Preview: Elden Ring Nightreign Is the Most Interesting PS5, PS4 Multiplayer Game of 2025

Elden Ring Nightreign is not your typical FromSoftware experience. It’s a multiplayer game and draws inspiration from battle royales and looter shooters. It’s certainly not what you expect from the team behind some of the best RPGs of the last two decades.

Yet after spending more than six hours with the game on PS5, Nightreign revealed itself to be a surprisingly fresh experience from the fabled developer, and a fantastically fun co-op romp to boot. It may irk some FromSoft purists, but Nightreign is one to look out for when it drops on PS4 and PS5 on May 30th.

FromSoftware describes Nightreign as a “session-based RPG”. It’s a game that successfully manages to streamline the best aspects of Elden Ring, so that you can create a build, discover new secrets, and fight gruelling bosses all within a 45-minute session. While the base game wants you to take your time, steadily perfect that build, and learn enemy attack patterns, Nightreign is all about speed, strategy, and working with what you’ve got.

You start a session on Elden Ring Nightreign at the Roundtable Hold. Acting as your hub, it’s here that you select your Nightfarer, this game’s version of classes. During our preview, we had access to four different classes, essentially boiling down to the typical archetypes of soldier, tank, assassin, and mage. Each comes with pre-set stats, different levels of manoeuvrability, different starting gear, and most interestingly, two rechargeable ultimate abilities — which we’ll get into later.

You start your run by gliding into Limveld on a spectral hawk with your two other teammates, and it’s hard not to make comparisons to Fortnite here. Nightreign is made to be played as a trio, which you can do with friends or solo queue in matchmaking, but offline solo play is also possible.

As soon as you touch down, you’ve started Day One, a roughly 15 minute session in an open map that steadily gets smaller thanks to a battle royale-inspired circle. It’s during this initial period that you must find enemies to kill to collect runes and level up. You start a run with next to no health, stamina, or mana, making you easily killable in just a few hits by the weakest of foes.

The first thing you’ll notice as you touch down on Limveld is the quickened pace of gameplay. Switching the run button from Circle to L3 — a Godsend in our opinion — your character is much quicker and the game includes a number of ways to help you speed across its map: a wall mount mechanic allows you to climb higher surfaces like camp walls; there’s no fall damage meaning you can jump from cliff edges and tower peaks; and Spirit Springs and Spectral Oaks allow you to leap enormous heights and glide great distances. Interestingly, your trusty steed Torrent is not featured here.

This speedier gameplay ties into the levelling too, which upgrades all aspects of your character, rather than singling out specific attributes. Just a handful of levels (the cap is 15 from what we could tell) will massively boost all attributes of your character, leaving you in a much better stead for the tougher enemies to come.

But exploring Limveld isn’t just about runes. Weapons are at the forefront, allowing you to play with different styles and different damage types, with randomised loot meaning you never quite know what you’re going to get. Weapons are available on a tiered system, very similar to a game like Destiny, with grey, blue, purple, and gold tiers bringing better stats, passive perks, and powerful weapon arcs. You can upgrade a weapon with smithing stones, if you find them and a merchant before the circle closes in that is.

Inventory is massively mixed up in Nightreign, with no armour, only six weapon slots, and no over-encumbered status. You need to choose your weapons wisely, as not only will they dictate the kind of damage you can do, but most come with passive perks that can aid the power of your character — even if they aren’t equipped. So, you might not particularly like a weapon you come across, but it plays into a build you are hoping to craft up.

In your hunt for better gear, the map is filled with various points of interest, ranging from churches which always store additional healing flasks to named bosses which not only reward you with copious amounts of runes but also drop higher tier weapons and perks that last you the rest of your run.

With such a short amount of time, it’s not possible to do everything, so you must learn how to maximise the potential of your run. Sometimes that means splitting up in the hope of more catered gear — a magical staff can always be found in towers, for example — and others will see you focusing on bosses in the hope of the higher-level rewards.

Nightreign does have a trick up its sleeve too, with randomised events. In our preview build, we were accosted by the Fell Omen, who relentlessly chased us down until either they were dead or we were. We had plenty of runs where this event ruined our plans but it could also set us up for success if we managed to survive it. More events will be available in the full game, and we can’t wait to see all the types of chaos it will cause.

