Elden Ring Nightreign is the multiplayer Souls game I've always wanted

I don’t speak Japanese, but I knew that the guys behind us that did were cheering for us. The whole room was crowded around our demo station, watching us take on the final boss of our Nightreign demo. Our all-press team were only the second group to get here. The other was a group of professional Souls players. You know their names. So there we were, a Duchess, a Wylder (me), and a Guardian, taking on a giant three-headed dog wielding a massive chain attached to a greatsword. We were doing well, right up until it split into three dogs. “Oh good,” I said, out loud, to my teammates. “One for each of us.”

We had some clutch moments. Our Duchess player used her ability to make us invisible to pull off a couple of clutch revives. We landed some absolutely fantastic ult combos. And in the end, after getting him to about 40 percent, we lost. When I got up, my hands were shaking. People came up to congratulate us. Our team first-bumped. We had gotten there on our third run. Had that team had another crack at him, I knew we would have won. I got my chance about a week later at another event. Different team, mind, though two out of three original members ain’t bad. But we take runbacks no matter how they come.  

Elden Ring Nightreign is difficult to describe. It’s a multiplayer PVE game where you’ll team up with two other Nightfarers (one of several classes; our demo had four), and then venture out into the world of Elden Ring for fortune and glory. You start in Roundtable Hold, though it’s different, as Nightreign itself is. As you explore those differences, Nightreign begins to come into focus. And it’s not the game I initially thought it was.

The first thing you do when you ready up for a run is choose your class. There’s the Wylder, an all-rounder equipped with a grappling hook and an ultimate attack that racks up stun like nobody’s business; the Duchess, quicker than fast, who comes with her own unique weapon, the ability to make her team invisible, and an ultimate ability that can reapply any damage and status effects the rest of her team has done in the last 1.5 seconds; the Guardian, a heavy weapon-wielding tank whose ultimate ability can control space; and the Recluse, the most complicated of the four, a glass canon caster who can recall the spells she throws and, once she has three, combine those fragments and unleash them for a stronger attack. I enjoyed all of them, but found myself called to Wylder, to his armor, that grappling hook, the lure of the perfectly timed ultimate skill to stun the boss, though the Duchess grew on me immensely as we played.

Once your team is assembled, you’ll fly giant eagles into a map pulled from Elden Ring. The one we saw was based on Limgrave. Only one thing is certain; you’ll spawn near a small camp of enemies, and you should take them out and then immediately find a nearby Site of Grace and level up. Nightreign is not like Elden Ring; a single level means a dramatic increase in power, and can make all the difference. Salvation lies in the minutae.

From there, the map is your oyster. Maybe you’ll head into a nearby cave and search for Smithing Stones to upgrade your weapons. Maybe you’ll go to a church and find another charge for your healing flasks. Maybe you’ll head to that castle or hunt that dragon. Maybe you’ll move from camp to camp, a wrecking crew killing smaller enemies, looting chests, playing small ball and taking the guaranteed yards. Perhaps you’ll find the key to an Evergaol and see what sort of monstrosity emerges once you’ve broken its bonds. Or maybe you’ll just pick a direction and go.

But you had better pick something, because Nightreign features The Fortnite Circle. Every so often, a circle of fire will close in, burning away anything outside of it… including you. Unlike in Fortnite, the circle does not close to force you into interactions with other teams. There are no other teams in Nightreign. Instead, it closes to force you to make decisions and then hold you accountable for them.

Is going into that cave really a good idea? You will have to get out, you know. And when was the last time that circle closed? Do you remember? Is fighting that dragon at level 2 really a good idea? Nevermind the question of beating it; even if you could, is the time you’d spend worth it? You are on a timer. Every second matters.

As the circle closes, your decisions get harder, your options become more limited, and the choices you made before affect what you can do now. Your goal is always the same: survive, level up, and get better weapons (which matter stats-wise even if you don’t end up using them in combat) so you can fight the boss at the end of Nightreign’s three days. Coordination is key, whether it’s calling out your ults, marking a place on the map to hit next, or dropping a weapon you don’t need for a teammate.

Traditionally, Souls games have been solitary affairs that reward individual mastery. Sometimes you can summon another player for help, but by and large, you go through those games alone. Nightreign is the opposite; it requires coordination, trust, and the ability to work together. A good player can carry a team a long way in Nightreign, but there’s only so much they can do alone, especially if another member of their team is playing badly. You succeed or fail together.

