Nightreign's distilled shot of Elden Ring juice makes it my ideal level of soulslike investment after 14 years of getting good

I've fallen off of soulslikes.

Not because of a lack of appreciation: I'll always treasure felling a FromSoft boss so I can snatch up their soul, read the item description and wonder what all those proper nouns might mean.

It's a problem of exhaustion.

The cracks first started showing in Sekiro—watching Guardian Ape stand back up after being decapitated is something I'll never spiritually recover from—but Elden Ring finally confirmed that I'd burnt out my soulslike stamina. A string of botched corpse runs and bungled attempts at fighting the duo boss in the Auriza Hero's Grave made me place my controller down and ask myself: What's the fun I'm getting out of a soulslike nowadays?

The shine of getting good had worn off. When I first tried Dark Souls, it was out of curiosity: I wanted to see if I could wrap my head around a game that was kicking so many asses and drink in FromSoft's fiction along the way. When I started Elden Ring, I was just as interested in seeing a new world's worth of the item descriptions, the boss and equipment designs, the breadth of spells and weapon arts available and the builds they could make.

But after finishing three Dark Soulses and a Bloodborne, whether or not I could beat a boss wasn't a particularly compelling question anymore.

(Image credit: FromSoftware)

There, somewhere below Leyndell, I admitted to myself that after slaying any boss in Elden Ring, I wasn't feeling satisfaction. Mostly, I was just feeling relief. It meant I didn't have to spend more time proving, once again, that I can figure out when to dodge, and could continue with what I was actually interested in. I still loved—and love—the weight and deliberate action of FromSoft's combat design, but today, it's a love anchored in the sheer variety of viable playstyles it offers. That variety is hard to sample when you're repeatedly slamming your head against a boss, or expending a finite respec item to try a new build, or grinding for upgrade materials so your cool new weapon is actually usable. We have only so much time on this earth, and I have spent my share on getting good.

Enter Elden Ring Nightreign.

In Elden Ring proper, the arc of a character's progression is dozens of hours long. In Nightreign, it's roughly 48 minutes. In a single play session, I might jump between three playstyles: If I'm feeling like some tried-and-true greatsword swinging, Wylder's on deck. I can do some dex-y spellsword action with Duchess, or swap to Recluse to go all-in on sorceries.

(Image credit: FromSoftware)

Nightreign isn't a flawless experiment: Even after some rebalancing, solo play is still a crapshoot, and the time pressure of the battle royale-style circle means I've had runs where I didn't have time to properly admire a build I'd cobbled together. In a perfect world, I'd prefer an Elden Ring roguelike where I could set my own pace.

But the run-based structure and randomization means the only barrier for experimenting with the huge variety of FromSoft's combat arsenal is firing up a new expedition. Whenever I crack open an equipment chest or see a boss's drops, I'm sticking my hand in the Elden Ring toybox and seeing what I can make with whatever I pull out.

I've had back-to-back runs where Guardian went from wielding a pair of flaming halberds to being a lightning-throwing warpriest. With an auspicious set of weapon arts and incantation buffs, I've turned dainty Revenant into a melee behemoth. In one of my successful kills of the final Nightlord, I was playing Raider—but instead of swinging a colossal weapon, I was firing greatbow arrows backed by a build stacked with ranged attack damage.

Nightreign takes the Elden Ring experience and distills it down into a single, swiggable shot. It won't—and shouldn't—take the place of a traditional soulslike experience, but I'm at a point where I want to spend more time playing with what's available than proving how good I've gotten. Nightreign lets me enjoy the FromSoft juice without having to bear the weight of soulslike fatigue.