Okay, so it’s been two Mondays without a post, and it’s looking like a third is coming rapidly. So I’m just gonna come out and do this now.
I’m putting the blog on a temporary hiatus. Hopefully things will be back to their normal self around mid or end of July. Perhaps I will get friends to come in and do some guest posts. I’m not sure.
I don’t know if I have regular readers, but on the off chance I do, I want to put this out their to explain, and quickly explain why.
For starters, it’s certainly not for lack of games. This has already been an incredible year. I haven’t finished my Blue Prince writeup, I haven’t even started playing Expedition 33, or Deltrarune chapters 3-4. There’s also Monster Train 2, and demos for stuff like Abyssus and Jump Ship. I also could write about High Tide, or any of the other board games I’ve been playing, or the Magic Final Fantasy set, and what it means for the futures of that games.
But….
My workload for my full time job is requiring more focus from me then usual, the sort of off-the-clock energy that I’d usually put into games, rants, and other sorts of things.
I probably could smash out a few weeks of content if I wanted. I can see that I have mostly finished drafts on a few demos, a Age of Darkness write up, and I could technically put a Blue Prince write up out.
But I don’t really want to write things purely for the sake of tossing out words onto a web page.
So until future notice, consider this site on a temporary hiatus. Hopefully it won’t become a permanent one.
Month: June 2025
Elden Ring: NIGHTREIGN
Correction: An earlier version of this writeup confused Malenia, Blade of Miquella, Goddess of Rot with Melania, First Lady, Wife of Trump. This has been fixed. Melania Trump is not an Elden Ring boss, or a boss in any other FromSoftware game.
When I do writeups on games, I try to “beat” the game. This might mean seeing the credits roll. It might mean playing all that an early access game has to offer.
In this case, though, it means “playing enough of the game that I don’t really want to play anymore,” at just about 11 hours. Is this a fair overview of Nightreign?
Yes. Yes, it is, because I paid $40 for this shit.
If I’d been given a review copy, I might try harder. I gave them my money and I had a mostly bad time, and I have no intention of choking down another 20 hours to get kills on every remaining Nightlord.
I beat Elden Ring without looking anything up. I don’t need to prove shit to myself when it comes to FromSoft games at this point. I know I can do it.
I just don’t want to.
Anyway, Elden Ring: Nightreign. This is a remarkably simple game to explain. You and up to two other players are dropped into a procedurally populated Elden Ring-style map. You then get to run around picking up loot, killing enemies and bosses for souls and loot, leveling up, and then fighting a big boss. All this takes place while the Fortnite ring closes in, eventually forcing you into a confrontation with a larger mini-boss. The cycle repeats, and then you fight a Nightlord—a mega boss. If you beat the Nightlord, you win the run.
There’s like eight of these guys or something. I bet there’s a secret one once you kill them all. Again, I don’t really care. I’ve actually found the ones I’ve done so far to be unfun fights, frankly.
The game has plenty more mechanics and systems. I don’t think they’re worth talking about. There’s only one real question you need to answer to ask yourself to determine if you will like Nightreign. Here it is:
Do you want to try to play Elden Ring very fast?
If the answer is yes, you will probably like Nightreign. If the answer is no, you will not.
Why Nightreign Doesn’t Work For Me
Of the two FromSoftware games I’ve played prior to this one, I quite liked them. I’m talking about Bloodborne and Elden Ring.
The thing is, Nightreign doesn’t do any of things that made me like those games. Let’s go through them, shall we?
The world does not inspire.
Nightreign just re-uses the visual language of Elden Ring, even when it isn’t literally re-using the assets. Its procedural placement and focus on speed of execution means that there is never a chance for reflection and observation. Don’t bother looking at these ruins or castle. Don’t bother looking at details. Just rush the boss because we are on a timer.
Worst salty runbacks ever.
FromSoftware likes to make bosses that are very difficult to beat when you don’t know their movesets. In their single player RPG’s, this is offset by getting dozens of chances in a row to fight them over and over again.
I’m of the opinion there’s a single core design element that makes FromSoftware games work: if a million monkeys on typewriters will create the work of Shakespeare, me—a single monkey on a controller—can defeat Malenia.
Forward progress is inevitable.
That is not the case here. If you wipe on a Nightlord, you need to do another 40 minute run in order to fight them again.
Weapons
When I play FromSoftware games, I tend to find a single weapon or two I like, and use it for as much of the run as feasibly possible. But that’s not how Roguelikes work.
However, since Nightreign is using the Elden Ring combat “model,” it’s basically asking you to relearn new sets and types of weapons every run, and to be adaptable. The thing is, I don’t find most of the weapons fun. And on its own, Elden Ring never had many weapons I found aspirational anyway.
Just give me back my trick weapons from Bloodborne.
Progression is boring
When I say this, I’m not talking about the type of progression you’re probably thinking of. For me, a large portion of the motivating factor in playing FromSoftware games, especially when I hit a wall, is a combination of spite and curiosity. I want to beat the current challenge, and I want to see what sort of things come next. One of my primary memories of Elden Ring is a continual shock and awe at the size of the world, and its variety and scale.
Nightreign never delivers on any of this. I skipped the cutscenes because I want to play with my friends; it’s unclear to me if there’s any real meaning to the Nightlords; the world itself is procedural placement, making everything feel samey; and asset re-use means I’ve seen almost all of these enemies and settings.
