Elden Ring: Nightreign

2026-03-22
Nightreign is Elden Ring on PCP. You can jump, you can climb, and you can fall an infinite amount without taking damage. Everything is fast and chaotic and seemingly out of a dream. The game starts, you hoard items, become uber powerful, fight gods, die, and are reborn to do it all again.

Importantly, it’s doing PCP as it should always be done: with friends. I was named “Trash” and my one friend was named “Satan” and, because of the strict censorship policies of The Lands Between, our third friend’s screen displayed both our names merely as “*****”. He could not fucking tell us apart as we hauled ass across the ever-decreasing space of Other Limgrave in search of more bosses to dunk on.

I think I’d try PCP once but probably never do it again. Because while I’d enjoy living with the memory of how I punched a hole through a cop car, at the end of the day it’s just…too much. I feel the same way about Nightreign. We played one session, cleared all three days, ganked the final boss and then I was done. It felt good to win but it also felt too stressful, too constraining.

The entire time I’m just sprinting across the map. No chance to dilly dally, to take in the sights, to even fight a lot of the time. I’d start a miniboss only to have a friend call out that the ring was closing and I had to get moving. I felt like Josh Brolin in No Country For Old Men with Anton Chigurh always one step behind.

Even then I'll give Nightreign its flowers. There's a genius in how the structure of the game forces you to constantly switch out and try new weapons all while leveling up so quickly. It's an intoxicating experience where you start and complete a build in thirty minutes in a series where that normally takes tens of hours. And while the speed may be too much, the flipside is that it's thrilling. This is as close as we've gotten to a boss rush from the studio that's known for its boss fights. You fight bosses so you can fight bosses so you can fight bosses.

But one rush is enough for me. I think I'd try PCP once but probably never do it again. The idea of punching through a cop car is great. But I don't need to punch through another one.