In Elden Ring Nightreign, you pick one of eight unique characters and are dropped into the land of Limveld along with two other players with the nebulous goal of defeating the Nightlord. The map is full of locations to explore and bosses to topple. But within a few short minutes, the playable area of the map begins to shrink as night falls and the life-sapping rain slowly closes in.

Eventually, you're trapped within a small ring of fire, facing off against a boss. Defeat it and the rain disappears, only for you to repeat the process for a second time on day two. Defeat the second day boss, and you move onto the third and final day: a confrontation with the powerful Nightlord. Then, win or lose, you start the same three-day cycle again with all of your progress lost. And while the overall shape of the map is the same each run, the locations placed on the map are different, forcing you to grow and adapt as you pursue your ultimate goal.

Elden Ring Nightreign is first and foremost a roguelite game. The thing that separates “roguelike” games from “roguelite” games is the inclusion of a meta progression between runs. In the former, you start completely from zero each time. In the latter, something carries over. In Nightreign's case, this comes in the form of the relics you get at the end of a run (regardless of whether it's a failure or a success) and doing the various character questlines. You can equip three relics per character, but they are rarely, if ever, the difference between victory and defeat.

This is because, except for the limited number sold directly in the shop, those from character quests, and those from beating main bosses for the first time, the attributes on relics are completely random. After 42 hours in the game, I have hundreds of useless relics and only two I feel are so universally good that I include them on every build possible. (Both can boost the amount of runes dropped for your entire team by 3.5% a piece.) While there is no way to re-roll the individual attributes on relics, you can sell them wholesale to the shop and then buy new relics with random stats, which in all honesty, will probably be just as useless as the ones you just sold.

So as the relics rarely do much beyond minor stat increases, lowering cool downs, or guaranteeing you at least start the run with a weapon the boss is weak to, is there some other kind of meta-progression to help you get over the hump and take the Nightlord down? Kind of, but not in the way you're likely thinking.

Rather than being a game about “getting gud”—slamming headlong into a big boss over and over again till you learn every tell and attack pattern, Nightreign is a game about “getting fast”. Every character level you get in the two days before facing the Nightlord is another three or four mistakes you can make before failing the run, be this due to your higher damage ending the fight faster or your higher HP keeping you alive when you otherwise would die. And, of course, this isn't just true for the Nightlord fights. Getting levels fast and early speeds up your entire run—after all, the faster you're killing things, the more time you have to kill more things.

Thus, we get to the true meta-progression of the game: your knowledge of the land of Limveld and how to best navigate it. Throughout your numerous runs, you'll start to assemble a general game plan. Some of this will be things you figured out yourself, but most will come from observing what more experienced players do—where they go and in what order. After a while, you start to understand why a teammate wants to go to a specific location even without words. For example, if they waymark a camp on the other side of the map, it probably contains the type of weapon the Nightlord is weak to. If they waypoint a mine, on the other hand, it means they plan to upgrade their starter weapon for use against the Nightlord.

Then comes the accumulated knowledge that comes from repetition. At first, every location on the map is a mystery. You don't know the enemies in each, much less what the bosses are and where they are located. Over time, you start to notice the visual tells—for example, purple smoke in some ruins means mage enemies and bear bosses. And lastly, simply glancing at the icon on the map—the type of location and the element of the item that drops there—you know what the bosses are and where they are located. This allows you to rush from one boss to the next, rarely even bothering with normal enemies.

When you start playing the game, making it to level 10 before facing the Nightlord will be a trial. 40 hours in, you'll be upset at how cataclysmically bad your run went if you are lower than level 13. This is the kind of power experience gets you—and what will let you get over the hump and take each Nightlord down one by one.

That said, even with a party of three level 15 players each armed with the Nightlord's elemental weaknesses, you're probably not going to beat them your first time seeing them. Each of them has gimmicks you're likely not prepared for. Until you learn how to dodge them, mitigate them, or stop them from ever happening in the first place, you're likely to end up with a failed run. And even then, more than half of the Nightlords are just difficult fights, even without worrying about the gimmick.

So what else can you do to achieve victory? Voice chat is the big one. While not strictly needed, it certainly helps. Your early game gets much easier when you can make a game plan while traveling and get everyone on the same page. In general, I've found I'm a good two levels higher with voice chat than without. It also helps to be able to make quick call-outs—to tell your team when to use their ultimate attack or let them know you're down and need some help.

