ELDEN RING NIGHTREIGN

Elden Ring Nightreign clicked the moment I hit level 2. My squad had just dropped into the game’s remixed version of Limgrave. I was a bird man named Guardian, and all I had to know about Guardian is he’s really good at blocking. We dropped 100 feet onto a camp of soldiers, sliced them up in seconds, and bee-lined toward a site of grace to level up.

- Morgan Park

The From Software levelling experience is one reason why I like Souls games, but don’t love them. Agonising over where to dump points into stats to make meters slightly longer isn’t my idea of satisfying progression, so when I touched a site of grace in Nightreign and watched my stats automatically increase according to my character’s specialities, I thought, "This rules, and it’s gonna piss some people off."

I hope I’m not dealing fatal psychic damage when I say that, structurally, Elden Ring Nightreign has more in common with Fortnite than Elden Ring. There’s the battle royale-like closing circle, of course, but the flow is similar too. A full Nightreign run takes place over three in-game days. The daytime is one long looting phase: your squad runs around the map clearing mob camps, looting, killing lesser bosses, levelling and maybe solving the odd ten-second puzzle. At night you challenge a harder boss, and then the sun rises for the next day.