It's down to the wire in Elden Ring Nightreign. After a carefully-paced, downright strategic brawl featuring myself, and two of PC Gamer's finest Nightfarers, we've got the Equilibrious Beast on the ropes. Two measly percent stand between us and victory. Our Duchess goes down. Me and my raider-in-arms exchange a look: It's all or nothing.
Time slows to a crawl and crystalises, as adrenaline and cortisol scream through my system. I make the choice then and there: Killing the boss is more important than reviving our Duchess. I push past her, Executor's Blade in hand. And then—
Another unfortunate evening approaches. Me and a friend push our luck killing a boss as the storm closes in. We have flasks, we'll be fine. Like children giddily fleeing the scene of a cookie jar, I watch as my health ticks down. My friend asks me if I have any flasks left. I say yes. I wait for the last second, only to remember that there's a goddamn animation when you drink. I keel over mid-sip.
Elsewhere in the neverending night: The run isn't going well, but it's still salvageable. We're rushing for a church to upgrade our flasks. I scrabble to scale up a cliff. Down below, a rock-flinging gravity miner decides my time has come. I make it halfway up the crag before I'm sniped out of goddamn nowhere and I plummet to the worms below. I lie in the muck below, deadly rain searing through the plates of my armour, snickering under my helmet as blood fills my mouth.
In what universe would I have predicted that an Elden Ring spinoff, of all games, would be so gut-bustingly funny—and so often, too?
For Super Limgrave!
Fellow writer Ted Litchfield coined a term last week that I can't get out of my head: "You got Nightreigned". It's used to describe the capricious and merciless way in which Elden Ring will flatten you into paste. It's also a sitcom catchphrase, it's a punchline. It's a perfect encapsulation of the Nightreign experience, and yet it could also be accompanied by a laugh-track and a slide whistle.
That's because Nightreign shares a huge amount of DNA with another game I've burst into fits of childish giggles at—Helldivers 2. A game that, by the admission of its devs, has a slapstick bent inspired heavily by the absolute shenanigans of a good D&D table.
Nightreign and Helldivers 2 are two extremely different comedy routines with the same final joke: At any point, at any time, a procedural set of circumstances can align to completely whomp you off the face of the earth with such immediate cruelty that the only thing you can do is laugh.
I'm fighting for Super Earth, and I try to dive away from an oncoming tank only to bonk my head and get shredded under its treads. I'm fighting for the Roundtable Hold, and I get poisoned three times trying to stumble around the same ruins. It's the same play being held in different theatres.
I'm frustrated more often at Nightreign, mind, for some of the obvious reasons. The soldiers of Super Earth are immediately replaceable, and it's not long before you get back in the action. Meanwhile, each venture in Nightreign is a half-hour investment—abject failure may be hilarious, but it stings.
Doom in Nightreign is also slower. In Helldivers 2, you can simply allow the reinforcement budget to run down if you aren't having fun—a bad start in Nightreign, however, can obliterate the rest of your run, forcing you to amble along to the Night 1 or 2 bosses and wait for your scheduled execution.
All things as they are meant to be
Despite this, I'm convinced there's a similar mirth to be found somewhere. Nightreign absolutely requires a deeper zen than its cousin—but while a souls game that's consistently funny is a novelty, one that asks you to change your mindset or die mad isn't new at all.
Every souls game I've ever played has demanded I shift my neurons around a bit. The OG Dark Souls taught me not to be afraid of a challenge. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice taught me that no problem was insurmountable as long as I stayed calm and remained analytic, the eye of the storm.
The thing Nightreign is working on right now is my patience for misfortune and, moreover, setbacks. I get flustered and frustrated at boss runbacks, but that's what Nightreign is—a repeated 30-minute boss runback on loop.
Each Nightlord is going to take a few earnest tries to even start understanding. You're gonna get whacked horribly, terribly, unfairly, at random, because your teammate didn't stick around, because you tried to solo a boss, because your build sucks, because your parry timing was off—and every time that happens to you, you're gonna have to spend 10-30 minutes getting back to that point again.
But that element of slapstick—uncompromising, unexpected, and random misfortune—is also what takes the edge off. The solution to looking into the abyss, says Nightreign, is to point and laugh.
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