Elden Ring Nightreign is blisteringly, stress-inducingly fast-paced, and more thrilling than I could have imagined – hands-on preview

Every now and then, a video game preview just has it. There’s an atmosphere. A buzz. Sometimes that’s when a game is hotly anticipated, obviously. Others it’s a random game you don’t necessarily expect. Those are the best ones, by the way. Anyway, my point is that every now and then a special game begets a special event. And the latest pleasant surprise to evoke such emotion is Elden Ring Nightreign.

Listen. I know what you’re probably thinking. This is a pseudo-sequel to one of the greatest games of all time, so of course it has ‘it’, whatever ‘it’ is. But, honestly – I went into a seven-hour play session entirely unconvinced by the game’s concept. As someone who plays Souls games more or less entirely as a single-player endeavor, I just didn’t think this was for me. I left the hands-on completely convinced. Moreover, I left it obsessed. This is a game I can’t quite stop thinking about playing more of.

I know I wasn’t the only one. Sitting down to play in groups of three, which is the intended way Nightreign is to be experienced, there was clear curiosity in the air. Within an hour or so I could hear cheers from across the room. Crowds gathered around groups that were doing well and nearing the final, most challenging battles of a run. When people succeeded, relative strangers were springing to their feet and hugging as others erupted into cheers. This is a game that fosters that sense of connection with ease.

Clearly then, this is not your typical Souls game. In fact, broadly speaking, I’m astonished at how little it resembles those games in all but the most superficial of ways. The core similarities are in the basics of combat and in assets, with the enemies and world a mish-mash collection of things that are familiar from Elden Ring and a few of the other Souls titles rearranged, remixed, and rebalanced for a co-op multiplayer experience. Aside from the visual, though, the tempo of the game immediately sets it apart. Where traditional Souls is plodding and methodical by design, this is a game where the pressure is always on. Each player is like a hammerhead shark, forward momentum vital to your very survival.

“The sense of speed in Nightreign is definitely a focus, and it’s definitely a big change from Elden Ring and our other previous titles,” Nightreign director Junya Ishizaki tells me. This is his first game direction gig, but Ishizaki is a FromSoftware stalwart of over a decade, and was the battle director on the base Elden Ring. A fan of co-op experiences, he’s taken the series in this new – and much faster – direction.

“We found that as we created the game that the speed is something you quite quickly get used to,” Ishizaki continues. “We wanted it to be approachable. We wanted to tie it into the multiplayer aspect of being able to quickly jump into a game either by yourself or with other people.”

“We wanted it to feel a little bit loose and flexible.”

Ishizaki’s descriptor is a good one. The movement has a sort of casual loosey-goosey nature to it that feels vaguely like you’re Spider-Man, or in Assassin’s Creed, rather than a suffering Souls hero. Jumping at ledges sees you mantling, clambering. You can climb anything in a few seconds, almost. A mage’s tower that’d inevitably have an elevator in Elden Ring proper can now be clambered in no time at all. The pace you can set is quite universal across all of the various character classes you can choose from, regardless of the weight of their weapons or armor. The only thing that slows this pace, ultimately, is when it comes to time to fight.

The speed is entirely necessary, and is a great part of the thrill. The structure of a ‘run’ of Nightreign sounds initially complicated, but it’s actually quite simple. There’s a battle royale structure in that at the start of a run you ‘drop in’ to a circular map which gradually becomes subsumed behind a ring of fire. The space you have to explore narrows over the course of a day. By the time you reach nightfall, you and your companions are limited to only a small area of the map – essentially, a boss arena. If you can beat the boss and survive the night, full exploration is returned to you for a second day, followed by a second challenging night of terror. Survive that and you’ll face the Night Lord, the final boss of the run.

In the base shipping game there’ll be eight Night Lords, and you’ll select which you want to face in the pre-run menus. Each Night Lord also comes with a varied selection of bosses that can appear as their deputies on Day One or Day Two, and map placements will shift in certain ways on different runs. Experienced players will be able to figure out which bosses they’re set to face by examining which boss arena the ring of fire is pushing you towards, giving you more time to plan your character build.

Character builds are why speed is of the essence – and it’s all about gear. Elden Ring Nightreign is a role-playing game at 200mph; during those daytime exploration phases, you’re running around the map like a total nutcase. You’re seeking out weaker mini-bosses who, when bopped, drop loot orbs that give you a choice between one of three pieces of equipment. They’ll also drop runes when defeated, helping to contribute to a much-expedited level up process – you just run to a site of grace and interact with it to buy instant level-ups. There’s no carefully selecting stats – there’s no time. Your chosen character will level up along their natural attributes – so if you pick a mage, they’ll grow the stats that make sense for a mage with each level-up. The process is way faster; over the course of an hour you’ll go from level 1 to something like level 15 if you’re playing well.

