Is anybody else bouncing off Nightreign?

I feel like I'm going crazy. I love the nightfarers, their mechanics are absolute peak. The sekiro parry has never had more parry frames, the witch lady has a million spells she can combine and they all give me the wizard power fantasy I try to recreate in every game. The new bosses look amazing, it's the weirdest shit I could have ever asked for because I love Fromsoft weird shit. I should love this game.

But I'm tearing my hair out because it's just not fun. I remember feeling similar about Bloodborne when I first tried it but when somebody explained to me I was just interacting with the game's economy wrong it turned it around to be my favorite. So I was hoping this would be similar and I would just need to adjust my expectations and reframe how I move through the game.

But I literally can't with this time limit. I don't like sprinting through the world at lightspeed trying to gobble up items. The play area diminishes as time goes on, I get to see and explore less as I play the game. When I fail against a boss, it's not an opportunity to change and grow. it's the timer starting over again as I hit the slot machine for another roll at some items.

I watched people like letmesoloher and saint riot play and it doesn't seem like I'm doing it wrong, you're supposed to move at a breakneck pace with your friends and blender enemies like Elden Ring co-opers do. I don't know. Am I alone in this? Did anybody else sincerely try but fail to like it?

6 comments

Are you usually a fan of the roguelike gameplay loop? Sometimes you get a god-run and sometimes it's an enormous uphill battle to win, that's just the way they work typically. Maybe the gameplay loop just isn't your cup of tea.
I love roguelikes and I love soulslikes, but Nightreign is also going to be a pass for me too. It seems like the type of game I would have a lot of fun with for two days and then never play again because the runs are too similar and that's not a good enough value proposition for me.
- I liked Hades and Dead Cells but no they're not really something I usually seek out. You're right that might be the factor that's tripping me up. interesting that of all variations on the souls format that have been made, this seems to be the first one to really turn me of.
  sucks because in any other game I would love to play these characters even if I can't level my freaking vigor adequately. I guess I'm definitely looking forward to whatever From does with all this tech though. a standalone game with Recluse mechanics for freaking slay.
  
  In Hades and Dead Cells, there's pretty well fleshed out meta-progression. There are always new things for you to unlock, work towards, or make the game more challenging. This game is missing any meaningful meta-progression that keeps you coming back and wanting to play that next run. The runs just seem too similar to really get excited about what the next one will be like imo. I really wish the map changed more between runs or there were different maps. Certain locations vary a bit, but once you know where everything is things seem pretty streamlined.
  Not being able to level vigor on casters was a complaint I saw among streamers trying to do solo runs. The balance between the characters does seem a bit off, but I'm sure they'll get that sorted out in due time. They definitely created some interesting characters though and not having full control over your build is a neat way of approaching things.

I’m a huge fan of both roguelikes and the souls series and I burned out pretty quick on nightreign. I think my main problem was that the game was all gas, no brakes. It’s frantic and fun at first, but it quickly becomes “the longest boss run up ever” as I’ve heard others say.
They streamlined the souls part of the game to maintain the speed, but they streamlined out the main fun of souls games to me. Every souls game I’ve played was “oh this weapon looks cool, let me try to make a build around it that works”. In nightreign, you figure out the best builds and hope to luck into it. Sure you can try to make a crappy weapon work, but you end up just wasting everyone’s time if you don’t and you may not see that weapon in the next run which makes practicing it way less effective.
- EXACTLY! Almost all the cool Fromsoft elements and moments got dropped to streamline getting to the objective. Like, I know there's no new weapons and the map is basically Limgrave with some extra bits here and there but I would have still liked to exist in that world a little.
  Points though for engineering a situation where for once in my life I felt backed into a corner enough to actually try using a katana. That never happened to me in Elden Ring

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