Ever since 2009’s Demon’s Souls kicked off a new subgenre of action game, FromSoftware has repeatedly put players in the fights of their lives against hard-hitting bosses. With Elden Ring: Nightreign, it’s now giving fans their fiercest opponent yet: online matchmaking.
Ah, what a fearsome devil it is! How many wars have been lost over the years due to long queues that stall the flow of reinforcements? How many demons have been allowed to run roughshod over an unprotected world as brave heroes struggle to figure out whether or not they can pair up together on different consoles? It is a silent killer that now looms large over The Lands Between, threatening to keep its potential heroes locked in a crypt, far away from the thrills and splendor of the world above.
If you can climb out of that darkness, overcoming convoluted matchmaking and inconsistent performance, there’s an exciting multiplayer game waiting at the surface. Elden Ring: Nightreign’s highs make it worth fighting through the lows, but I couldn’t blame any warrior who would rather just sit the battle out until it gets some much needed improvements.
Putting a run together
Built as a way to capitalize on the success of 2022’s Elden Ring without committing to a full sequel, Nightreign puts a clever co-op spin on the open-world game by turning it into a roguelike. It’s a smart remix that gets more use out of existing assets while inventing a replayable multiplayer game with unexpected strategic depth despite its RPG hooks being much more streamlined than a standard Soulslike. Fully finding that hook takes a lot of effort, but it pays off for those patient enough to push through its most obvious flaws. Don’t ask me what the story here is about. I know that it’s my job to tell you that, but I just don’t have the answer for you. FromSoftware’s games are infamous for their cryptic stories that dole out layers of lore, but Nightreign is especially obtuse with its sea of proper nouns that do little to actually deepen the world of Elden Ring.
Oh, you want to know all the juicy details about the Nightfarers and their quest to defeat the Nightlords while avoiding the Night’s Tide? That’s all spooky set dressing to explain why players need to vanquish eight bosses quickly as a shrinking circle of flames closes in on them, Fortnite-style. I’ll leave it to the lore videos to try and decode every stray NPC conversation in the Roundtable Hold, but this is largely a story built to justify a gameplay scenario. It’s FromSoftware letting its hair down after a decade and a half of tireless worldbuilding packed into every weapon description.
What’s more worth dissecting is how an actual roguelike run works. Players begin by selecting which Nightlord they’re pursuing. They are then dropped into Limveld, an alternate reality take on Elden Ring’s world that remixes its sights into a compact island that’s dense with points of interest, loot, and bosses. A run takes place over three days. On the first and second, players explore as much of the map as possible as the circle gradually pushes them towards a final arena. Before that happens, squads have to use their time wisely to take out enemies, gain experience points, find powerful weapons, and craft a viable build before taking on a boss. If they survive the first two days, they’re then teleported to a cosmic arena where they’ll try to take down the boss.
Though it sure looks like your average Soulslike, it’s playing by a very different set of rules that might throw veterans off more than newcomers. This is a roguelike first and foremost with an emphasis on power management over RPG min-maxing and reactive skill. Leveling up, for instance, is a static process. Once I have enough runes, I simply have to run to a site of grace and spend them to have my stats automatically boosted based on the stat layout of the character I’ve selected. A successful run hinges on a party’s ability to amass runes and upgrades by cutting through as many minibosses as possible in a day, all while stopping to grab additional flask charges from churches and uncovering other stray secrets along the way.
Doing so will help them level up and stack passive upgrades that will put them in the best position possible to take down the big bads. If you can make it to the third day with your party around level 13, there’s a good chance you’ll win. The engaging challenge is learning how to consistently pull that off.
It took me a long time to crack the code, which made for some frustrating early runs that had me swearing the entire project off. That’s the way in which it’s most similar to a traditional Soulslike. A total lack of coherent onboarding means that it’s up to players to figure out how it all works, something that I fear may turn the all-important casual multiplayer crowd away early. But once it all clicks, Nightreign turns into an enthralling action gauntlet that rewards players who can react to the world quickly.
My first success came after a three hour session with a set squad over voice chat. I had started to understand bits and pieces at that point, but this was the first time where I could craft a long-term plan with two other players who were on the same page as me. With each loss, we loaded back in and put any knowledge we’d earned to good use. We soon began starting each run by chasing down bosses and churches around the edge of the world, as those would be closed off to us first once the ring started moving. From there, our team leader would quickly pop into the map and call out a path we could follow towards the center that would let us cross through as many points of interest as possible.