Speed matters because drops are so random. This is where Nightreign’s roguelike elements come into play. I can’t quite describe how much I enjoyed the sense of terror each time I realized the ring was closing in and nightfall was coming, bringing with it a hard-as-nails boss, while I wasn’t quite ready. You truly panic: Bollocks. We need another two levels minimum. We need to beat another boss and pray for a better weapon drop. Oh god. Oh, s**t.

This is a fascinating feeling for the game to inspire – the constant sense of a ticking clock that fosters a knot in your stomach. It’s also a wonderful inversion of the Souls formula. In regular Souls, you prepare and prepare, then often throw yourself against the brick wall that is a boss until something clicks. Here there’s no quick respawn, bonfire from which you can back to the boss at speed – if you wipe, it’s game over and time to start a new run, resetting all progress. But the masochistic terror that Nightreign manages to instill in its best is totally reminiscent of the best stomach-turning moments from Souls; it’s just evoked in a different way.

While drops are random, Nightreign is also deftly successful at making players feel in control. As the video game social media clap back goes, you control the buttons you press. From the second you drop where you go, what mini-bosses you target, and where you loot in the limited time available all contribute to your situation when the sun sets. These decisions have enormous weight in each run – but also have to happen at great speed.

“In terms of how this evolves in the late game, we want players to feel like the decisions in each session throughout the map really change how you approach these boss encounters,” explains Ishizaki.

“And vice versa – which boss encounters you choose… in the late game, these later bosses that are going to unlock are going to have some… well, they’re going to be quite unique in their own ways. So we want players to figure out their build and route through the map according to which boss they’ve chosen. We hope that this aspect, the decisions they make, is quite important to players.”

Each decision should probably be considered as a group, too. You can play Elden Ring Nightreign one of two ways: solo, or with three players. There are no AI companions – so it’s either solo, or with two other real humans, either through buddying up with friends or through matchmaking. To underline, there’s no two-player option – though Ishizaki says if there’s demand, a two-player balance is something they might consider. The game is meant to be played with three, though.

“If you’re in a group, maybe you split up, maybe you stay together, but so long as you band together at the end for the boss encounter, that’s all that matters,” says Ishizaki. “There’s no real restrictions surrounding the multiplayer; you don’t need to babysit each other. You can go off and do your own thing, and then come back for the boss at the end.”

While that’s true, I sort of struggle to imagine wandering the world on my own. I would’ve been truly screwed without allies to revive me a couple of times per run. In fact, we only had solid success when really working as a team, shouting out what loot we were finding (drops are unique for each player, but you can drop something to pass it to an ally if you feel it’s better in their hands). Again, the ring of fire pressures you constantly. These discussions need to be had at speed. I love the urgency. I love the stress of it all.

Part of the stress, I admit, came from my choice of class. I picked a mage, the Recluse. She’s a fragile thing that can turn into a truly devastating glass cannon with the right gear found along the way. I felt mages were sort of easy mode in Elden Ring, but not bloody so here. However, the Recluse is also the perfect class through which to explain the new skill system and weapons – so I devoted most of my play session to her.

In terms of gear, only weapons matter in Nightreign. There’s no armor slots, and only a pair of accessory slots. Otherwise, it’s all weapons. Weapons have their base attack stats, but also often carry a buff – and this buff is in play regardless of if you’re using the weapon or not, so long as you’re carrying it in one of your character’s eight weapon slots. For instance, as the Recluse I only really wanted staffs for casting magic – but I also found a dagger that, when in my possession, reduced my chances of getting targeted by enemies. This was perfect – I held on to that dagger for dear life, let my tankier allies draw aggro, and then shredded enemies by spell-slinging from a distance.

But for a mage, management of FP – mana – is vital. And in Nightreign there’s no flask to restore FP, only health. The Recluse can restore FP two ways – by visiting a site of grace or by ripping mana from injured enemies (or, indeed, allies). This is the Recluse’s special skill, which results in a fascinating tempo to combat – casting basic glintstone sorceries – or something better if you find a staff with a better spell attached – then performing the skill to suck in some FP restoration. Then back on the attack. Dancing back and forth, the dodges needed to do so require careful management of your limited stamina bar.

