A confession: I sometimes continue playing video games even after I’ve given them a mediocre review. The most obvious reason for this is, of course, that I’m a total hypocrite. But there’s also often something about an unsatisfying game—especially one I had outstanding and glaring issues with—that continues to gnaw at my brain in a way a more unequivocally great one won’t. In casual conversations about games criticism—I’m a lousy conversationalist, in addition to a hypocrite, in case that wasn’t also clear—I’ll often phrase my goal as a critic as trying to figure out how to like a game, and then exploring where and why I couldn’t. And so I continue playing certain panned games, even after I’ve spilled copious ink on their flaws.
For example: Since filing my review of From Software’s online multiplayer Elden Ring spinoff Nightreign back in May of 2025, I’ve played something like 50 more hours of it, spread over the subsequent eight months. That’s partly for the reasons laid out above, and it’s partly because there aren’t that many three-player online video games out there, and us boring hypocrites have to find diversions that fit the ever-shrinking size of our friend groups. In that near-year—which kicked up into a new spout of increased activity after I suddenly remembered that I had access to the title’s downloadable content pack, The Forsaken Hollows, after it came out last December—I’ve gone in big, sweeping arcs with From’s experiment in online monster killing. That’s been marked by my fair share of exultant highs, including actually managing to beat the damn thing, something I’d definitely doubted would ever happen when I sat down to write my review in the late Spring of 2025. But also, it gave me a much deeper and more profound sense of “Fuck this game, actually” than I ever could have had before dedicating so much of my gaming life to it.
Some details: The Forsaken Hollows’ most immediate piece of gamer candy is the introduction of two new character classes to Nightreign’s team of pre-generated characters. There’s The Undertaker, a bruiser who can cast Faith-based magic to boost her big honkin’ mace strikes, and The Scholar, who I’ve naturally gravitated to, because I like playing as fiddly little weirdos who make things complicated for everybody. Specifically, this weird little nerd’s all about inflicting status ailments and using the game’s various consumable items, making them far more useful than they would be for everybody else. (I’m also a sucker for his Ultimate Art, which allows you to link up all the enemies on the battlefield so that they all take damage together; popping that sucker in a big room and watching everyone explode when your buddy pulls off a single backstab is satisfying.)
On the monster side of the equation, the DLC feels slight: Just two new Nightlords (the game’s main bosses) alongside eight new sets of minibosses to screw up your run on the first two of each session’s three in-game “nights.” (Ah, finally, you’ll think to yourself: A chance to get fucked up by those chakram-flinging acrobatic assholes from the start of Shadow Of The Erdtree with my friends!) These new Nightlords are, admittedly, pretty cool to look at and fight—provided you can actually get to them—but for a game that’s fundamentally about hunting down giant challenges, the package feels on the slim side.
The biggest change The Forsaken Hollows introduces, though, is to the game’s map, which was pretty static for the first seven months of the game’s existence: A big chunk of Elden Ring carved off and dropped in the ocean, and then subjected to the merciless whims of a Fortnite ring of deadly rain. The DLC adds new structures to the existing map, mixing up familiar locations to breathe a little life into ones you’ve probably run through dozens of times at this point, racing at breakneck speed to shuck their content for life-giving loot and experience. It also introduces what is, essentially, a brand new map via the game’s existing “Shifting Lands” mechanic, in this case a massive crystalline cave that fully replaces the existing world of Limveld. And it’s here where my chronic case of “Fuck this” had a nasty flare up.
Being forced to reckon with the perils of this new and unfamiliar terrain forced me to take a hard look at just how much Stockholm Syndrome I’d been applying to my time with Nightreign, filed somewhat deceptively under the heading of “institutional knowledge.” Even more than enemy patterns and boss attacks, there is no skill or knowledge in Nightreign more important than simply learning how to read and move around its map; with an incredibly deadly and strict time limit hanging over each match, even a minute of distraction or digression can be the difference between arriving at the Nightlord at a workable level of experience, or being forced to acknowledge that your entire 45-minute game up to this point has just been the prelude to a dispiriting ass-kicking. Nightreign is so profoundly unforgiving on this score that you’re essentially classically conditioned out of any wasted behaviors—including taking in the scenery or lore of this world, which is a pretty hideous thing to do to a game as mysterious and beautiful as Elden Ring.
Dropping into The Forsaken Hollows’ Great Hollow, I felt a sudden, awestruck urge to explore, to experiment, to play. There were whole new mechanics and structures to learn about here, and I would have absolutely loved to learn about them through poking around and treating the game as a playground, rather than clicking through on Reddit to figure out how to optimally deal with the new health-sapping Crystal Curse introduced in the zone. But that’s not Nightreign, a game that embodies the principle of homework as much as any non-competitive multiplayer game you might care to name. With the ring closing in, and the rain starting to fall, there’s no time for anything but brutal efficiency, along with a desperation that comes from mixing new amounts of verticality and deadly bottomless pits into the mix. There are no mysteries here, no wonders: Just the wireframe, and the clock.
And that, in turn, is why I like revisiting an imperfect game from time to time. Some of these ideas are ones I laid out in my review of Nightreign last year. But many of them have been brought into much better focus by my extended time with the game, and especially with The Forsaken Hollows. I’d never claim to love Nightreign—it’s so deliberately hostile, it’d be hard to see the point—but I know it now in ways that I couldn’t have a year ago, and that’s allowed me to highlight its strengths and damn its weaknesses with far more knowledge and efficiency. There’s value in that.
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