Elden Ring Nightreign: A Revolutionary Co-op Spin-off That Will Blow Your Mind!

From the discovery of sprawling, subterranean otherworlds to the startling second phases that completely turned the tables in so many of its boss fights, 2022’s Elden Ring was a mesmerising action RPG adventure that surprised players at almost every turn. Now, more than two years later, it appears that developer FromSoftware isn’t done with pulling the rug out from under the feet of its fanbase just yet, with the surprise reveal of Elden Ring Nightreign, a standalone co-op spin-off that takes the cautious dungeon crawls of Elden Ring and turbocharges them into propulsive, slash ‘n’ dash speedruns. After spending some six hours of hands-on time with this bold new spin on FromSoftware’s own Soulslike formula, I can confirm that Nightreign is shaping up to be something truly unique. If Elden Ring was one of 2022’s biggest chart-topping hits, then Nightreign would appear to be its dance floor-filling remix – chopped up, intensified in beats per minute, and designed to both excite fans of the original and broaden its appeal to the masses.

Nightreign: A Condensed RPG Experience

“Initially when we set out to make Nightreign, we wanted to create what we're calling a condensed RPG experience,” says Nightreign’s game director Junya Ishizaki. “We wanted to take all those elements from Elden Ring that players enjoyed like the exploration, the building of the character, fighting tough bosses, the sense of discovery, and condense that into a shorter, tighter play session.”

Gameplay Overview: A Three-Day Cycle of Survival

Imagine stepping back into the opening area from the original game, only nothing in the landscape seems to be where you remember it. Also, there are three of you now, and everything seems to be happening at a much faster pace. That’s Nightreign in a nutshell. You squad up with two other players at the start of each round, get dropped into a densely-packed alternate reality chunk of Limgrave that has both its enemy types and the placements of its castles and forts randomly shuffled around at the beginning of each session, and it’s up to you and your squadmates to build up from your lowly level-one character status as fast as possible by harvesting runes and weapons as you slash and dash through every enemy-filled camp and castle that you come across.

What’s the big rush? Well, each session of Nightreign is structured as a three-day cycle, with each in-game day taking about 15 minutes to complete. At the start of the first day, you can pretty much pick any direction to point your team in – dropping pins on the map to highlight points of interest to the rest of your squad – but as day approaches night, the space you can operate in narrows, and you’re liable to be killed by acid-like rain should you find yourself caught for too long beyond the perimeter of the rapidly shrinking circle on the map known as the ‘ring of reign’. Once the ring of reign reaches its smallest diameter at the end of the day, a boss fight is triggered, one which you and your team will be much better equipped to tackle if you’ve made the most efficient use of Nightreign’s daylight hours boosting your individual character stats and arsenal. Like the rest of Nightreign’s enemies, these end-of-day bosses are always randomized, and during my repeat runs, I experienced clashes with familiar returning nasties like a Demi-Human Queen and Demi-Human Swordmaster tag-team, and a hard-as-nails stoush with a Draconian Tree Sentinel flanked by a pair of Carian Knights. That's along with some brand-new boss types like the Centipede Demon.

Unique Characters and Abilities: A Blend of Strength and Strategy

Nightreign doesn’t feature the lengthy list of generic character classes that the original Elden Ring did. Instead, Nightreign offers eight different heroes to choose from, each with very clearly identified strengths and weaknesses. Four were playable in the preview build: Wylder, Guardian, Duchess, and Recluse. Each character features a unique skill and ultimate attack that both operate on cooldown timers. Finding ways to combine them with the special moves of your squadmates is key to surviving Nightreign’s toughest enemy encounters. One strategy that my squad grew to rely on quite heavily was to unleash a damaging ultimate attack on an enemy, then immediately follow it up with Duchess’ Restage skill, which basically creates an instant replay of the last attack landed and allows you to double the total amount of damage inflicted.

