Elden Ring had a starting class named the Wretch that gets a club and some ratty underwear filled with dreams and nothing else, and there's something special about the first few hours in Limgrave playing them, scavenging your first pieces of mismatched armour and build-defining treasures. The first time you hit a site of grace, that initial stat boost feels like a deific power surge. Insomuch as Elden Ring's most memorable stories run tangential and emergent to its static lore, this early fraught scramble is the player's self-woven tale at its most captivating. Soon enough, though, the feeling is gone. You're as powerful as god, desiring nothing but more bulbous Albinauric skulls to toss on the pile.
Elden Ring: Nightreign feels unique among FromSoft's modern catalogue for its flippant attitude toward a convincing sense of place, and so regrettably sacrifices much of its studio's identity as committed worldbuilders, even while amplifying some of their more peculiar and interesting beats. It's tempting, then, to ask why it exists in the first place. On a generous day, I'd say that Nightreign exists to recreate - over and over - that same, wretchedly gratifying early-game feeling. Where every scrap of progress feels like a milestone, dull smithing stones shimmer like silver, and each incremental bonk stat increase is a hero's journey in miniature.
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