Once the circle has funnelled you into an end of day boss fight, this is the most traditionally Elden Ring that Nightreign ever gets. With an enclosed space you must use the tools and skills you’ve acquired to take down a named boss from the base game, with two possible bosses on each night depending on the Nightlord run you are currently on.

These boss fights are where the ultimate abilities really come into play. Each class comes with two abilities, ranging from marking an enemy so that teammates can regain HP and FP upon hits to a slam attack with a massive area of effect. Mixing and matching abilities really feeds into that team build synergy, and can vastly change your approach to the big bosses.

At one point in our session we ran a triple Duchess run (the assassin archetype), a class that’s able to temporarily make the team invisible and can repeat all damage done to enemies from the last five seconds or so. By timing up when we used our abilities, we were able to rinse a boss we had previously struggled with in mere minutes.

By defeating the boss at the end of Day One, the map opens up and Day Two begins. This works exactly the same as before, but this leg of the run is more about refining the build you crafted on the first day. You could try to find new perks and new weapons, but with limited time, you might actually be weaker than if you just doubled down on what you already have. It’s a choice we’re sure many players will struggle with.

Again you’re funnelled into a named boss and upon defeating it, you’ve now got one last chance to upgrade your character at a Site of Grace, and buy anything you can afford from a merchant. With a daunting cinematic showing your Nightfarers opening an epic doorway, you start the final Nightlord fight — new bosses made specifically for Elden Ring Nightreign.

Our fight was against a triple headed wolf named Gladius, who wielded a sword on a massive chain. Having to jump as its sweeping attacks whooshed by, the tension was palpable. While getting to this point is incredibly condensed by comparison to Elden Ring, it's still nerve-racking, especially knowing that death will set you all the way back to the start.

At this point in your run, you should be working in conjunction with not only the build you’ve crafted over the session, but also those of your teammates. While so many aspects of the game feel streamlined, it’s in this final boss fight that you realise the scope and depths of Elden Ring’s buildcrafting is still very much alive and present. Even with powerful builds, defeating Gladius was no small feat, making our eventual victory all the sweeter.

The completion of a run, regardless of whether you make it to the end or not, will reward you with Relics, permanent stat buffs that you can apply to specific classes. These range from healing perks to damage type boosts, so that you can go back for another run and lay the foundations for a certain kind of build. You just have to hope that your team finds the materials to make those stats bonuses shine.

Outside of this there was very little in the way of permanent progression, a surprising omission in the multiplayer space. During our session we were earning a form of credit that we couldn’t spend in our build, so we’d love to know if there’s more to character customisation, whether that’s purchasing Nightfarer skins or just rerolling Relic perks. The Roundtable Hold also feels a lot larger, but was noticeably empty. Whether this is filled come release or expanded out post-launch is yet to be seen.

One thing is for sure though: every single run feels like starting with a new character and a fresh set of build possibilities. With different boss pools, randomised loot spawning and events, eight character classes to play around with, and eight Nightlords to conquer, the scope of this game is massive. We can easily see Nightreign taking upwards of 50 hours just to work through the different classes and bosses, and that’s before you take into account simple replayability and the new content that will come to the game post-launch.

Elden Ring Nightreign is an exciting new venture from the famed RPG developer. By streamlining the best aspect of the base game and condensing it into a much more intense and focused co-op experience, it can’t be understated how much fun Nightreign is. Our team had such a laugh as we strategised build synergies and split off to widen our discovery of Limveld.

Some may see the experience as a lesser or shallower release compared to the developer’s past work, but to do so is to ignore the pin-point balancing act of speeding everything up whilst still retaining that Elden Ring feel. After nearly seven hours with the game on PS5, we feel like we’ve barely scratched the surface and we can’t wait to sink our teeth into what will undeniably be one of the most interesting multiplayer releases of 2025.

Will you be dropping into Limveld with a squad when Elden Ring Nightreign releases on PS4 and PS5 on May 30th? Let us know in the comments below!