Elden Ring Nightreign takes a big swing at a bigger audience

It’s inaccurate and reductive to call Elden Ring Nightreign a Dark Souls take on Fortnite. And yet, if pressed for an extremely brief elevator pitch — say, the kind you’d give to your friends who are curious about soulsborne games but are put off by all the discussions of their difficulty — it’s about as best as you could do. In my hands-on time with the game, I was compelled to ask my team at the outset of our very first run, “Well… where we droppin’ boys?” as we flew over the map in the claws of spectral birds. The similarity to Fortnite and other battle royale games was so striking, the reference simply had to be made. But once we got on the ground, Fortnite took a big ol’ backseat and Elden Ring reemerged as the foremost game Nightreign compares to.

Nightreign strips out the combat and visual aesthetics of Elden Ring and lays them over gameplay that combines multiplayer battle royale action with roguelike live, die, repeat mechanics. Matches will take place over three days. During daylight, players will assault a Limgrave-like map (called Limveld), either solo or in teams of three, beating regular enemies and mini-bosses for powerful weapons, accessories, and runes to level up their characters. As daylight turns to night, a destructive, HP-draining storm called Night’s Tide shrinks the map, forcing the players to a tiny arena where they’ll face a major boss. Defeat the boss to begin the next day, when the cycle repeats and the match ends by defeating the final boss on the third night.

Instead of building bespoke characters from the ground up, Nightreign lets you choose from a roster of new classes, each with their own unique abilities, including one extremely powerful ultimate ability. For the hands-on preview, I was given four classes to try out: Wylder, Guardian, Recluse, and Duchess. The classes are somewhat analogous to typical warrior, mage, rogue archetypes but aren’t straight-up one-to-one recreations. The Guardian absorbs big attacks with their shield while the Recluse slings spells and has all the fortitude of wet tissue paper. Meanwhile, the Duchess delivers brutally quick knife attacks alongside the jack-of-all-trades Wylder.

Characters level up at Sites of Grace as usual, but instead of choosing which stats you wanna pump up, the game does it for you. You don’t have to worry about how much dexterity or faith you have, only that, no matter your class, each level up makes you stronger and hardier.

In addition to leveling up, death mechanics have also gotten a bit of a revamp for Nightreign. When you die, you still lose all your runes, but you will also lose a level. However, hitting 0 HP doesn’t mean you immediately die. If you fall in battle, your allies’ attacks fill a meter that, once full, restores you with a little bit of health. (It is so very like FromSoftware and also deeply funny to make hurting your allies the method to heal them. Excellent touch.) If all three party members fall, the game restarts the day.

Having two extra players around made combat relatively simple to a point. My party and I roamed the Limveld streets like a band of vicious murderers, but once anything more substantial than a soldier or a blighted dog showed up, things got dicey — and fast. In typical FromSoftware fashion, a lot of enemies were much tougher than they looked even for three-on-one (which, also in typical FromSoftware fashion, never remained three-on-one as enemies liked to pop out of nowhere). Combine that with the knowledge that the map might start to close in on you at any time, and every battle became a potentially life-threatening, run-ending situation.

There were often times when my party had to choose between abandoning much-needed treasure or risk getting caught in the encroaching storm, and that friction was seriously fun. It already feels good to triumph over Elden Ring’s hard-hitting monsters. It felt twice as good doing that with so much additional danger heaped on top. And despite the relative ease of fighting regular enemies, the bosses were no joke. In the five to six hours I had with the hands-on, I was only able to successfully complete two days, and I’m pretty sure nobody in my cohort of previewers was able to beat a run outright.

Nightreign also adds new ways to traverse the map, which might sound inconsequential, but when you’re playing a game as visually rich as Elden Ring, it means a lot. Much like Shadow of the Erdtree, Limveld’s map contains a ton of verticality, but you don’t have your trusty Torrent to navigate it. Instead, there are nightsprings that act like giant springboards to propel you to higher sections of the map. You can also hitch a ride on Spectral Hawks to take you to another corner of the map much faster than by foot. Since so much of the Lands Between are seen from the ground up, it was so cool to get it from a different perspective.

And that’s what so much of Nightreign is actually about: offering a different perspective on a game you’ve seen before. It’s a big risk to take a beloved game and add multiplayer elements to it, and that might upset some Elden Ring diehards. But if you want a new, ever-changing way to play an old game you love, Nightreign is definitely worth checking out.

_{Elden Ring Nightreign releases on May 30th on Xbox, PlayStation, and PC.}