Clunky-ass grindingly slow combat is the bit of FromSoftware games that I put up with in order to get weird lore, intense exploration, alien enemies, and visually impressive moments. It’s not the part I find fun.
Bonus Round of Gripes
This is Monster Hunter/Nintendo levels of shit multiplayer system design. In other FromSoftware games, the weird shit around invasions, goofy PVP, and all that garbage is tolerable, because those are primarily single player games. But this is an exclusively multiplayer game. So why is there no voice chat? No text chat? Literally why is there no reasonable way to communicate in a game that demands communication?
Emotes do not, in fact, count.
Also, only eight characters feels kinda weak. Meta progression is boring.
Boss design is cool, but I would have liked more cool Overworld enemies. As it is, it felt like I’d already seen every mini-boss.
Overall
I don’t like Nightreign. It doesn’t mean you won’t, but I feel like all of FromSoftware’s other games offer a fundamentally more interesting and expansive experience while using the same core systems.
The joy I get from FromSoftware games is that of exploring crumbling destitute alien worlds, where nothing can ever quite be understood. Nightreign does not offer that. It offers a fast paced frenetic roguelike experience bolted to Elden Ring’s combat system.
If you crave more FromSoft, and your favorite part is weapons, challenge runs, experimenting, or pushing your own limits within those already punishing systems, you might love it.
I don’t.
I would rather have my $40 back.
Brightcast
I love Brightcast. It was my favorite new game from PAX Unplugged last year, and it’s easily my most played game from the show. I’ve brought it with me to pretty much every event I’ve gone to, from weekly Magic, to PAX East.
I’ve showed it off to the local LGS’s I go to, and convinced at least one of them to stock it. I’ve done everything in my power to show it to more people… except actually write a review.
So we’re gonna correct that now.
The Game
Brightcast is a 1v1 dueling game. There’s no asymmetry. Both you and your opponent are working with the same set of tools: six copies of each of Spellcasters, two copies of the dragon, and two copies of the Alchemist. You each get a single deck of 34 cards of 7 different types.
Let’s start with the Spellcasters, since they’re how you actually win. There are five spellcasters: the Sage, the Warlock, the Druid, the Sorcerer, and Wizard. In order to win, you need to collect either one of each, or five copies of a single one into your tableau.
How do you do this? Well, it’s quite simple. On your turn, draw a card, then pick a card from you hand to add to play. You get its effect, and if it’s a Spellcaster, you then add it to your tableau. (You can alternatively choose to draw a second card instead of playing a card, but you usually don’t want to.)
Let’s talk about their effects. The Sorcerer is the simplest, destroying a single card in your opponent’s tableau when played. The Warlock works a bit in reverse, returning a single card from your discard pile to your hand. The Sage draws you two more cards, then requires that you discard 1, while the Druid makes your opponent reveal their hand and discard a card of your choosing. And then there’s the Wizard.
The Wizard is a bit special. You can play the Wizard from your hand and just draw one card. Or—and this is what you’ll want to be doing most of the time— when your opponent plays a card, you can discard a Wizard and a copy of the card your opponent played to block their play. Sure, it’s a two-for-one, but it can be worth it to slow your opponent down.
Then there are the last two card types: The Dragon and Alchemist.
When you play the Dragon, you can destroy up to 3 cards from your opponent’s tableau. When you play the Alchemist, you can copy the effect of a Spellcaster you already have in play in your tableau. Both of these are obviously a fair bit more powerful then the other cards, and as such they don’t go into the Tableau, and they also can’t be recovered with the Warlock.
Why I love it
Okay, so that was a lot of rules text, but importantly, that’s also pretty much all of the rules. You could take everything I wrote up above, make your own copy of Brightcast, and play it reasonably accurately. It’s the sort of game you can teach to someone in five minutes, and play multiple games for the next 45.
Because despite that simplicity, Brightcast offers a lot of interesting choices. Do I play my dragon, knowing they might pull it out of my hand with a druid, or do I try to hold it for the perfect moment? Do I play Sage after Sage, trying to get all five out quickly? Should I daisy chain warlocks into having a bit of a buffer for completing a set of five, or just grab back a Druid to pull their Sorcerer out of their hand?
I could go on! I won’t. But I could!
Brightcast fits into a similar space as Tiger and Dragon for me. It’s not a full course meal on its own. But it’s the sort of thing that you can slip in a game of anywhere, or teach to a complete stranger. I’ve played a fair amount of it in between Magic games, or while while waiting for events to start.
There’s a fascinating set of decision points from an incredibly simple set of cards, and it’s fun enough to play over and over. Also, and I’ll say this again, the art is just incredible.
Overall
The back of Brightcast describes it as “Deceptively simple, secretly deep” and I can’t think of a better descriptor. It’s quick to learn, and offers a interesting play choices all throughout the game. If you like Magic: The Gathering, or clever dueling games, I highly suggest trying Brightcast.
Who knows. Maybe you’ll become as much of an evangelist for it as I have.
Quick Note: Brightcast is currently only available from direct retailers, so the best way to get a copy is to ask your LGS to stock it, or check if they already have it available. If you’re up in New Hampshire like me, The Fourth Place has some copies.