Is this a safe space? Can I make a confession? I still haven’t finished Elden Ring. In fact, I’ve yet to make much further than Margit. For all the hours I sunk into The Lands Between, it never quite got its hooks into me. I’ll go back and give it another shot some day, but there’s a part of me that wonders if I might just be kind of done with Souls-style games for a while. Sekiro 2, though? I’d eat that up in a nanosecond.
But I don’t think most people are with me in that regard. I wonder if most people would much rather FromSoft stuck to making what it does best. That’d certainly explain the current Steam reviews for Elden Ring Nightreign, which came out yesterday and quickly became FromSoft’s worst-reviewed game on Steam. Now, don’t get too alarmed, we’re not talking the doldrums of an Overwhelmingly Negative score here or anything; Nightreign is currently Mixed, with 66% of its user reviews coming in positive.
Not terrible by any stretch, but lower than any other game in the FromSoft catalogue. Only one thing under its name—Dark Souls 3’s Ashes of Ariandel DLC—scores lower: 59% positive. As full games go, Nightreign is bottom of the table.
It’s not surprising. I’ve not touched Nightreign myself, but it’s been controversial here on the PCG team. Some of us are dead keen, others are iffy, and even those in the former camp took a little while to come around. Our reviewer, Tyler Colp, was positive in his Elden Ring Nightreign review, but admitted its experimental, multiplayer-focused gameplay made it a stranger, messier thing than its predecessors.
It’s no shock to see that same division play out on Steam. “This is not the Elden Ring game you are looking for,” reads one. “Immediately got crushed by Fell Omen in under a minute. 10/10 Elden Ring experience,” says another. I’ll be curious to see if opinion turns more positive as people get some time to adjust to the game, or if From stalwarts just won’t take to its co-op trappings like they have to the studio’s previous work. Perhaps it’s fated to be bottom of the leaderboards forever. Well, unless and until Duskbloods gets a PC release.
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