion. The home base’s winsome personality solves a problem endemic to online games: It flips the inertia of the wait for a match on its head, turning the seconds or minutes spent in the queue into an energizing reflection on the stakes of your mission.

On run 11, as the Raider, a brute capable of eating concussive blows, I rip a massive totem up from the earth, dazing the expedition’s Night Lord, an unsettling reptilian creature coursing with lightning. The party is flagging, but so is the fiend—so we unleash the myriad tools we’ve scraped together in one last frenzied surge. We prevail.

With the hunt complete, we congregate in the center of the arena, where we jump for joy. Each hop, like every pin we planted on the map along our adventure, further crystallizes our wordless bond. A fellow warrior points their bow to the sky, as if to shoot a celebratory arrow. But before they do, we’re wrested from the scene to a screen detailing our prizes. The compellingly unresolved ending caps a run that, like even a half-decent crack at Nightreign’s challenges, is a story unique to itself: a journey of close calls and triumphs too fortuitous to be replicated.

The game was reviewed with a copy purchased by the reviewer.