Nightreign is the most interesting Souls game since Dark Souls 2

I can’t stop thinking about Elden Ring: Nightreign. I can’t stop playing it. It’s a problem.The things it gives me access to are some that I’ve been holding out for for nearly my entire life, and while they’re far from realized, I can see so clearly the vision they had for each character and why I’m drawn to the ones I am, why the bosses feel so well executed.

This game could not exist without Elden Ring itself as the basis for its spin-off, but while Shadow of the Erdtree is a refinement of that game in specific, Nightreign feels like it was the perfect excuse for people who genuinely love the history of the series to carry out their favorite brainchildren and show them off to the rest of the world.

The Nightfarers, or: Actual Class Mechanics

FromSoftware is no stranger to starting classes, as should be obvious. But where they’ve always had the same breadth of potential to build toward in any given game, they also all fall short in many areas as skins over the same mold, only giving you a different portion of the same grab bag (or offering none at all, if you choose to take that option).

The Nightfarers showcase a new opportunity, akin to the single protagonist of Sekiro: become this character, see the world through their eyes. You still retain access to the entire inventory, locked only by levels—who cares if the melee weapon doesn’t scale well with your stats, you can still have it for picking up friends or clearing adds, or finishing off something when you’ve managed to run out of FP. Who cares if the seal or staff doesn’t scale the best, if it has a good buff for you, or you want something to use FP on at range, or just contribute to a specific weakness? Trying different weapons is one of the most frustrating aspects of a fresh playthrough or trying to build for a role you haven’t before, let alone upgrading them all, and this skips most of that slog.

The Nightfarer Skills and Arts are, by that metric, simply a bonus on top of a framework for letting people experiment within the loose constraints of a guiding path through Dormant Powers. But they also highlight the other aspect of these class mechanics, and it’s one of the reasons I’m glad that the game tries its best to trend toward “raid boss”-style mechanics and health pools: you actually get to play the game differently.

To get way too analytical about this, we can break the Nightfarers’ playstyles apart by a few metrics:

• Threat, or how much of a rotation a Nightfarer expects to spend dealing damage.
• Positioning, or how much a Nightfarer needs to consider deliberate positioning vs. dodging or otherwise.
• Survival, or the potential damage a Nightfarer can withstand.
• Volatility, or how much need there is to hit different specific gear or item types depending on different fights. (You can play a wide range of styles within each default, but by and large these are measures of how each character is built, via stat spread and Skill and Art.)

With those definitions covered, we can actually talk about how interesting these Nightfarers are.