If we go this way, we can hit this boss, stop at this church, and open that evergoal in rapid succession.” An action-focused gauntlet turned into a connect-the-dots routing puzzle that tested our ability to navigate a world quickly.
The excitement of a success comes from learning how to execute a reactive game plan.
That format still leaves room for strong risk-reward dynamics. At one point, we came face to face with a giant centipede that we were barely denting with our attacks. We kept trying anyway, reviving one another when it would take us out in two hard hits and expending precious items like Warming Stones to keep the party’s health topped off. By the time we got it’s health down to half way, we noticed that the circle was coming.
We were left with a choice: Do we stay and finish it off or cut our losses and spend our time getting easy wins elsewhere? In this case, we stood our ground and unleashed all of our special skills. It went down just as the fire came in and we reaped our rewards behind the damaging wall before dashing out and continuing on. It was a pure thrill built solely around time management rather than pinpoint parrying.
That’s bound to trip up the “get good” crowd who enjoy Souls games for the skill; slowly grinding down every hard boss with careful evasion is a death sentence. Nightreign flexes entirely different muscles, testing how well players can build and push their momentum. That means that some runs can be overly fragile, as a party that can’t amass some level ups early will be stuck in a power deficit that’s hard to climb out of. But the excitement of a success comes from learning how to execute a reactive game plan that ends with a Nightlord corpse rotting in the sand.
Elden remix
To pull this all off only three years after Elden Ring’s release, FromSoftware carefully threads new ideas into existing assets and systems from the base game. Limveld is an amalgamation of different points of interest from The Lands Between, dotted with familiar churches, mines, and castles. I fight a rogue’s gallery of Elden Ring enemies from the Bell Bearing Hunter to Margit, and even some stray Dark Souls bosses. Sites of grace, wandering vendors, armament upgrading, and more are accounted for in more compact forms. It feels like a well-designed fan mod built from a creative suite, one that turns the movement speed up and turns off fall damage.
All of the sticky enjoyment of putting together a build in Dead Cells carries over to the Elden Ring formula quite well.
It’s the way that those familiar elements are remixed with new ones that makes the approach work. Take its character progression, for instance. Rather than selecting a class that I’ll build on with tiny changes, I pick a specific hero at the start of every run that has two special abilities and a passive perk. The Guardian is a giant bird who starts with a halberd, has access to a powerful slam attack, and has a stat distribution built around HP and stamina.
The Ironeye, on the other hand, is a weak archer who can pick enemies off from afar with unlimited shots. Each can still be built up through a run, equipping any weapon and perk, but it makes Elden Ring feel more like a hero shooter. Team composition becomes paramount when trying to figure out the best way to approach a boss.
Combat remains mostly unchanged from Elden Ring, though boss fights tend to go by much quicker with three people. I still need to dodge roll or parry to avoid familiar attack patterns. What’s different is that weapon perks play a much bigger role in battle now. Rare and legendary gear can turn regular old swords from the base game into electrified blades that call forth lightning bolts. My best run had me wielding a flaming whip that could summon a pool of lava around enemies when I had enough FP. I tried to shape any passive perks I grabbed around that, nabbing a relic that would let me recover magic on successive attacks. All of the sticky enjoyment of putting together a build in Dead Cells carries over to the Elden Ring formula quite well.
The roguelike format isn’t always a clean fit for FromSoftware’s usual design philosophy, though. There’s a small bit of permanent progression in the form of relics, which add passive perks onto character classes. These are earned after runs and give players perks like “Attack +1” that are often imperceptible in practice. Elden Ring’s “die and try again” loop can be tricky too, as falling to a boss means restarting a run that can take a good 30 minutes just to see more of its attack patterns. That’s par for the course for any roguelike, but it can feel especially punishing when coming up against FromSoftware’s brand of tricky attacks that are meant to be studied over multiple attempts.
At least the Nightlords aren’t your typical, predictable bosses. FromSoftware takes the unique three-player setup as a chance to imagine what new tricks it can pull off. Gradius, for instance, is a three-headed dog that occasionally splits into three individual beasts. That gives the fight a unique pace, as teams need to know when to divide and conquer.