However, even stacking everything in your favor, you may get stuck on some of these Nightlords for quite a while. Luckily, other than the first Nightlord and the final boss, you can do the Nightlords in any order, and some are drastically easier than others. Coming back to one you're stuck on when you've improved your early game and gotten some more experience with the game overall can make a world of difference.

While Nightreign is designed to be a multiplayer coop game, you can technically play it single player if you wish. But before you do, some questions to consider: Do you speedrun Elden Ring regularly? Do you play Elden Ring bingo with friends or use randomizers? Have you done a level 1 run of Elden Ring or taken out every boss in the game in a single hit? This is the kind of skill and game knowledge you need to overcome the challenge of Nightreign when playing alone. Simply put, Nightlords and day-end bosses are designed for 3 people. In single player, they have less HP, but their composition and attacks are the same as if there were three of you. Remember, this is a game where the freaking Nameless King—the super boss of Dark Souls III—is a normal end of day boss. At the very least, don't attempt single-player seriously until you've beaten each Nightlord normally with a group.

While this game may have only eight Nightlord bosses, it's safe to say you're going to be doing more than just eight runs, likely many times that, before you see the credits roll. Thankfully, the game does quite a bit to shake things up as you progress to keep things interesting. The most obvious of these is the Shifting Earth. As you down the Nightlords, you'll unlock new versions of Limveld where one fourth of the map transforms into a different biome—a lava pit, a cold mountain top, an aeonian swamp, and a mysterious city. These are boss-filled dungeons with an amazing reward at the end. They completely change how you plan your run (as the final circle is always in the special biome), and some of the rewards make certain Nightlords much easier.

Biomes are not the only random events you'll face in your runs. Previously defeated Nightlords often hassle you in some immediate way or another—or Morgott simply drops out of the sky to throw you into an impromptu boss fight. Sometimes, you even face two-day ending bosses, one after another, with no break or healing. To say the game keeps you on your toes is an understatement.

The other big way the game keeps things fresh is through the characters. As you use each, you gain the ability to play parts of their backstories. Often, this means adding a special objective to your run, like defeating a new boss or something similar. Doing this rewards you with new relics and even costumes. It's a great way to make you want to play with all the Nightfarers instead of just a single one.

When it comes to the overall presentation of the game, I have no complaints. The character designs are fantastically varied, and their voice actors are spot on. The world is a great mix of the familiar and the new, especially to those familiar with Elden Ring—and the soundtrack is as amazing as you'd expect from other FromSoft games. Best of all, however, it plays smoothly. Despite being a faster-paced game than the other games in the Soulsborne lineage, it feels sharp and responsive, even when playing with people on the other side of the world.

Speaking of the online nature of the game, back in February of this year when I played the network test for this game, I had horrible connection issues. Of the 78 runs I attempted back then, 73 ended in disconnections—there was no way to rejoin the gameplay session. In the final build of the game, I disconnected only a single time and was able to rejoin the run after a short trip back to the title menu. And in another user-friendly update, you can now form a group from your PSN friends list in addition to the usual password system.

All that said, I do need to mention a bit of a caveat. As I played this game to completion in the week-and-a-half before the public release of the game (34 hours to beat the final boss, 40 to defeat every Nightlord), there were only a few hundred of us worldwide playing the game at any time. We weren't stressing the servers in any way, shape, or form. On launch day, it could all work perfectly, or it could be an unplayable mess. The best I can say is that, under optimal conditions, the net code works like a dream.

In the end, Elden Ring Nightreign is a great game, but it's most certainly not for everyone. It's hard—brutally so—if even one person isn't up to par, it's likely the run is going to fail. I pity the new player unfamiliar with Soulsborne or rougelite, and this is their first introduction. I can imagine them carefully reading each stat as they try to choose a weapon, only to look up and see the rest of their team is already halfway across the map, shouting expletives at them over voice chat. If you're new and want to work your way up to this game, play the original Elden Ring first—you can even coop it with a friend. Beating it—or at least another similar Soulsborne/Soulslike title—is the bar for entry for this game.

However, if you have the necessary base knowledge and experience with the genre, the whole game becomes a wonderful puzzle of planning and execution. For thirty minutes to an hour, three people work together—sharing all that they have learned from their numerous failures and successes—to defeat something they couldn't alone. It's a highly addictive blast. I expect to be playing it regularly for months, if not years, to come.