• Wylder is a High Threat, Moderate +1 Survival character with very low Volatility.
  • Greatswords and Great Spears are together easily the strongest and most populated joint class in the game, and deal very good damage against nearly any fight. They get a respectable amount of FP inherently for weapon skills, and are a very good melee all-rounder. The grappling hook means positioning is rarely an issue for them, and starting with a light Parry shield also opens up reactive punishes for a large amount of enemies and bosses.
  • This is your bread-and-butter starter character who remains extremely competent, and is also the Shadows Die Twice half of the Sekiro pair. Sixth Sense gives more and more value the farther into the game you go and the more you improve, effectively giving another half life every fight. Really, the grappling hook is more interesting as a shake-up for movement, and makes Wylder incredibly mobile, so much more than the rest of the cast and even the rest of the series.
• Guardian is a ? Threat, Ultimate Survival character based around Positioning. Volatility is low, but not 0.
  • Halberds can be an awkward class and Guard Counters don’t always pan out well in fights, but the ability to shrug off 70-100% of incoming damage basically for free should never be underestimated. Even his starter shield un-upgraded is extremely competent against many fights, but late-game it is recommended to find a suitable elemental negation or upgrade for higher stability. His melee weapon itself doesn’t matter too much, and he has some ability to cast Incantations, leaving him very reactive to what’s available on the map.
  • Guardian is one of the few characters with one particular Relic effect that is never worth passing up on, and quite frankly should have been part of his base kit to some extent. The reflected wave after receiving attacks with Steel Guard active may deal minor HP damage, but it hits the Near-Death Gauge as much as his Halberds do, and can frequently pick up allies during a multi-hit for little extra effort.
  • This is the Tank. Low mobility, extremely high durability. It turns out it’s a lot easier to learn attacks and comm plans with a team when you aren’t under as much imminent danger. In fact, this Pinionfolk is so much of a tank that he’s a full third of the reason I’m writing this! There are so few games where tanking and tanking hits is a legitimate strategy, and we need MORE. Please. Make them even more tank-based.
• Ironeye is a Medium (High) Threat character with decent Survival and very little Positioning or Volatility.
  • A note here: Ironeye can be played in melee with the Dex-scaling weapons, and that doesn’t affect my evaluation here at all.
  • Ironeye is, weirdly, built around burst damage despite being a constant-DPS marksman, and is one of the characters that benefits most from teammates due to how the Mark mechanic works. 1-2 free dodges that are also attacks that also start stacking a proc of large health and stagger damage? It’s pretty wild. An innate boost to bow speed as well is immensely helpful.
  • This is your Suppressor. Pick a target and start firing from safety. Headshots are fairly easy to get even by accident, and a lot of larger enemies can be focus-aimed at to speed things up. The Mark builds as more damage is dealt, so it’s a free boost to the team’s clear, and has a very low base cooldown. You rarely need specific weapons, but some can be more helpful than others when Ashes of War are concerned.
  • Bows have, frankly, never been good. They’ve never been allowed to be good. Here, they’re incredible, and I’m so happy.
• Duchess is a ? Threat character with moderate Positioning and Volatility.
  • This is your Wildcard. She can build for melee, magic, or a mix depending on what’s available and how you like to play. On-demand invisibility with her Art and a Restage for large damage moments make her a lot more reactive to what enemies are susceptible to and what her team is running, but she can also find a lot of success from just placing herself off-sides and revving herself up like a Beyblade. Daggers are harder to come by in specific needs than Staves, though her gear pool is very wide. The main thing for her to look out for is weaknesses due to low base damages.
  • 2 dodges! Woah!
  • idk i feel like there’s more to say, she feels very team-based but is also very competent on her own, i don’t play her very often
• Raider is a Infinite? Survival, Extreme Threat character with very low Volatility and almost 0 Positioning.
  • Have you ever wanted to have a free “I decided I’m not dying right now” button? Well, there you go. A fair few relics work off taking hits during his Skill, and while his Ult is fairly lackluster for damage, the reprieve from height gained and the 20s attack boost on top of a mini-stagger for a whole area is pretty ridiculous. He mostly doesn’t need to think about actual weapons, since the Strength-scaling pool is so wide, he just needs good raw damage or an elemental weakness to exploit.
  • This is your Bruiser, or Brawler, or Staggerer. Heavy weapons, long animations, and while he benefits from some post-damage HP recovery on Relics, he never needs it. He is built to take and dish out hits in equal measure, which makes it very tempting to succumb to the hubris of just going one more round in the ring before healing up.
  • Much like Guardian, Raider feels like a type of character that doesn’t often have a lot of room to play in the series since Dark Souls 1. Poise has been knocked down from the Rock status it once was, but even then, trading with high-damage hits has never truly worked. In that sense, having a character who is meant to actually brawl is also a fresh experience.
• Revenant is a ? Survival, ? Threat character with high Volatility and high Positioning.
  • This doll is the hardest one to talk about well, because she can technically do anything mediocrely! She just struggles to excel in a lot of circumstances because she lacks good consistent gear options and the durability of her Skill, the summoned family members, doesn’t ever increase. Incantations lock the caster in place longer and more readily than Sorceries or Bows, and often have shorter ranges for their payoff.
  • This is your Summoner. Living(? or at least “walking”) tragedy. She still has an immense amount of room for mastery, but is perhaps the most different playstyle and tempo to the rest of the base-game Nightfarers. Which I, personally, love her for. She still does have a good chance to roll seals, the seals themselves are just in smaller number compared to staves.
  • From Software. Why do you hate Faith so much. Why.
• Recluse is a Maximum Threat character with 0 Volatility, conditional Positioning, and ? Survival.
  • You want magic? You want to explode bosses through ranged attrition while only betting most/all of your health bar as collateral? Free reign over all non-physical damage typings, and on top of that some limited access still to status effects?
  • This is your Mage, your Wizard, your Sorcerer. You will never run out of FP (well, you can if you want, but it’s hard). You will never run out of an effective element against a boss if even one instance of it is in the party. You can ride lightning, call down the heavens, throw the stars, craft a miniature black hole, encase yourself in ice, or even just throw another fireball. There are always staffs, there are always Sorceries, there is always Magic. It is always there, you just need to learn how to find it.
  • I find it very funny that she gets the best i-frames on her dodge when she doesn’t even really need them. You can totally play her in melee range or at distance, but for me, mastery is reflected in how many openings you can greed for to keep casting, spacing yourself around an enemy, rather than retreating from them.
  • Magic has always had a lot of pain points in this lineage of games, and even more so than the tank gameplan, it’s glorious seeing it come into its own as a dedicated character.
• Executor is a High Threat character with some Positioning, High Survival, and relatively low Volatility.
  • This is the other half of the Sekiro pair, the infinite deflects. You can use this as the main combat weapon, or you can forgo it for other Dex/Arcane weapons with high damage potential. Both Skill and Ult are good at area damage and Holy with relatively good uptime, offering a lot of good non-physical Threat.
  • To be clear,
  • you can deflect explosions.
  • You can deflect damn near everything in the game that has a hitbox.
  • It’s really fun.
  • This is your…well, “Executor” is pretty accurate, honestly. Melee DPS and timed immunity with good affinity for high-critical weapons for ripostes, and statuses for enemies not weak to conventional weaponry. Also dog mode.
• Scholar is a Weird Threat character with Weird Positioning, High Survival, and High Volatility.
  • Scholar’s weird, y’all. I love him, but I also gotta know who was cooking so I can thank them for getting clearance to just do whatever in the design rooms.
  • High Arcane for status application, item-based playstyle, benefits from a guaranteed Relic effect that buffs allies when in range of the monocle and also benefits from sharing item use with allies. Does respectable damage against bosses and easily explodes common enemies with Art and Bleed, has high damage potential depending on finding good weaknesses to exploit, and sometimes doesn’t really get off the ground in time.
  • This is your Tactitian. By nature of the kit, he has to think a lot more about where to go and where to be for different things, and it lends itself well to someone who already enjoys that sort of approach to the game. This is different than Nightlord targeting, it also can involve routing to status camps to clear other camps, knowing good collectible pickups and enemy placements to maximize Runes and inventory, having a status in the pocket for every enemy weak to anything ever, and firebombs for those that aren’t.
  • Just check the wiki for the Analyze details so you save yourself a headache. And maybe help us out with the numbers if you have datamining skills and some free time. Please.
• Undertaker is a High Threat character with Negative Positioning, High Survival, and Low Volatility.
  • So, fun fact! I have not played a single match as Undertaker yet I have played a single match as Undertaker since drafting this. Much like Wylder, the straightforward melee style just doesn’t appeal to me enough, but I do appreciate what they built for her.
  • If you like having your Art: you get free Art, and you can plug your Art into your Skill to ArtSkill and autododge? Which is ridiculous?
  • This is your…I really don’t know how to summarize her. She just attacks, and keeps attacking, and benefits from others attacking and using Arts. Good for her. Hammers and other Strength/Faith weapons are easy to come by, too.
  • Incredibly unique. Idk what else I can say about her right now since I’ve yet to play her any real amount.

