This is, obviously, a factor of my own Brain Problems. But it’s also a consequence of how high the stakes in a game of Nightreign can feel. A single round—broken into two 15-minute days of exploration, followed by a battle against the resident Nightlord—is a fairly hefty time investment, usually clocking in at 40 or so minutes of play. A single, serious mistake is all it takes to send that whole chunk of three different people’s days racing down the toilet; you can recover from a few minutes of screw-ups in the early going, but by the time you’re facing down against the final boss—many of which require planning and coordination to take down, featuring divided attention mechanics reminiscent of what you might see in a Destiny raid or an MMO boss fight—it really only takes one slip to doom the entire team. Enjoy your pity Relics (the game’s incredibly scattershot and random way to buff up characters between matches) and the knowledge that two people somewhere in the world just moaned “Ugh, this fucking guy” about you in the comfort of their living rooms. It’s all a consequence of a game that demands coordination, while doing almost nothing internal to facilitate it; the game’s (admittedly low) $40 price tag should come with the budget for the care and feeding of two dedicated buddies to come smack you back to life every time a big dog with a sword strapped to its back slams you down into the grave.
And if all of this sounds like a lot of moaning about the structure of the game, and very little discussion of the actual play, that’s kind of my point, because you literally can’t get to the latter without reckoning with the former. Which is a shame, because there’s fascinating work being done in Nightreign, even if some of it’s fascinating in the “I don’t know why a human being would do that” sense.
The game’s classes, for instance, are uniformly clever, taking character archetypes from Elden Ring—and, in a couple of cases, other From titles like Bloodborne and Sekiro—and streamlining them for the by-necessity rapid play. (You no longer pick your stats when leveling up, for example, with each class auto-allocating them in a way that inclines them toward using certain weapons and roles.) A lot of work has gone into giving each of these classes a real mechanical identity, whether you’re playing as a marksman who can weaken enemies from a distance, or a magic user who surrounds herself with the summoned dead to cover her while she deploys big, slow blasts of arcane power. But even here, there’s weirdness to surmount: The in-game tutorial text leaves big gaps in understanding the role and abilities classes are meant to fill; it feels telling that most of them only really clicked for me after reading through what was essentially a strategy guide that Bandai Namco provided for reviewers. Here, as in so much of Nightreign, the developers seem to assume players will use outside tools to patch the skimpy offerings in the game itself.
That also extends to the role of the various camps, forts, and castles that Nightreign randomly craps onto the map at the start of every game, listlessly shuffling its geometry from a fairly small deck of options. (You can unlock more impressive changes, like fiery craters and frozen mountains, which will appear for a handful of rounds before expiring. But they’re still just being dropped atop this same basic template, culled from the Limgrave zone of the original game.) A major portion of the game’s strategy comes down to learning how to navigate through these locales, attempting to stay ahead of a steadily mounting power curve. (And the death wall.) Some of this is intuitive—always go for churches first, because that’s how you get more healing—but some of it isn’t. Notably, there’s no way to know how hard a location or randomly roving field boss is supposed to be from its map icon; the only way to be sure is to engage directly with the fuck around/find out continuum, potentially nuking your run.
Even beyond the difficulties of play, though, the map is also where Nightreign’s spiritual core is the most hollow. One of the most beautiful, and emotionally affecting, elements of Elden Ring was the way it became a world for me: A gorgeous, fallen paradise for my Tarnished to wander through over more than 100 hours of exploration. Nightreign’s Nightfarers, on the other hand, can only take in its world in a sprint—literally, since From gave everyone a dedicated run command to make up for the fact that you no longer have a jumping ghost horse to bounce around on. Which is fine, because there’s no identity to any of this procedurally generated geography anyway. Few games have ever felt more like a haphazardly assembled collection of assets, enemies, and weapons that the developer already had sitting around. Comparing any game to Elden Ring’s magnificent, literally-best-in-the-artform sprawl is always going to come up empty, of course—but, then, most games don’t invite those kinds of comparisons down on their own heads in quite so spectacular a way.
The exceptions to this philosophical absence—and the primary reason I can’t simply dismiss Nightreign out of hand—are the Nightlords themselves, the big bosses you challenge at the end of those three in-game days. Unlike the mid-round bosses (all of which are taken from From’s old games and all of which are just fine), each Nightlord is a bespoke creation for Nightreign, and each is, in its own way, a reminder that there are few creators who can match this studio when it’s working at the top of its beautifully grotesque game. It’s not just that each Nightlord is a minor work of art—although they are, with gorgeous designs each evoking a very individual flavor of monstrousness. It’s also that they’re the one part of the game that feels perfectly suited to the three-player structure the game imposes on its players. My most thrilling moments with Nightreign came in these fights, in those instances when three random people transformed into a team, managing enemy aggression, striking at openings created by my allies, and supporting each other as needed. (One battle, where I managed to pull up my badly wounded companion and dragged a near-certain loss back from the jaws of defeat, is going to live in my memory for weeks.) It’s here that the promise of “mandatory multiplayer Elden Ring” comes closest to feeling like a bold new step, and not simply a massive imposition; at the same time, there’s a grim aptness to the fact that you can only get to Nightreign’s best material by suffering through its biggest inconveniences.
With “infinite games” like this, my reviews tend to hinge on a final thought: Am I going to keep playing this sucker after I’m no longer contractually obligated to do so? Normally, I know the answer by the time I send a review off to my editors, but in the case of Nightreign, it’s genuinely not up to me. I have Elden Ring friends who’ve vacillated about playing this game, intrigued by the idea of more content in this world, but repulsed by changes that seem to excise so much of what made that game special. (A repulsion I do not anticipate this review making any easier to manage.) If I can talk them into playing it with me, investing the energy, the mental overhead, and above all the time required to learn its quirks, I believe there’s a genuinely great experience to be had here: Not as thoughtful as Elden Ring, even by a fraction, but thrilling and fun nonetheless. (I hesitated about including “fast-paced” in the above sentence; relatively, maybe, but the only sessions I’ve had that felt “short” were the ones where me and my squad of randos ate shit on the first Night.) If I’m left to my own devices, though? Just playing this with folks online? Even for someone who fell in love with Elden Ring’s gorgeous, expansive isolation, that’s too lonely an idea to contemplate.
Developer: From Software
Publisher: Bandai Namco
Platforms: Windows, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S
Reviewed on: PlayStation 5
Price: $40
