Writing this review after having defeated all 8 Nightlords. Keep in mind that this opinion is from the perspective of someone who consistently had at least one friend to play with, and also got relatively lucky and managed to beat most of the Nightlords first try (Except doggies, Augur and Darkdrift. If you know you know.) I don't think this is the average experience, but I don't think any part of it invalidates what I have to say below.

All in all: Perhaps not quite as much content as I would like, but what's there is all quality. This is not a 'soulless cash grab' and anyone describing it as such needs to play half the ♥♥♥♥ that's already come out this year and remind themselves what that term means. That said, the game definitely isn't perfect - but neither is Elden Ring.

I feel like 8 Nightlords is a good number. However, the actual beef of the game - Day 1 and 2 - don't feel like they have quite enough variation. Maybe this is an intentional design decision to give you a chance to get better at the encounters without it switching up on you, but it starts to feel kind of samey pretty quick. Granted, I don't think I've seen every single random encounter or Day 1/2 boss yet, but I'm already noticing a lot of repeats. Just feels like there should be a liiiiiittle bit more. Same with the "Shifting Earth", which is what they call the big changes on the map - really cool idea, good execution... on the 4 of them that there are. More would be welcome. I know working with the assets available in Elden Ring is a limiting factor, because Crimson Rot/Mountaintop of the Giants/Nox/Volcano basically -is- the extent of unique landmarks we have to work with, but there's still room for Altus Plateu and Liurnia, to name a couple...

***(See edit at bottom for this point)*** Solo is definitely a lot harder than trios and might need a -bit- of rebalancing, but, honestly, if you've played Elden Ring you already know that fighting bosses on your own is harder than fighting them with two buddies, even with the scaling. Go figure. I think this point is being a little bit overblown by the average reviewer. Elden Ring is actually pretty difficult when it's completely randomized, you don't have control over your perfect build, and you don't get unlimited tries on every boss. That's just how it is! ***(See edit at bottom for this point)***

It's got some classic FromSoft jank to it, though admittedly the netcode isn't as bad as I was expecting. Nothing like the iconic lagstabs of Dark Souls' yesteryears. ***The worst offender might be the new climbing mechanics - great in theory, awesome when it works, very frustrating when you're trying to climb up a wall and keep rubbing your face against it like an eraser while the Rain closes in behind you.*** There's a little bit of technique to it, but it still feels clunky and inconsistent even when you aren't just spamming A wildly. Another very FromSoft thing that annoys me is the way the character quests work - I can kind of get the reason why more than one character quest can't be active at the same time in a lobby (in some cases - in other cases it makes no sense at all) but the way it's implemented is terrible. If you have to complete a character quest and you don't have two friends willing to do it with you, good luck. You're going to be sitting in queue for three years ON LAUNCH WEEK because you will not find two people in random queue who fit in your very specific niche. Thankfully, some of the quests can be reasonably completed solo - I did a few that way, it was actually kind of fun - but other ones can be a lot trickier without multiplayer. Whether or not I have a quest to do shouldn't be the deciding factor of whether I want to play online or by myself.

But don't let the above points distract you from the fact that everything I haven't mentioned IS extremely good, and the game is still fun. It's worth 40 dollars. All eight of the playable characters are extremely fun in their own ways, and maybe not perfectly balanced, but still within a reasonable range of each other. The new bosses are some of the best in FromSoft's entire catalogue, at least in style, and returning bosses from Elden Ring and Dark Souls have been reworked pretty well to fit the new format with new attacks and such. The soundtrack is probably my favorite out of any of these games, ever. And, writing wise, FromSoft has definitely attempted to do something new with how it has written these eight characters, weaving several interesting character-driven dramas together into a story about duty, family, and friendship, with some bittersweet notes. I like it a lot, even if I haven't finished every character's storyline yet. The roguelike elements of Nightreign give you an excuse to play with a random assortment of toys from Elden Ring that you would normally never bother to pick up or use, either because they don't fit in your usual builds, they're outclassed by broken weapons, or at the end of lengthy questlines that aren't worth the time. It's a great time. Definitely meant for a multiplayer experience, though, so don't buy it if you intend to play solo - or do, if you're a masochist, I'm not your dad.


***Edit: pretty much immediately after I posted this review, they re-tuned the singleplayer and made it way more reasonable. Just completed my first solo run as Ironeye and it was a lot of fun. Game's good. They also fixed the climbing, so that no longer feels jank.

I wanted to like this game, but my initial fears ended up being completely true.

It has a very charming aesthetic and a wonderfully unique puzzle mechanic, but unfortunately, it doesn't really make good use of its potential. The whole game is beatable in just a few hours and there's really not a lot of puzzles, especially not at a 25 dollar pricepoint. The puzzles that ARE there are generally very easy, and a solid 4/5 of them are beatable on first pass after just looking around and seeing what tools you have available with no sort of critical thinking required. There were exactly two times I actually felt even a little bit clever about finding the solution, but most of the time felt like I was just sort of walking in a straight line to the end.

The story isn't anything interesting either. The "twist" wasn't satisfying or thematically interesting in any way, which assumes I had a reason to be emotionally invested in the first place, which I really didn't. CAIT is a nice companion character, at the very least, but that doesn't salvage the fact that the story surrounding him is a thematic mess and the only moral of the story is that programmers make poor project leads. There's maybe three different ways I could've interpreted what the 'point' was, and none of them were told well. If that was what they were going for, then I guess that's great, because you really nailed writing an unsatisfying nothingburger of a story with no emotional beats whatsoever.

All in all this game really just feels like a tech demo for a marvelous concept, put in the hands of people who had no idea how to actually make puzzles with it (or write compelling stories). If this had community levels or something it might salvage my opinion significantly, but as it stands it just feels like a game about a tenth as fun or as interesting as The Talos Principle with one cool gimmick. This is a game I'd feel very comfortable spending five to ten dollars on, because it's going to last you exactly one afternoon and then you'll forget about it forever.

The best writing in any video game of 2019, probably the last decade, possibly of all time. Every piece of dialogue, every interaction with an inanimate object - if it isn't giving you shivers and making you think about your place in the world, it's making you laugh at the absurdity of existence in a way that helps you cope with the terrifying scale and sheer indifference of it all. The characters are great, the exploration is great, the number of things you can MISS in this game is delightful. The tone is somber but hopeful in a way that is so impossible to express.

If you play one game from 2019, make it Disco Elysium.

Do it for the working class.