So many different aspects to each Nightfarer, and while they do have unique moveset alterations to different weapon classes, it’s always an augment to the existing Elden Ring moveset.

An aside on the existing Elden Ring moveset.

I’m someone who considers Dark Souls 2 Powerstancing to be the pinnacle of weapon freedom in the series. I do begrudgingly accept the Ashes of War system in Elden Ring, as it’s vastly superior to the Weapon Arts of Dark Souls 3, but I would have really liked to see some more moveset variation make its way back into powerstancing, especially considering there’s a specific weapon passive category that applies to powerstanced attacks, and opening that up to have more overlap would go a long way to let builds work.

Please. Give me back good powerstancing. Nightreign manages to rein in Ashes of War and basic powerstancing in a way that works, in a way that it really hadn’t for several games in favor of paired weapons and AoW themselves, which means there’s more potential to improve. I’ve actually seen some innovations on Elden Ring’s base-game weapons in some mods, which, the whole legal minefield about borrowing ideas from fanwork, but lemme dream.

The Multiplayer, or: Actual Multiplayer

Imagine a world where if you help someone beat a boss, you beat a boss.

This has literally never been the case in any other game.

It’s fascinating, isn’t it? There’s a lot to be said about disjointed multiplayer and the difficulty of playing with people you already know or have met through your journeys, and how that is intentional to some portion and inherited to some other, but more importantly than that there’s always been one very difficult pill to swallow: if you help a host kill a boss, you do not also kill that boss. I feel like this contributes a lot to the idea that participating in multiplayer isn’t real FromSoft Gaming, though there’s no data to that, but it also is just needlessly awkward? The more seamless world of multiplayer afforded by first Elden Ring and now Nightreign finally opens up persistent multiplayer, and crucially, shared victories, without the need for a Seamless mod.

There’s also coordination and adaptability for different bosses? A lot of the time in the base game, you kind of just hope that the overlaps of your limited pool of resources and anyone else’s works for whatever you’re fighting, or possibly respec, or just roll with it, but each Nightfarer has an inherent sort of gameplan and informs the route for the run. It’s cool! It’s nonverbal communication! It builds community in a non-hostile way!

We’ve been playing Trine 5 recently. Trine, and Magicka for that matter, and some other games like Risk of Rain /2 (go have fun listing more of them on your own) fall into the genre* of multiplayer that is cooperative rather than combative. Fromsoft multiplayer has long been both! And that’s fine, but I’ve found that it leans more heavily to combat than cooperation because people are more willing to fight strangers than they are to sit around and help them. YMMV, sure, but fight clubs have a much more storied history and even in fully cooperative settings, players are still too quick to judge their teammates instead of offer some understanding.

There’s an entire other thing that we plan to work on touching on that aspect of engaging with games…maybe. Multiplayer might not fit in it, but either way, it also doesn’t fit here longer than it has.

The Nightlords, or: What’s in a Raid Boss?

The Souls lineage is no stranger to cinematic fights. There’s actually way more than I’m willing to count, but one thing that the Nightlord fights—and the game as a whole, really—highlight for me is how easily competent boss design falls apart in difficult terrain, and at the same time, makes me wonder what else the future of this lineage is.

Tricephalos (Gladius, Beast of Night)

is the tutorial Nightlord, and the one you need to fight before unlocking the others. A ping-pong between joined and joint attacks, weak to the same element as the Aspect, and fairly squishy. It’s still got some very good mechanics, with a lot of different mixups depending on positioning, but decidedly early game. Multi-target boss fights often lose a lot of their shine in practice (and we’ll get to that later…), but I think this one is done really well! No thanks to, as always, the camera. Keeping track of those dogs is such a chore sometimes, when it doesn’t need to be.