It’s a very different fight from Adel, an enormous hippo-dragon that tries to gobble players up with its massive jaws. That fight is more about using one player as a distraction, letting the other two stab it from behind while its mouth is hyper fixated on one meal. Dynamics like that show that there’s still much more FromSoftware can do with its Souls formula, just as Elden Ring showed how a true open-world game can change how a battle plays out.
There are little quirks here and there that put a dent in a fairly good idea. Trying to revive enemies by whacking them with a weapon is incredibly clumsy, for instance. Runs can be a little repetitive too, even as new bosses rear their heads and the map shifts through world events. It’s also disappointing to see Elden Ring’s performance issues return here. I was getting occasional frame rate choppiness even on PS5 Pro’s Performance Mode, as well as texture pop-in. Even that list issue is a small problem compared to Nightreign’s true weak point: its archaic online integration that makes getting into a game far more challenging than it should be.
Nightreign is ideally played with a squad of three people. It can be played solo, but that experience is incredibly unpleasant. While there’s some scaling meant to help solo players get by, it’s not nearly helpful enough as players will be taking down multiple enemies at once, something built around the assumption that there will be three people to control a crowd. I’ve only toyed around with solo play a bit, but I never have even had a hope of getting through night one by myself. There’s no duo option at present either, so three players is the only viable way to play right now.
There are several hurdles to getting a full team together. The biggest issue is that Nightreign does not feature cross-play. Your friends will all need to get it on one platform to party up, which is absurd for a demanding multiplayer game in 2025. They’ll also all need to have cleared the first boss in order to play any other expedition together. If you don’t have enough friends on one platform, you can matchmake with strangers, but I’d highly advise against that option.
Communication is crucial to success, as players splintering off in random directions can kill a run before it even starts. There’s no way to chat with players in game; the only communication system is an insufficient ping system. Even if you want to try your luck with random players, there are still obstacles that will stretch your odds of matching up thin. You’ll have to queue up for a specific expedition, meaning that there are eight separate playlists that will split the already split community at launch (you can queue up for multiple at a time, but that won’t help if you’re looking to do a specific boss).
Even more complicated is how it all buts up against Nightreigtn’s most unique feature: the Shifting Earth. After clearing the first boss, the world map will inherit one of a handful of mutations. A giant crater may open up in the middle of it, creating a vertical space that occasionally erupts like a volcano. It’s a smart way to change the otherwise static map, but there’s a catch as far as I understand: players with different world states can’t always match together. As far as I understand, you can not match with players who have a world event active if you’ve yet to see that event in your own world. So if you’ve only had a crater in your game, you won’t be able to matchmake with someone who currently has a mountain active. I think. I still don’t fully get how the restriction works and it is not explained in-game as far as I can tell.
Maybe none of this will be a problem once the game goes live and millions of players hop in across each platform, but it is unfathomable to me that a multiplayer game is launching with so many hoops. Even something as simple as setting a room password so friends can join is cumbersome, as I often found I’d have to cancel my matchmaking once or twice and try again to connect with friends who had the same code set. Nightreign is built to be played with a consistent group of friends who intend to tackle every mission together over voice chat. Good luck to anyone who dares to try anything else.
Issues like this remind me why it took me so long to truly appreciate FromSoftware’s games. Every time I review one, I feel like so much of my time gets spent breaking down unforced errors like this that carry over from game to game. Maybe they’re harder to change than I think. Maybe FromSoftware feels that it doesn’t need to change anything because it’ll eat up awards and critical praise no matter how glaring the barriers to entry are. All I know is that a bulk of the conversations I’ve had with other members of the press during this review cycle has been about how bizarre the matchmaking is and how much that will hurt its chances of success. It’s a boring conversation! I’d much rather be discussing the artistry on display, but Nightreign too often invites us to focus on it as a product.
At least that product is engrossing when all the stars align. The constant euphoria Nightreign provides once I’m in a coordinated party is remarkable. I get the same thrill that I get when beating a hard boss in Elden Ring but magnified thanks to dozens of little decisions my team made along the way. I’m not just celebrating because I parried enough attacks, but because I had the sense to stop and kill that one stray boss even as the flames threatened to engulf me.
One mistake can spoil a good run, but you can’t let it stop you from pushing ahead to victory. Maybe FromSoftware understands that better than everyone, earning every pass it has received over the years. All that matters is the killing blow, and Nightreign lands that strike when it counts.
