Elden Ring Nightreign

Developed by FromSoftware and published by Bandai Namco Entertainment, Elden Ring Nightreign launched on 30 May 2025 for PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One and PC. It is a standalone co-op spin-off rather than an expansion, and this review covers the base game only, so The Forsaken Hollows is out of scope.

The run is the character

In Elden Ring your build is a monument you carry between sessions. Nightreign inverts the whole idea. Every expedition starts a fresh level-one Nightfarer, you level up inside the run at Sites of Grace with the runes you pull out of the map, and when the trip ends — win or lose — almost none of it comes home with you. The only things that survive are the relics you earned and whatever you learned about spending a limited day well.

The loot is where the run actually happens. Weapons arrive rolled with random upgrade levels, skills, affinities and passive effects, and those passive effects fire simply by holding the weapon and stack with one another, so a generous morning can hand you a build you never planned. Named enemies and strongholds drop a shared reward the game calls Dormant power, from which every player claims one weapon or effect — which quietly turns your team's biggest wins into a short negotiation about who needs what.

Relics are the single exception, and they are the reason a run can begin differently each time. They carry up to three random effects, a character can fit up to three of them onto their designated vessels, and they are set at the Relic Rite in the Roundtable Hold before you deploy. They persist between expeditions, but the design keeps them honest: a relic nudges your opening, it does not solve the run for you.

Two days to become strong enough

An expedition is two in-game days across Limveld, a reforged Limgrave whose camps, tunnels, churches, enemies and bosses reshuffle every session. A circle of blue flame marks the safe ground and contracts as the day burns down, herding you toward the boss arena; wander outside it and the Night's Tide eats your health far faster than most allies can reach you. So a day is a route: level at a Site of Grace, crack a stronghold for gear, raise your flask count at a church, find Smithing Stones in a tunnel, then survive the boss that arrives when night falls. Beat it and the map opens back up for day two.

After the second night the doors to the Nightlord open, and there is a Spirit Shelter first where you can level, shop and upgrade without a closing circle breathing down your neck. Then it is one boss, fought with everything you scraped together. It is a clean shape — prepare, escalate, gamble — and the shrinking circle does the work a director usually does, because the map itself decides when you have to stop looting and commit.

The team is the difficulty

Nightreign was built for three players, and the co-op is not decoration. Runes and item drops are shared no matter how far apart the team spreads, so splitting up to cover more ground is a genuine tactic, and map pins let you coordinate without speaking. When someone drops they enter a near-death state and are revived by hitting them, but each repeated knockdown lengthens a death gauge that makes the next rescue harder until you clear it at a Site of Grace.

And if the whole team falls to a Nightlord, the expedition simply ends. That single rule is what gives a run its shape: you are not really managing your own health bar. You are managing your team's ability to still be standing, together, at the worst possible moment.

Launch-day Nightreign assumed a trio. Two-player expeditions arrived in the 31 July 2025 update, with the balance scaling to the number of players and the old Expedition Type setting renamed to Number of Players. Solo exists, and the game scales enemy health down for it, but the design still leans hard toward company.

Where the night pushes back

Two complaints are worth knowing before you buy. The first is variance. Because the weapon you find, its rarity and its passives are all rolled fresh each run, some expeditions hand you a plan and others hand you leftovers, and that gap is felt most in the middle of a run rather than at the start. Relics soften the opening; they do not fix a bad afternoon of drops.

The second is repetition. The Nightfarers are distinct and their skills and ultimate arts genuinely stack into something bigger than their parts, but the roster of Nightlords is finite, and the reward for learning a fight is usually that the early game stops being interesting rather than that the game changes shape. Add the unevenness of random matchmade trios — a group that never learns each other's kit rarely produces the moments the design is chasing — and the best runs feel like one of the strongest co-op games of recent years while the weaker ones feel like three people solo-queuing in the same field.

The pulse

Nightreign landed well and then got bigger. It sold two million copies in its first day and passed five million by the end of July 2025; critics were generally favourable, with the main console aggregates sitting in the high seventies; and Steam's English reviews sit at a healthy Very Positive across tens of thousands of players. Rather than smoothing the edges, FromSoftware added difficulty: Everdark Sovereign variants of the Nightlords rolled out through mid-2025, the harder Deep of Night mode followed, and the first expansion, The Forsaken Hollows, brought two more Nightfarers in December 2025.

Should you play it

Yes, if you want the fight and you have two people who want it with you. Nightreign is the most interesting thing FromSoftware has done with Elden Ring's combat since the base game, and its best idea — that a build you cannot keep is a build you actually think about — is worth the roulette. The defensive vocabulary is still Elden Ring's, so the rhythm of bait, punish and retreat that carried you through the Lands Between still works; what changes is that you rebuild it from almost nothing, repeatedly, on a clock.

Skip it if you play these games for the world. Limveld is a staging ground rather than a place, and the story is delivered in fragments around a loop that will not slow down for it. And if you are strictly a solo player, know that Nightreign will let you in and then spend a lot of its time quietly reminding you that it was built for a party. That is not a flaw so much as the whole premise — but it is the premise, and it decides whether you will love this one or merely admire it.