I wish the relic was Large. Feels bad trying to fit it in for its bonuses and missing out on a slot.

Gaping Jaw (Adel, Baron of Night)

is incredibly unique, and was even more so before the DLC.

All Nightlords have a specified weakness (its effectiveness varies, and any secondary ones are not listed in-game). For Adel, it’s poison. Poison causes it to undergo a minor convulsion and spit out any players grabbed by it, and it takes more damage from the status.

Another interesting thing is that Gaping Dragon makes a return as a possible Night Boss in the leadup to Adel, and retains its tail-cut property (dropping a random weapon when severed). Tail-cuts and limb severing have largely been left behind by the series, with a few showings in DS2 and (as far as I’m aware) a single instance in DS3 at the top of the Bridge over Farron? None of the Nightlords have severable parts, which is unfortunate, but it’s nice to see the older bosses get a refresh in this game and carry their mechanics forward with them. Really, let us cut open the Gaping Jaw in the later phase, or something!

Sadly, the only other major thing I have to say is Adel is not kind to framerate, which is the next thing Fromsoft should tackle (seriously, that’s the other thing DS2 did that the rest of the series can’t: run well).

Sentient Pest (Gnoster, Wisdom of Night)

is perhaps the real joint fight of the main game. Where Tricephalos largely operates as 3 separate instances of the same boss to manage as best you can, Sentient Pest attempts the impossible: making a good duo boss fight. Does it succeed? Well…

Gnoster, Wisdom of Night

is the moth. As an aerial enemy, the actual experience of fighting it is…mixed. When it cooperates, it’s a fun foil to the other boss. They also share a healthbar, which makes it not the worst thing in the world to have to only fight Faurtis if Gnoster is playing really hard to get.

The real complaint here is the poison clouds. Elden Ring decided to implement a system where clouds of poison also chunk you for HP damage while standing in them, and it fucking SUCKS. Both in concept and execution and actual damage dealt for no discernable or justifiable reason? It’s bad? Remove it from the game? The poison already has other effects, maybe it could have its damage boosted! Deadly Poison and Toxic (!) exist in the series, anyway! Use them, to differentiate it from Rot! Please literally do anything else besides what is currently being done it’s not good.

Faurtis Stoneshield

is the scorpion. Not too much to write home about for this one. It’s solid, pun very much intended, and it’s the thing to wail on if you aren’t running anything with the range and reaction necessary to chase Gnoster down across the skybox. It interacts with Gnoster’s poison clouds as the wall it is, which is very fun boss design (complaints about the poison itself still stand, see above), and isn’t so much of a threat as it is an obstacle.

I quite like Sentient Pest. Duo fights have long been the bane of enjoyment in the series, and even with the few pain points it has, this one manages to land pretty well in the ‘good’ realm.

Augur (Maris, Fathom of Night)

is something of an Outer God?

This has been a rather polarizing fight. Like Gnoster (and specifically the moth, Gnoster), airborne enemies are often quite annoying to deal with, and Augur is very mobile when it wants to be. Melee gear and characters are not going to have a lot of opportunities to deal their damage (outside defeating the adds, which sends a small amount of health and stagger damage per add vanquished back to Maris), and even with the few guaranteed staggers, it’s a rather slow fight. It does a better job of being a cinematic…amphibious? fight? than Gnoster, which I appreciate, but it’s not really one I prefer to run.

As far as the fully* airborne fights go in Nightreign, this is the best one, but it’s still not great. Having a better way for melee units and weapons to contribute would go a long way to making the fight more enjoyable, and it wouldn’t even really have to cut into the gimmick all that much.

Equilibrious Beast (Libra, Creature of Night)

is a Creature, alright. He squishes himself down to the rough shape of a humanoid (if you aren’t looking too closely), and waits for players to approach him. As soon as one starts talking to him, a clock begins counting down. Each player may choose to make a deal with him from a random selection of his offerings, to make no deal, or to back out. When all choices have been made, or if the timer runs out, he removes his disguise, and begins the actual combat.

Anyway, I spend all that time talking about the lead-up because I struggle to think about what else in the fight to comment on? It’s very fair. Lots of chip damage, lots of small healing, lots of madness, lots of small status cleaners. This fight can probably get overwhelming, but the attacks are telegraphed better than most thanks to being signs and gestures from Libra’s free hand (and a surprisingly well-done set of audio cues as well!) and you really just need to play with the madness. You can even proc Madness on Libra, making him the only other base-game boss to incentivize a status, and in another unique way (though it’s part of his other moveset technically, different from how Adel operates). A fight based around taking and repairing chip damage feels a lot better than how some of the other Madness-based encounters are in Elden Ring, and it’s just very well-made.

Darkdrift Knight (Fulghor, Champion of Nightglow)

is a centaur!

One of the most entertaining things about Nightreign is the added variety in boss design. Maris isn’t quite an analog to the Elden Beast in operation (if maybe in appearance), Fulghor is the only horse boss to not be mounted on the horse but the horse itself, and so far, Fromsoft hasn’t done the thing where bosses are too jumpy to be fun to chase after!