At the end of each day (each cycle has three), the circle will close until it forces you into a boss arena. This is where you’re truly tested. You’d better hope you hit a Site of Grace before you get there, that you’ve got enough flasks and you spent your time wisely. What’s interesting is that Nightreign’s bosses aren’t pulled exclusively from Elden Ring — the Centipede Demon from Dark Souls is here, as is Margit the Fell Omen. In fact, the latter can pop up in your run at any time to ruin your day, and he’ll chase you until he kills one of you, or you kill him. You might open an Evergaol to find an Ancient Dragon staring at you. You won’t see all of them as end-of-day bosses, but those encounters are where the pressure’s on, regardless of who's waiting for you.

It’s in these moments that Nightreign sings. When you land the Wylder’s ultimate skill for a massive amount of stun damage, your Guardian pulls off his at the same time, and your Duchess times hers properly to cash in all your chips at once. When both your teammates are down and you manage to buy enough time through positioning and guile and luck to land enough attacks (you revive your friends by attacking them enough to deplete the gauge that fills a little more every time they go down). When you are out of flasks and hanging by a thread and you have to be perfect and you find perfection and cling to it like a liferaft, praying you can hold on just long enough.

And then they fall. And you’re on to the next day, where things are harder, choices matter more, and the reward is even better, and even if you survive, you will face another boss. Or you fall, to them, to the Circle, to some ill-timed venture into a cave, a random encounter that goes badly, a run-in with the Fell Omen. Any can end your run, and when it happens, and it will, you’ll be itching to get back in there. Next time, you tell yourself every time, will be different. Even when you fail, you acquire permanent upgrades you can equip called relics. The farther you get on a run, the better relics you’ll acquire. Even when you’re not winning, you’re making progress.

Nightreign captures a strange kind of magic. It sands off many of Elden Ring’s traditional RPG elements (you do not choose how to level up your class; you do not equip gear outside of weapons and trinkets; there is no fall damage; you sprint across the map at a speed that would make Torrent blush) and replaces them with more traditional rogue-lite elements. Beating a boss offers a choice of a random reward, which can range from a weapon to a 4 percent stamina bonus to much more specific and strange, like spawning an ice storm every time you begin to sprint.

That this works is a testament to how far From has pushed the core of Elden Ring’s systems; they bend enticingly without breaking, encouraging you to see how much farther they might be pushed. But Nightreign’s most subtle spell is its strongest. Even on runs that end badly, you always feel that you made the best choices you could at every given moment: you chose the right class, went to the right places, chose the right upgrades, worked together as well as you could. If you fail, it is not because you chose poorly; it is because you executed badly in the moments. Salvation lies within the minutiae. 

A single run takes place over three days, but the third day is really just a final test. After defeating that second day’s end boss, you are teleported to a final area with a merchant (he only sells, never buys), an anvil for upgrading any weapons provided you have Smithing Stones, and a Site of Grace. Once you are ready, it’s time to face the Night Lord, in our case, that three-headed dog.

We never beat him, though we reached him several times. When offered help, a more experienced player to sub in for one of ours, we refused. In the days since, I have wondered if that was the right decision. I come back to this: what more would I have gained from seeing him fall that I did not from the fight itself? Satisfaction, perhaps, but with the caveat that I had capitulated somewhere, strayed from the team that had gotten us there. Salvation is in the minutiae. We chose to succeed together, bound by our first choice — the choice of the players on our team — or not at all. 

Soon, I will play Nightreign again. I will play it with my friends during the Closed Network Test, and we will make our choices. We will complete run after run, succeeding or failing on the merits of our decisions, our ability to work together, to find those moments of perfection. I don’t know how many times it will take; I don’t know what classes we’ll play, what choices we’ll make, what buffs we’ll collect or weapons we’ll wield. But I do know this: we’re going to kill that damn dog. And then we’ll start again.

This preview was based on a build of the game provided by the publisher. Elden Ring Nightreign releases on May 30th, 2025.

Will Borger

Contributing Editor

Will Borger is a Pushcart Prize-nominated fiction writer and essayist who has been covering games since 2013. His fiction and essays have appeared in YourTango, Veteran Life, Marathon Literary Review, Purple Wall Stories, and Abergavenny Small Press. His games writing has also appeared at IGN, TechRadar, Into the Spine, Lifebar, PCGamesN, The Loadout, and elsewhere. He lives in New York with his wife and dreams of owning a dog. You can find him on X @bywillborger.