Once you’ve reaved FP off three consecutive beings, their ‘essence’ gets compiled into a magic cocktail. My touchstone for this is to say it’s sort of like the ‘Mix’ command in some Final Fantasy games. Elden Ring has four types of elemental damage – Magic, Fire, Lightning, and Holy. I assume Nightreign is the same. Enemies will have an elemental affiliation based on their nature and whatever action they’re currently doing; so drawing FP from a dragon as it breathes fire will add a fire charge to your magic cocktail. Once your magic cocktail has three charges, the next time you perform your ability you’ll perform a powerful spell instead, with the effects of the spell determined by the combination of elements in your cocktail. It’s neat.

Each class – and though there were only four in the demo I understand there’s quite a lot more of them – has a unique ability like this. One class has a grappling hook that can be used to pull smaller enemies to you or drag yourself to larger enemies to kick off airborne combos, for instance. Each character also has an appropriate ‘ult’ which charges as you fight and then can be triggered in a pinch.

Like I say, the tempo and timbre of it all just feels right. I wasn’t sure FromSoftware would know how to make a game like this, but it’s utterly nailed it. Part of that, I sense, comes from a probable laser focus on getting the design right – something which has doubtless been assisted by how familiar much of the world and the beasts that inhabit it are. Take the world of Limveld, for instance – this Fortnite-esque circular island features great similarities to Limgrave from the main game in a visual sense, but its layout is all-original. Every now and then, you’ll notice little chunks that are identical to something you might recognize from Elden Ring, like pieces of modular world design have been pulled apart and glued back together in new formations.

But by the end of my seven hours of hands-on, I found it difficult to care. There’s a habit among gamers to think of asset reuse as a bad thing – but can it really be so bad if it allows fascinating iteration such as this?

“We simply felt this was a good opportunity to create a fresh experience by adding in these elements from previous games, and from Elden Ring as well. It felt like a good way to freshen things up in terms of this new gameplay approach, this new sense of speed in Nightreign,” Ishizaki admits.

This means not just familiar looking locale assets and trash mobs, but also returning bosses alongside new baddies – including some ripped from other Souls games. One of our day one bosses was the Centipede Demon, last seen in 2011’s Dark Souls and now given new moves to help it fight three heroes at once.

“We wanted them to feel familiar, but still have this essence of being a new experience in Nightreign. This was part of the selection process – how they led to that feeling of a new experience in a new game – and also how we differentiated them from the new bosses created for Nightreign.”

Thinking about the reused assets really brings us to the most curious question about Nightreign, and the largest unknown for me still – a matter of content. Limveld is the sole area in the game, essentially, but for the hub zone that is another version of Roundtable Hold. It also uses the visual style of just one zone of Elden Ring. The path seems pretty obvious: an update down the line that adds a new zone themed after Caelid, complete with new returning bosses and all-new Night Lords? Then Liurnia, I assume? And so on? Or not?

Ishizaki wouldn’t really be drawn, saying that FromSoftware will be monitoring feedback – but he was keen to impress that the update cadence will not be that of a ‘live service game’, but something more akin to the update schedule for other FromSoftware games. Alrighty then.

What I can say is that one map, even one that adjusts significantly from one run to the next, gives concerns about the amount of content in this release – even if it isn’t full price. Lore nerds will find that there’s Souls-y lore to uncover here, too, despite this being a game with no luscious item descriptions or the like. Instead, downtime in the Roundtable Hold hub between runs will see a narrative unfurl as the Night Lords are toppled.

“While you might not expect quite the same volume or extent of lore content as in Elden Ring, we have included some of these aspects,” Ishizaki notes. “It’s a little bit less about uncovering the lore of the world and more about uncovering the lore of each of these individual characters. Why they’ve come to the Lands Between… how and why they’ve banded together to battle the Night Lords… there will definitely be a time and place to uncover those aspects of these characters. So I’m hoping the lore buffs look forward to that.”

But a dollop of lore between successful runs is unlikely to hold attention truly long-term – and so I can’t help but wonder what FromSoftware has planned for the longer-term future. The path of expanding the game with more maps based on the other ‘biomes’ of Elden Ring seems obvious – but it’s fair to say that FromSoftware doesn’t airways take the obvious path. So who knows? Well, they know. They just won’t tell us yet.

It speaks to how impressed I was with the game, though, that is my first thought. Based on the fact it took the better part of seven hours to get a comfortable victory under our belt, and given the fact that there’s at least eight permutations, each more challenging, each with a great degree of randomness… clearly there’s enough game here to be worth the money. But I could easily see this being a staple that I play long-term, if the content plan is there. The fact that I think that is probably one of the best endorsements I could give, in fact.

Anyway, I suppose this all amounts to me saying: I think those psychos have done it again. Final judgement will have to be reserved for launch (which is May 30, by the way) – but I can’t believe how this game rocketed from something of a curiosity to something that I absolutely must have. I can’t wait for the final thing.