That last one won’t stay, sorry to say.

Fulghor isn’t the most impressive boss to fight, but he feels Fair, much like Libra. The additional large arm in phase 2 and the amount of start to a movement without him frequently ending up what feels like 5 miles away is good. It’s a very well-designed and well-executed fight, and while he isn’t my favorite of the base Nightlord targets, I think of the fight very fondly. He is perhaps the most unique shape of boss in the game, and that’s fun to see.

Fissure in the Fog (Caligo, Miasma of Night)

is, to compare to some other dragon fights in this small branch of the grace of gold, more akin to Placidusax than she is to Bayle. This is another of the ‘cinematic’ fights in that it is designed like a raid boss with a gimmick, and out of every Nightlord in the game, this is the only one that really properly achieves that in a way that is enjoyable. There’s a couple different attacks in the first phase that make use of most of the arena and the players can intuit how to deal with them easily, and only in the second phase does she suffer some from the unfortunate aspect of large dragons taking a small hop and ending up 2 postal codes over.

I like this fight. I don’t prefer to fight her often, but I really appreciate what they did for the first phase because it really doesn’t exist in any other part of the game.

Night Aspect (Heolstor, the Nightlord)

—a very good Final Boss, both for the base game, and even after experiencing what the DLC adds. Weirdly, I don’t consider this one to be a particularly difficult fight? It’s the Soul of Cinder type of fight, more of a send-off than an immense challenge, though it will fuck you up if you greed or aren’t careful. And I do mean Soul of Cinder deliberately; it very much a culmination of the rest of the game in a more mechanically direct way than the themes-implication way that came up with the last linking of the fire.

The fun of this fight comes from the relaxed warmup in the first phase, followed by a more heavy-hitting phase 2 and then the gradual introduction of different elements as part of Heolstor’s moveset, which are only HP threshold gated the first time and time-based as the fight continues. They are random, so most fights will be very different, unless you happen to end up with a build that deletes its health bar in a handful of bubbles (sorry!).

There’s also a small selection of alternate endings, one for each of a subsection of the Nightfarers, that can only be acheived after defeating the Nightlord, but the credits effectively roll after defeating Heolstor, and the Deep of Night mode is also unlocked upon victory. More on that a bit further in. For now, we proceed to the DLC targets!

Balancers, Weapon-Bequeathed Harmonia

The Balancers are perhaps the most interesting fight thematically and lore-wise, though I won’t really be getting into that aspect here.

Mechanically, they’re quite fun! 7 individual enemies with a shared health bar and mechanics, as a sort of evolution on what Dark Souls’s Four Kings were going for. At least, that’s my read on it.

Anyway, much like Sentient pest finally accomplishes the ages-old ordeal of trying to get a paired fight that works well, the Harmonia are a step beyond that, succeeding at the next conceptual step of what is almost a horde fight that remains fairly coordinated and easy to manage, if you keep your eyes and years open. To be clear, this is a very mentally demanding fight, but it does for Nightreign’s trios intent what Sentient Pest does for the single-player intent of the other games. Which,

An aside on single-player.

Nightreign is clearly meant to be played in trios, the same way that the other games that come before it intend for the player to engage with the multiplayer to different extents across the playthrough. I touched on this earlier, but it really is sad to see how many players are stuck in the mindsets of old, where summoning for help is bad, and interacting with other players is only ever a recipe for loss compared to getting existing friends to join a run. Admittedly, it can be more strain on the brain in the game trying to maintain the same course with randomly assigned teammates, but come on. It’s 2027. Are you really that afraid of genuine human interaction that you’d rather default to aggression? That’s so cliché.

Anyway back to the Balancers to add on that they are weak to sleep, which is the only instance of a fight in Elden Ring canon that incentivizes putting enemies to sleep in a way that feels realistic (sorry but I don’t find the Godskin Duo fight to be very interesting no matter how it’s tackled). It’s unfortunate that they were given some more resistance post-DLC-release, but I understand it was perhaps too easy to proc the status.

Traitorous Straghess, the Dreglord

is the tentative finale of the DLC, and the penultimate boss in order according to the game’s layout (and also thematically). I don’t really get the entirety of the lore about this one being named first “Traitorous” before reverting to its state as Pure Impulse, but the fight is interesting, it’s challenging, and it’s fantastic. I don’t really have anything I can even think of to complain about, but I also strangely struggle to pin down anything specific to praise, because it’s all equally impressive. The fight is fairly unique in its own right, with adds in the first phase that are important to play around and immense amounts of variation thrust into the terrain in the second phase, and it’s a fight that is fairly resistant to a lot of damage typing and statuses in a way that doesn’t feel unfair. Truly a 10/10, no notes.

Overall, the interesting thing about these fights is how they’re all flat arenas, and how weird it is to think about how so many of the best boss fights in the series take place in areas with little to no minute-to-minute terrain variation, and how odd that is to think about. It’s a Duel Simulator, effectively. Maybe it’s unavoidable, but I’d like to see more terrain stuff happen.

A flash of purple, or: What’s Really in a Raid Boss?

