Elden Ring Nightreign has a few fans in the hallowed halls of PC Gamer, but I confess that I am not among them. It's a rare fail for FromSoftware—a studio that almost exclusively designs games that I should hate, as a lazy man with a low tolerance for adversity, but which I usually end up loving.
What I have been kinda enjoying, though, is the extra mobility this spin-off affords us. Nightreign lets you sprint like an only slightly more sluggish version of the Flash, jump up walls, jump off walls, and in the case of the Wylder, you can use your grappling hook to quickly close the gap when engaging in combat.
It is a brisker, more agile version of Elden Ring, but rather than being empowering this feels like an absolute necessity. Nightreign swaps the thoughtful, slow-burn pace of its originator for the hectic speed of a battle royale, complete with shrinking battlefield and that perpetual sense that, whenever I am not moving, I am just wasting time.
I've found this to be an absolutely terrible way to experience Elden Ring's tricky bouts and savage boss fights. There were multiple times while playing with colleagues where we had to give up on a fight we were absolutely winning, not because we were out of flasks or close to death, but because of some arbitrary bullshit: a big blue wall was heading our way. The one enemy we could not defeat.
Plenty of folk will vibe with this. Our reviewer Tyler Colp found a lot to love about it. But lots of people also really vibe with mods that utterly ruin games I love unmodified. And this is what Nightreign feels like: a bad mod that craps all over a previously refined experience. And all the bits that I have to acknowledge I do quite like, such as the enhanced mobility, come with so many caveats.
We don't have Torrent now, for instance. So while, yes, you can run around at breakneck speeds, it doesn't feel quite as speedy as when you were charging around on your goat-horse hammering the dash button. "Feel" is the operative word here. We've gone back to Elden Ring to compare the speeds, and the Nightreign sprint might actually be faster, or at least comparable. But there's an exhilarating sense of speed that Torrent provides that's not quite matched in Nightreign. And Torrent was more than a means of transport—he changed the way you could enter combat, giving you more tactical options like cool dismounting jump attacks and driveby swipes that we've now lost in his absence.
Torrent was more than a means of transport.
Regardless, it's nice to be able to sprint like an absolute maniac. The jumping, though, makes me a different kind of maniac. An angry, infuriated one. The wall jumping is janky and inconsistent, and while that wouldn't be too much of an issue in vanilla Elden Ring, in Nightreign, where you've got a blue wall of death nipping at your heels, it becomes more serious and more frustrating. When every second counts, the last thing you need is for your bird-man with useless wings to get stuck trying to jump up a wall that's only slightly taller than himself.
When it does work, though, it's actually quite exhilarating. You've got seconds to get to another flask, or another boss, both of which are necessary to get you all set for your final encounter at the end of the three days; so you're sprinting across the plains, weaving between trash mobs, leaping up cliffs, relentless in your pursuit of more power. There are times when the race, and the tools you've got at your disposal to help you win it, offer a sense of excitement that's entirely different from the traditional FromSoftware experience. And that's a thrill. But those moments are rare.
FromSoftware has already experimented with action like this previously, and with better results. Sekiro, for instance, gives you an infinite sprint and a frankly ridiculous amount of mobility. The joy I feel from grappling away from an enemy, leaping from trees to rooftops to reposition and find a new angle of attack, or simply to escape an encounter I'm not ready for, it's like nothing else in the realm of soulslikes.
Sure, the Wylder's grappling hook feels novel in Elden Ring, but it's got nothing on its counterpart from Sekiro. It's a much simpler tool, and while you can use it on terrain as well as enemies, you ain't no ninja. You'll be using it to quickly reposition in a pinch rather than constantly deploying it to get around the world.
Here's the thing: Nightreign isn't FromSoftware running a bold experiment. That would be exciting. In reality, it features a bunch of things that both the team's done before and better, while awkwardly jamming in some Fortnite junk. Beyond the extra mobility, everything it does well belongs to Elden Ring, and most of the enjoyment it provides stems from the fact that it's actually pretty hard to have a shit time playing a game with your buds. Co-op is just inherently fun. But Nightreign isn't.
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