The greatest trick that Elden Ring Nightreign plays on mediocre Soulslike players like myself is convincing us that we might actually be good at these games, only to dash our hopes when the boss shows up. But even if I never end up conquering all of Nightreign’s bosses, I think I will be returning to this brilliant roguelike remix for months to come.
Welcome to Limveld
Elden Ring Nightreign is the latest title from developer FromSoftware, but it’s not a direct sequel to 2022’s Elden Ring. Rather, Nightreign revolves around randomized cooperative missions that task one or three players with leveling up and finding new equipment in the ever-changing world of Limveld before facing off against one of several Nightlords.
You start every expedition by matchmaking with a group of players in the Roundtable Hold, an area that will be familiar to fans of the original game. As noted above, you can play alone (and I can’t wait to watch some very talented players solo every boss), but the real fun of Nightreign is exploring the world with a group of friends or strangers.
Once you’ve found your team, you’ll each pick one of eight Nightfarers (character classes) and fly off to Limveld together. Once you arrive, your goal is to level up as quickly as possible while decking out your Nightfarers with all the best weapons, shields, and consumable items you can find. As time passes, the Night’s Tide begins to close in (similar to the storm in Fortnite), steadily pushing the team to a boss arena at the end of the day. If you successfully vanquish the night’s boss, the map will reopen for a second day of leveling and gathering.
This cycle might not be as compelling if the gameplay of Elden Ring wasn’t among the best of any action RPG of the last decade. It’s just fun and rewarding to explore this world and fight its enemies, and now you can reach them even more quickly with an array of expanded traversal mechanics, including wall jumping, faster sprinting, Spiritstreams for leaping dozens of feet into the air, and Spirit Hawks to fly between regions of the map.
Proving grounds
Making it through the first two days is often achievable even for a lackluster team of Nightfarers, especially when they don’t overextend and try to take on Limveld’s toughest enemies without the proper preparation. Dying isn’t final, as your teammates can revive you by smacking you enough times, but even if you fully expire, you only lose a single level when you’re in the open world. You can usually go grab whatever you dropped and kill any miniboss with enough tries, then continue to progress ahead of the nightly boss fight.
Even if you do make it through the first two nights, there’s no guarantee you’ll survive day three. On the third day, you depart the plains, hills, and dungeons of Limveld for an otherworldly arena inhabited by a Nightlord. There are seven to choose from when you start an expedition, and you can fight them in any order you like. Whether or not you and your team can actually defeat any of them (other than the relatively manageable Gladius) is another story.
This is where your Elden Ring skills are truly put to the test, and I can safely say that I won’t be carrying any teams through these boss fights any time soon. They are brutally difficult, and even when I was paired up with capable, skillful teammates who breezed through the first two days, I still struggled with each and every Nightlord I faced.
If you’ve played FromSoftware games before, you know that getting your ass kicked is part of the deal, but it’s brutal to see a great run end instantaneously with an all but unavoidable area-of-effect attack from a Nightlord that kills all three Nightfarers at once. The expeditions are quick enough that I was never demoralized to the point of walking away, but prepare for a serious skill check if you haven’t already mastered Elden Ring combat.
The hook that brings you back
Nightreign doesn’t have nearly as many progression hooks as other popular action roguelikes like Hades or Dead Cells, but there are ways to permanently improve your chances of success. When you finish a run, even if you don’t kill the Nightlord, you’ll receive relics you can equip on each Nightfarer to boost their stats or give them new abilities. You will also receive a currency called Murk that you can use to buy relics at the Small Jar Bazaar.
Aside from the obvious, the biggest difference between this and Elden Ring might be the lack of decisions when it comes to builds in Nightreign. There are eight Nightfarers to choose from (two of which you have to unlock), but you don’t decide which stats to boost when you level up. That happens automatically, so customization is limited to the relics you equip and the weapons you find on your expedition. As someone who was mostly overwhelmed by the seemingly unlimited number of builds in Elden Ring, I was relieved to have the game make some of those decisions for me so I could focus on killing monsters.
Speaking of Nightfarers, the complexity of each character varies wildly. I mostly gravitated to the Ironeye — a ranged fighter with limited health and damage-dealing, but a knack for escapability. My parties also often included the Raider (a powerful but risky pick that gets stronger by taking damage), the Wylder (a balanced warrior that can cheat death once), and the Guardian (a tank that does a good job of keeping squishier players alive). Finding a character or two you really enjoy playing is vital to having a good time in Nightreign.
Then there’s the map. Limveld’s structure doesn’t change, but the locations of various points of interest and minibosses do move for each expedition. Getting around Limveld becomes second nature by the time you’ve dropped in half a dozen times, but you’ll always be carving new paths through the map in order to reach the most enticing points of interest. For instance, church altars allow you to increase the number of healing flasks you can hold, so they should always be a top priority in the days leading up to the Nightlord battle.
The one major exception to the rule about Limveld staying the same is the Shifting Earth. When you complete an expedition, there’s a chance you’ll receive a notification letting you know that a Shifting Earth zone has appeared in Limveld to explore (or avoid) on your next trek. These can range from giant volcanic craters filled with fire monsters to rotted woods crawling with infected enemies to the sprawling city of Noklateo taking over a corner of the map.
There’s just enough going on around the core loop of running from POI to POI to kill a wave of bad guys to keep every expedition feeling fresh. How long that keeps you hooked will obviously depend on your tolerance for repeatedly exploring the same map, but every time I venture out, I seem to find something I have never seen before.
Three heads are better than one
I split my time in Nightreign fairly evenly between random groups and pre-selected teammates. There is absolutely a benefit to having your party in a voice chat to quickly talk about a potential game plan or issue warnings before someone gets themselves killed, but I was surprised at just how quickly I was able to mesh with randos who I couldn’t hear. It’s easy to mark a spot on the map, and once we reach our destination, the goal is always clear: Kill the monsters.
That said, I think anyone who has two friends to play with will find Nightreign the most rewarding. I’m confident that it will be entirely possible to beat every Nightlord with a group of strangers, but there’s no doubt that the most fun I had was syncing up with other journalists and YouTubers to talk about what all we’d seen as we explored Limveld.
FromSoftware went out on a limb here, and while I don’t think it scratches the same itch as the studio’s massive single-player RPGs, I do believe that Nightreign will find a dedicated community that wants to see everything this game has to offer.
Elden Ring Nightreign launches for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC on May 30, 2025.
Bandai Namco sent BGR a copy of Elden Ring Nightreign on PS5 for this review.