As the only truly “live service” aspect of the game, Nightreign’s team added enhanced versions of many of the Expedition targets after the launch of both the main game and the DLC. These fights typically begin with the target boss in its second phase behavior, which is then followed by a third, new phase at an appropriate HP threshold. While they technically also retain some of the same weaknesses, that aspect very much varies, as does the quality of this ‘upgrade’.

By and large, what I like about the Nightlords is that they exist, and that the team tried interesting and different things with them. This of course doesn’t mean that they all landed well.

The Night of the Beast

Gladius was added in rather late in the rotation, but we will be going down the list in order of original listing to make proper comparison to the base forms.

Gladius as Everdark is pretty rough. The dogs hit hard, move fast, and jump around a lot, which exacerbates the more tolerable issues that already existed when their damage and health numbers were lower. The added attacks are generally an improvement over the dog-type moveset that is already readily annoying to anyone who has every played a Souls-lineage game (dear god they want you to learn to hate dogs, i swear), and that movement speed and size does unfortunately interface rather poorly with the whole ease of managing a fight thing. Having to chase down and also run away from a boss so much when stamina is required to attack and dodge it is just not that fun.

Oh hey, the relic is large now!

The Night of the Baron

Remember the part of the fight where poison had a neat interaction with the boss? Yeah that’s gone now. Sucks.

This fight, while it does still annihilate framerate on a variety of laptops and consoles and PC builds, is at least pretty well executed mechanically despite dropping the poisoned ball, which is a rather large point in its favor. It redefines the arena in one of probably only 3 interesting ways total, including it, the Dreglord, and Maris just below (which we will get to momentarily), and of those three, this is the one that involves the player in that change most directly, which the other two rather fail to accomplish.

As a separate point of credit, Adel was dropped before the announcement of the Everdark mechanics had been made anywhere, which combined with the sudden spike in difficulty made for a very wild time, and for that, I think of this fight fondly.

The Night of the Wise

Gnoster and Faurtis are joined by Animus, a spiritual moth soul thing, in their new third phase. I have some mixed feelings on the way this part of the fight plays out, but I do also like the incentive to fight both physical targets more than their base fight. It does unfortunately suffer from the same issues Gladius has where the damage numbers exacerbate the otherwise minor issues.

And, of course. The poison. It’s actually joined with another very difficult to avoid form of damage in the lasers from the heavens we and our friend group affectionately refer to and call out as “Light of Miquella”—the fight would shrimply be massively improved by removing the entirety of the HP chunk damage from existing in a poison cloud, or reducing it to more reasonable parameters.

Mild improvement over the duo fight it already was, mild disappointment in how it comes up short.

The Night of the Fathom

This is the obligatory Actual Gimmick Fight! The Storm Ruler makes an appearance after defeating a weaker version named Augur, which is then used to contend with the truly cosmic-sized boss that makes up the rest of the fight. It is… Well, like all Storm Ruler encounters, it comes very close to being actually good outside the cinema of it all, but falls short because of what it being a Storm Ruler fight entails, especially in a game that otherwise heavily incentivizes variety.

I’m quite torn on this one. It’s not heavily disappointing, but at the same time, I wish it had done more to shake up the fight if they’re going to make a point of it being so long. Even kitting out a build specifically to shred it, it still ends up fairly monotonous, and that’s always a sign of bad design. All the more so when this is a game that wants you to replay it!

The Night of the Demon

Okay. This is going to be a bit of a long one.

Libra’s Everdark fight is a masterclass trainwreck. It succeeds in imparting the feeling that you are being affected by madness buildup in real life, and fails at being anything remotely resembling a fight that I want to engage in more often than once a month.

The issue is twofold.

1. A demon summons the condemned.

Even after the team went in and nerfed the fight by a considerable margin, the Condemned that are summoned (distorted copies of the Nightfarers in the fight, with one of a few different preset and concerningly strong loadouts) are much harder to deal with than is reasonable, due to their reactive rolling and player-inherited i-frames, their loadouts being spec’d for immense damage and varying types that are impossible to predict for certain before entering the fight, and the frequency at which they are summoned if you aren’t already winning the fight. To be perfectly honest, even when you are winning, they still feel overwhelming.

2. A demon preaches madness.

Libra himself joining the fight seemingly at random also contributes heavily to how nearly impossible it is to manage the Condemned, especially if a player is on the back foot. In most fights, there are ways to recover and whittle down at the boss anyway. In theory this is still true for Everdark Libra, but in practice, you are going to get bulldozed by three times your number as they ignore the blasts of area damage that Libra tosses out with abandon. Fun fact! A status like madness proc’ing during a blast will down you through a Sacred Tear effect that would heal you at low HP because that makes sense and is good for game feel!

The only way this fight has ever felt close to balanced is with a very specific build that got very specifically lucky, together with a friend who had the same, in duos, outside Deep of Night. And the relic you get for your troubles isn’t even particularly good for any Nightfarer. It really is baffling how bad this fight is, considering how fun the base form is still.

