The "I stayed up way past my bedtime to play this" test is perhaps one of the most persuasive endorsements of a game I can think of. With my 30th birthday leveling both barrels at me and ready to fire, this status is only becoming harder for a game to wring out of me. I'm not a multiplayer guy either, so the co-op centric nature of Elden Ring Nightreign was a hurdle that I thought would surely protect me from accumulating a sleep deprivation debuff.

Also, this game is such bullshit. And yet, I keep playing it.

I'm 42 hours in. I ruined my precious geriatric millennial sleep cycle to stay up late with the west coast multiple times in the pre-launch period. When the servers went down for a day before launch, I kept messaging our group chat asking to play before being reminded we literally could not. I felt like a dog whining and pawing at its bowl nowhere near mealtime.

Nightreigned

The single player Nightreign experience pissed me off to hell and back⁠—at least before it was patched⁠—but the whole game can be punishing and RNG-dependent in a way that repeatedly drove me to the brink of madness. In multiple runs against a poison-weak boss, we never ran into a single poison weapon drop. We got Nightreigned.

Trying to jump up a wall as the circle's closing in, and you just keep clipping through and failing to clamber up? You got Nightreigned. We lost one run trying to figure out a map event boss, ran it back understanding its mechanics, and still couldn't beat it before the circle closed.

Later, I found out our reward would have been immunity to Frostbite, a condition that only minor enemies, the boss we failed to beat, and one of the Nightlords⁠—not the one we were queued against⁠—can inflict. Nightreigned.

We got "invaded" by a special boss inflicting a Dark Souls-style curse effect, limiting our health bars by a quarter. We found the boss, failed to beat him after several attempts, then the circle closed and he went home. But our three-quarter health curse was permanent for the rest of our doomed run. We absolutely got Nightreigned.

To borrow a turn of phrase from contributor Tyler Colp's Elden Ring Nightreign review, "There's nothing like fighting a boss in a FromSoftware game that is designed to be a joke with you as the punchline," but all the friction, trolling, and obtuse mechanics the studio is known for are put in their worst light in a rapid, run-based format that asks for 30 minutes of your time a piece, and offers very little reward when you beef it. If Elden Ring or Bloodborne is Fromsoft in a dimly lit, chic ambience, Nightreign is the studio under the harsh fluorescent glare of a DMV built in 1992.

Take the fact that certain bosses are immune to affinity effects like bleed or frostbite⁠—that's just something you come to accept in Dark Souls or Elden Ring. But what about when you claw your way to the end of a half-hour run, only to discover that the poison bow you've built around actually doesn't work against this particular Nightlord? Nightreigned.

It turns out, you can click the left stick to see what item passive effects actually give you in your inventory screen: After 30 hours, I discovered that the "[Nightfarer's] Grief" effect on weapons you pick up from fallen players actually gives you stacking attribute bonuses.

I loaded up on Executor's Grief weapons while playing as Executor to boost his core Dexterity and Arcane stats to great effect. Now, who would think to carefully read over hidden tooltips in a severely time-limited game with no pause button? Only someone who's been Nightreigned more times than they care to count.

PC Gamer contributor Nova Smith pointed out a crazy-making tension in this game to me. It's inherently "commercial"—"Elden Ring Fortnite" sounds like a hack punchline about C-suite guys on uppers⁠—but this also may very well be the most player-hostile, least approachable game FromSoft has ever made, and that's including primeval stuff like the OG King's Fields.

But I keep going back for more

I goddamn love this game. I'm going to keep playing it. If they make DLC, it's day one for me, baby. I think there are three big things that just keep me from putting Nightreign down, despite its myriad frustrations:

1. Snackable Souls: This isn't an Elden Ring boss rush mode, but it's close. I'll always return to and replay the original game, but that also comes with a lot of downtime and exploration, which doesn't quite hit the same on successive replays. The harried rush from camp to camp can't replace the joys of methodical exploration, but it offers its own frantic, blood pressure-raising appeal.

You get a mini version of the Souls zero-to-hero RPG arc, and Nightreign's randomized remixing of Elden Ring's massive arsenal really puts it in a new light. I've formed attachments to weapons I never gave a second thought in the original game, while a rare appearance by a favorite like Rivers of Blood feels like Christmas.

Plus, we finally have Sekiro at home⁠. In fact, the inventive mechanics, striking visual identity, and killer class fantasy represented by each playable character may be the most irrefutably excellent part of the game.

2. Pleasant surprise: One of the FromSoft guarantees is that you will see and feel things you just don't expect in their games⁠—it's why shrill fans sometimes treat the very appearance and names of bosses as the most egregious spoilers, and they're not entirely wrong for doing so.

That boss who permanently stole part of our health bars is a great example: Was it an insanely frustrating way to lose a run? Absolutely. But the rush of the unexpected, the gobsmacking audacity to have an end boss show up as a random event to screw you over, it brings a smile to my face just thinking about it.

3. Better with friends: I pretty much play Souls games alone, and the last time I got really into a multiplayer game was Destiny 2 circa the Beyond Light expansion in 2020.

It's been a minute since the stars aligned for so many people in my life to be into the same multiplayer game the way they are with Nightreign⁠—friends, colleagues, old coworkers, everybody's playing Nightreign right now, and the enthusiasm is infectious. It also handily magnifies those "what the hell" moments Nightreign dishes out to experience them with friends on a Discord call.

I just beat the final boss with Tyler and PCG senior guides writer Sean Martin. Our run went flawlessly, leading us to joke that, for once, the script had flipped and we were the ones Nightreigning our enemies.

The balance of the experience may not be for everyone, but all the bullshit I've had to slog through may be making this game's moments of triumph all the sweeter.