Estimated reading time: 8 minutes

A Tactical Shift to Session-Based Soulslike

Elden Ring: Nightreign doesn’t pretend to be a sequel to the original Elden Ring—and that’s its strength. FromSoftware has walked away from sprawling open worlds of Elden Ring franchise in favor of a tightly wound, repeatable structure. Each match, dubbed an “expedition,” resets all character progress, stripping away long-term builds and inventory in favor of roguelike spontaneity. You begin at level one, and nothing carries over beyond trinkets and minor permanent unlocks. Gone is the comfort of grinding to brute-force a wall; what remains is pure skill, mechanical depth, and quick-fire decision-making under the pressure of a ticking timer.

This structure resets everything you’d expect from a Soulsborne RPG. There’s no safe harbor. No meta builds to carry you through. Each grin-inducing victory or brutal wipe depends on what you and your squad can figure out in the moment. And that dependency on your squad? It changes everything.

Trio-Only Co-op: Finesse or Failure

FromSoft made a gutsy move at launch: three-player teams only, no solo campaign mode, and no duo queue. That irritated a good chunk of the player base, particularly those who prefer mastering systems alone or playing with a single partner. Duo Mode is in development now—clearly a response to volume-demand—but as of review time, you either run with a full group or get out.

Queueing with strangers is pure gamble. Sometimes you land with methodical, synergy-driven killers. Other times you’re fighting both the boss and your teammates’ idiocy. The game asks that every player understands revive mechanics, reads boss patterns, and doesn’t crowd-stack on AoE attacks. Failure to do so means a wipe in all but the most forgiving encounters. Still, matchmaking today is miles ahead of the broken state at launch—near-instant connections and smoother server stability make it easy to retry with a new crew when disaster strikes.

Interestingly, many players began by deliberately avoiding co-op, diving into solo runs to learn the ropes. The absence of duo mode encouraged some semi-solo experimentation: launching a match alone, grasping the systems, then returning to team play with actual understanding. It’s counterintuitive for a game built on team play, but it worked. Once rhythms clicked, regrouping transformed the chaos into a coordinated dance of staggered revives and last-second clutches.

Souls Combat Through a Roguelike Funnel

What hasn’t changed is FromSoftware’s commitment to surgical, punishing combat. Nightreign still whispers the same gospel: commit to your swing, read the animation, dodge at the last frame, manage your stamina like your life depends on it—because it does. No mercy. No safe grind. The only way forward is mastery.

But here, the classic violence is filtered through roguelike unpredictability. You don’t build an overpowered loadout over time. Instead, you are dealt a spread of randomized gear and stat rolls. Sometimes you get a blessed setup: nimble frames, high-damage daggers, synergized items. Other times it’s mismatched junk, and surviving becomes pure improvisation. Build optimization is not the goal—adapting under pressure is.

The expeditions themselves are time-locked. A metaphoric—and then literal—darkness creeps in after a set duration, spawning a final boss encounter that can ruin even a clean run. This mechanic cuts any cheese strategy at the knees. No methodical poking; you must push forward, make decisions quickly, and stay alive long enough to stand a chance.

Meta Limits and the Art of Reset

There’s very little to grind toward in the permanent system. You’ll unlock the occasional enhancing ring or slight tweak to gear pools, but nothing that truly tips the balance. In some ways, that’s a flaw: long-term motivation is lacking. In others, it’s a feature. Repetition begets clarity. Every expedition is a crash course in Soulslike combat, where practicing efficient movement, team positioning, and target prioritization matters more than gear.

What’s really happening is a test run—fromSoft dialing in the dynamics of repeatability, iteration, and UI clarity across multiple sessions. It’s polished but spare. You won’t find a lush metagame or robust player economy. At least not yet. But the fundamentals are solid, and the stripped-back progression invites focus instead of noise.