The Night of the Champion

And in an entire about-face of attitude, Fulghor’s Everdark is magnificent. By virtue of it not being immensely taxing on the brain to manage and also being a really nice follow-up to the first and second phases, this is probably the most consistently relaxing and enjoyable fight in the game for me. It’s very upbeat, compared to the other high-adrenaline fights that are very tense (in good ways, usually!), and I also find the transition from phase 2 to 3 here very smooth. Fulghor is honestly the only Nightlord who I wouldn’t mind fighting all 3 phases in sequence as a full fight.

Another 10/10, no more notes.

The Night of the Miasma

Immense disappointment.

We’re back in the trenches. If you remember my praise for Caligo’s first phase, and the minor issues stemming from Being A Large Dragon in the second, then it should come as no particular surprise that her Everdark, residing entirely in the Jumpy Dragon fight and without damn near all of the good cinematic raid-type attack patterns!

But worst of all is the unavoidable damage, truly. Everdark Caligo has a specific attack used in the new phase that, to be fair, is very sick. She gathers a crystal and shatters it, spawning a blizzard across the entire arena for 30 seconds, inflicting constant frostbite buildup. Usually this only procs the status once, but depending on how the fight has been going, as resistance drops in this fight every time frostbite occurs, it can get very dicey without any way to counteract or avoid it.

It’s a shame, because the boss herself is actually quite interesting, and the fight in theory looks pretty. But she has armor to break, plenty of damage to throw out, and spends far too much time in the air or jumping away and over the Nightfarers to be easy to deal with even without the blizzard.

Admittedly, I was expecting more of phase 1’s attack patterns, and by the time she released, that was not the trend, but I am still forever disappointed in the type of fight this became. Dragons are so incredibly often un-fun fights in this series, so it hurts to see one that showed a lot of promise turn out the way Caligo has.

The Balance, Salvation’s Standard-Bearers

And let the emotional rollercoaster continue! This is an insane fight. It’s so sick. It’s not perfect, but it’s really good, and I’m willing to forgive two really awkward elements for the enjoyment of the rest of the fight.

Where Caligo became exhausting and Maris became boring, Harmonia instead become thrilling. Perhaps overwhelming, but worth the rough patch.

There are three distinct rotations. First, the original first phase, with the heaven-sent Harmonia as always. Once they go down, the nightmare descends, and it is time to contend against a ravenous rush of blood and screams. Survive that, and they lose their form, dispelling into blood and reforming as a truly massive beast that thunders over the arena. It and the previous rush phase rotate back and forth as the Nightfarers weather the bloody storm, until finally, they fall for good.

I think the most interesting potential that Nightreign shows is that of the massive boss, and this has been the third of three different avenues to explore it. Elden Ring has a couple of its own, between Bayle and the Elden Beast, but the Standard-Bearers are a true pinnacle of experimentation, with both a multi-target slow fight, a multi-target fast fight, and a fight against a massive opponent (cue the remix) all in one. I don’t know how much of this experimentation will be allowed to bleed back to the mainline games, but I have my eyes on what else Duskbloods will also be bringing to the table.

A flare of red and a bubble of darkness, or: What if something Raids You?

Challenges! Bonus buffs! Stress! Fun!

The Night Encroaches

On rare occasions, the game will place an orb of the Night somewhere above the map, and if a player approaches near enough to it, it’ll rain down a small group of enemies. The reward for clearing this is always a small increase to the rate the Art gauge charges during combat, but I’ve found them to be much rarer than the alternative, which is

The Boss Invades.

There are a handful of different Boss Invasion events that can occur when conducting a regular Expedition. They don’t entirely match up with the boss roster, and they also can’t occur for a specific instance if you are actively challenging the boss itself, but otherwise, random seed willing (because they’re tied to map spawns rather than separate rolls), someone will pop in for a visit!

Tricephalos, Sundered

This one is pretty rough, as is the Everdark. The dogs hit decently hard, spawn in 3 separate locations across the map, deal constant damage over time until they are defeated or time out. In exchange, they are very squishy, and their reward is a stamina-related boon that is very beneficial for nearly every class!

The Ravenous Moth

Gnoster appears, solo, and attempts to siphon levels off the Nightfarers until dealt with (or, again, times out). The boon is a low chance for any individual damaging move (attack, Skill, spell, incantation, even the Star Rain that you can be granted from other passive options!) to grant the Nightfarer who caused it 10,000 runes. There is no limit to how many times this can occur, though it is much more likely to enrich someone using a quick weapon or multi-hit magic. This one feels like it could have maybe done something else, but it’s nice to help boost to level 15 when it occurs?

The Augur

Maris, in a similar small form to the one that appears during the Everdark intro, yoinks the Nightfarers into a small bubble to do combat. It’s not particularly dangerous, but quite confined, and can sometimes rest partially within the rain of Night. Either way, the boon awarded upon its defeat is augmenting the flask, which normally only restores HP, to additionally restore FP now! …Weirdly, this one isn’t that impactful? It’s nice to have when it happens, but FP is not that hard to come once a player starts looking for it.