The Thrilling Endgame: Confronting the Nightlord

With the day one boss dealt with, day two begins, and the ring of reign rescinds, allowing your squad to take a breath, regroup, and then resume ransacking the map for upgrades in preparation for the more challenging boss encounters to come at the end of days two and three. It’s a structure that allows for a gradual build of tension before a palpable sense of accomplishment and release with each boss felled. Gladius is just the first of eight major bosses to take down in Nightreign, each with their own three-day cycle leading up to them. In addition to the randomisation of enemy types and structures, further wrinkles will be introduced into each boss cycle such as live volcanoes and forests full of rot in an effort to prevent the landscape from ever growing too predictable. That’s along with random events like meteor strikes, swarms of giant ants to fend off, and the surprise invasion of powerful tormentors in an attempt to impede your progress. During my hands-on my team was regularly stalked by Margit, the Fell Omen.

Streamlined Gameplay: A More Accessible Elden Ring Experience

Nightreign has polished up a lot of Elden Ring’s more abrasive edges to make it a far more friction-free experience. A new wall-jump move allows you to quickly hop up and over steep sections of the terrain, while the removal of any fall damage means you can lunge off cliffs or down dark holes without stopping to study your surroundings for safe platforms. You only need to walk near a site of grace to top up your health and flasks, and if you want to spend some runes to level up you just button mash through pages of auto-levelling that best suits the base traits of your chosen character, rather than having to agonize over whether you should allocate a point to faith or dexterity.

Death, Revivals, and Relics: A New Approach to Failure

Death is not necessarily the end in Nightreign. If you find yourself downed, you have a ‘near-death’ meter that appears above you, and your squadmates must attack you while you crawl along the ground until the meter is reduced and you can return to the fray. However, although you can revive downed players during an end-of-day boss fight, there are no actual respawns during these climactic moments, and should all three of you be wiped out at once, it’s the end of the session, and you must restart day one with everyone back at level one. In between sessions, you return to the Roundtable Hold hub, where you can practice your attack combos in the training yard, study up on enemy strategies and character lore in the codex, or spend the currency you earn from each run – known as ‘Murk’ – to buy character emotes and customizable skins from the merchant. It’s in the Roundtable Hold that you can also configure each character’s relics. These are permanent attribute buffs that are unlocked after each session, and you can slot three of them into each character to further tailor them to your playstyle.

Nightreign: A Standalone Experience

While there’s no doubt that elements of it are inspired by the likes of Destiny and Diablo IV, it needs to be said that Elden Ring Nightreign is not a live service game. Once you buy it, you get access to the complete package, and there are no battle passes or microtransactions to contend with. It can also be played in single-player should you wish to stay offline, with enemy health pools that scale down so that it’s not too overwhelming for solo players (although curiously, there are currently no plans to allow players to play in pairs). All this is to say is that fans shouldn’t be concerned that Nightreign is at any risk of being dead on arrival like recent notable disasters such as Concord or The Day Before, and certainly the team at FromSoftware seems very confident in its multiplayer offering regardless of the fates that have befallen other online-only launches.

A Final Verdict: A Breathtaking New Chapter in the Elden Ring Saga

As someone who has sunk hundreds of hours into Elden Ring, both in the original 2022 game and this year’s Shadow of the Erdtree DLC, I can confidently say that FromSoftware is onto something truly spectacular with Nightreign. Cutting throats at breakneck speed with a pair of friends in tow has been a consistently exhilarating experience so far, and especially gratifying when you work together to topple its fiercest bosses using each character’s special abilities in tandem. Dark Souls diehards may well be quick to dismiss it as some sort of Elden Ring: Arcade Edition due to its heavily streamlined settings, but the potential scope of its relic system still leaves plenty to tinker with for fans who want a bit more stop and think along with their hack and slash. Assuming the developers can throw enough randomized elements to keep each three-day assault feeling fresh, then Elden Ring Nightreign could well provide an exciting change of pace for existing fans, and an enticingly accessible entry point for newcomers when it launches sometime in 2025.