Boss Design: Brutality With Familiar Bones

Players will quickly notice that some bosses borrow heavily from FromSoftware’s past bestiary. There’s plenty of chatter about asset reuse, but the criticism rings shallow by the fifth or sixth expedition. Yes, many enemy types return from past games—from Nameless King-adjacent patterns to early-stage Dark Souls flourishes—but they aren’t just dragged and dropped. They’re adapted.

There are newcomers too, with fresh mechanics tuned to the game’s group dynamic. Unlike the theatrical bosses of Elden Ring’s open world, these aren’t choreographed fight-scenes. They are whittling machines. A DPS check balanced across three bodies. Fail to dodge, mistime your revive, or spread damage too thin, and it’s back to the start screen. These fights demand everything: awareness, mechanical grace, and selflessness.

The procedural maps, while a break from handcrafted worlds, serve that purpose. These aren’t winding catacombs or lore-rich hellscapes—they’re cleanly assembled gauntlets. Visual themes rotate between gloomy ruins, corrupted woods, and classic FromSoft gothic silhouettes, all doused in fog and candlelight. Beautiful, yes. But not personal. The maps exist to test—not immerse—you.

A Tense Sprint, Not a Lush Hike

This is not a game you wander through. The timer stabs at complacency. Eventually, you hear the nightfall audio cue—a chime of something dreadful waking. Then, either you find the boss quickly or the boss finds you. And when it does, any mistake snowballs fast.

But it’s those clutch moments—the best runs—where FromSoft magic kicks in. Teammates down, one player remaining, sweat dripping, juggling aggression and desperation en route to a far resurrection shrine. These are the moments Nightreign lives for. Not the exploration. Not the loot. The adrenaline spike when the impossible turns possible. And that’s grace: raw, earned, and permanently fleeting.

Notably, there’s no PvP yet, and that’s probably for the best. FromSoftware has stated it’s not planned, and if it ever arrives, it’ll need to be in its own tightly regulated enclosure. Right now, the balance just barely holds together for cooperative combat; PvP would shatter that unless heavily curated. Whether that’s a weakness or deliberate design depends on what kind of player you are.

Smooth Launch, Gothic Mood

FromSoftware’s usual launch jank hasn’t shown up much this time. Nightreign runs impressively well. Review builds report stable FPS at ultra settings with no crashing, screen tearing, or major bugs—even during heavy particle effects or chaotic team fights. The one major flaw is session recovery: if your connection drops, you lose access. You’re kicked out and must restart everything from the title screen. Not ideal, but unfortunately standard fare for modern live-service formats.

Visually and audibly, this is FromSoft sticking to their oppressive, magnificent strengths. Boss animations are grotesque yet fluid, every clang and scream deliberately tuned to raise tension. The orchestration leans on haunting crescendos, tight string progressions, silence-before-impact moments—but it never overwhelms. This isn’t just background noise; it’s atmospheric dread, precisely placed.

A Prototype With Teeth

What Nightreign offers is something no other Soulslike does: a fully multiplayer, repeatable version of FromSoftware’s hardest design instincts. No endless inventory churn. No cheese. No over-reliance on YouTube builds. Just rotation after rotation—test after test—until muscle memory replaces panic. It’s a prototype, sure, and the repetition does eventually grind. You will want more bosses, more biomes, more evolved mechanics.

But what makes Nightreign click so hard is how honest it feels. It strips away pretense. There’s no grand narrative to lose yourself in. No cinematic overindulgence. Just you, your friends, and the abyss between you and survival. It’s an idea that earns its place through execution, and with planned updates—Duo Mode, more content, and hopefully structured PvP—it could become one of FromSoft’s most long-lasting side directions.

Nightreign isn’t a filler while we wait for the next Elden Ring. It’s not an off-brand mode pack or budget Souls knockoff. It’s something real. A studio setting fire to tradition and trying something just crazy enough to work. And after 50+ hours sunk into its bloody hooks, all we want now is more.