The Demon

Libra’s invasion entails him appearing with a visual overlay of his features, cursing the Nightfarers and reducing their max health. You can track him down and pay Runes to resolve the curse, or defeat him in combat to earn additional runes. Either way, the boon received is a boost to attack power based on how many runes are held, and either a preset selection of deals with their cost removed as he is satisfied, or a random talisman from his defeat. This one feels very good! Big fan. Suffers from Symbol of Avarice existing, is all.

A chill mist rolls in…

Caligo… Oh dear, Caligo, why are they always doing this to you?

Caligo’s invasion is not that technical, it just kills the framerate due to how the fog and ice crystals render, and the nearly-unavoidable damage (half due to the framerate issues, half due to how low the visibility is) easily killing a squishy or low-level Nightfarer is, once again, depressing. The reward isn’t bad, and considering how much it affects gameplay it is impossible to ignore as it stands currently, so at the very least, you get an occasional prevention of death for your efforts!

Judgement of the Balancers

One of the most chaotic events. The Nightfarers are once again yoinked across the map, interrupting plans, and deposited at one of 3 POIs the Balancers have affected (never more than one Nightfarer per POI, but in teams of less than 3, obviously there is a numbers mismatch). Also, your healing flasks are gone, and only returned in part after defeating each Balancer!

The reward for this has the most variance, as it is a percent-chance to stand back up after going down for every instance, so luck plays a factor, but it’s certainly useful to have.

Also there’s sometimes different events,

like a meteorite falling, a large flame of frenzy, a wandering mausoleum, et ceter a (i don’t actually know if there’s ones beyond that because these are so rare? and they might be the only ones?). Clearing these generally doesn’t get you any passives, they just offer a good change of pace for the run.

(Hi Libra)

Libra can also decide to show up simply chilling on the map somewhere, without cursing the players. He will trade some form of payment (levels, stats, runes, or otherwise) for a different bonus. And, if you really want to, you can still fight him!

I think him offering Symbol of Avarice, even the potential for him to offer it, is honestly bad game design, because it devalues all the other options (besides improved physique, maybe), but that’d be the only other thing on this random event.

The hubris to challenge infinity, or: The Interesting Ways Deep of Night Breaks Itself

It’s really interesting. With a playerbase this interested in challenge runs, and a reputation as a series of difficult games, and a recent hit title that is very difficult in its DLC and endgame, Deep of Night feels like the logical conclusion as a digital existence.

A lot can be said about how Deep of Night is a fundamentally different experience to the rest of the game, but of interest to me right now is how it breaks apart the cycle of gameplay in much the same way that the fanbase has crumbled to bits the sense of a “normal” gameplay experience—min-maxing, ruining low-level experiences out of spite, hacking, but more than any of that, the immense breadth of challenge runs that exist, from fist-only to NG+99, speedruns of every single caliber—all things that appear once again in Nightreign itself, and so the cycle meets itself in a full revolution.

Very few people are, or ever will be, in Depth 5, comparative to the overall playerbase. But it exists, if you choose to seek it, and so does that 9999. Tantalizing in its depth, the allure of the Night, the allure of mastery over it.

It’s a rough time. I enjoy it, though I’m bad at it. I like how it adds a new dimension to the gameplay and incentivizes different things. But I can’t stop thinking about how it feeds off the urge that so many players in this series and fanbase experience, how it is a direct reflection of such a large aspect of the playerbase that has been here for so long. The inverse spiral to the roguelite mechanics, where now that you have mastered the climb up, all that remains is the descent, chasing flashes of red in an ever-darkening Night.

The veld and the grave, or: The Persistent Shortcomings of the Open-World

Elden Ring is a pretty fun game, one time through, but it is most certainly another failure of the open-world design paradigm.

…There’s a lot of directions I could take this, but let’s just walk through Elden Ring, mentally, and think about what the open-world gives, and what it takes.

It gives a wider world. It takes the context of returning, as you are rarely returning to a place, only to a region. The Roundtable Hold is as disconnected from the world as Firelink was in Lordran, to even more separation as so much can be maintained and performed on the road. Other characters are few and very far between, and widely (pun intended), the travel afforded by Torrent also feels deadened by the sheer amount of distance between places the player ever wants to travel or or revisit.

It’s not all bad, of course.

It gives very beautiful, visually connected areas. It gives a world map, and waypoints, and reasons to re-traverse The Lands Between. It gives larger arenas as parts of setpiece dungeons, it gives more individual locations.

But I think it knows that it’s stretched beyond its limits.

Each legacy dungeon feels more enjoyable to traverse and re-traverse than to run through the same singular path forward in the game. Small diversions are not enough to escape the rails of the Great Runes, the vast distances that need to be traveled.

Nightreign, in its compactness, is still massive. Dozens and dozens of different spawn patterns for locations and bosses, corners of the map you may never visit for 20 runs that end up being the one that cinches you a win. Different areas prioritized by different targets, on different Shifting Earths.

In both cases, you will likely never see the entire world yourself, both because of the secrets and the time it would take. But Nightreign really does accomplish what it sets out to do just that little bit better than Elden Ring, and the Land of Shadow would seem to agree. More compact, more tightly designed, better for it, and unfortunately locked so far behind the main game that it is also so much of a chore to revisit.

Oh well. Maybe one day.