Category: Video Games

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.

Skin Deep

I like Skin Deep. I like it more than Quadrilateral Cowboy, the previous title by BLENDO Games. I wouldn’t have mainlined thirteen hours of it over two days the day it released if I didn’t like it. If you like weird indie stuff, and find yourself interested by an immersive sim where you save cats from space pirates, give it a look.

I’m front loading this so that when I spend several paragraphs complaining about the game in just a bit, no one gets the wrong idea here. I’ll say it again: I like Skin Deep. I recommend Skin Deep.

Give me more of this sort of thing please.

I just also happen to have some problems with the game.

Skin Deep is an immersive sim stealth sort of game. You are Nina, an insurance agent. The deal is simple: you get cryogenically frozen on long haul space trips. If the ship gets attacked by space pirates, you get unfrozen, at which point your job is to rescue the crew.

The defrosting is how each of the game’s 13 levels (each their own individual spaceship) starts, with you transforming from popsicle to human and stepping out of your pod. From there, it’s pretty much up to you how you want to approach things. The only thing you have to do is save all the captured crew mates by unlocking them from their little cages with purple key cards.

Image of a cat locked in a purple box from the video game Skin Deep.

Since this an immersive sim, it would be a bit tricky to cover every interaction available, so I’m going to quickly go over a few key ones.

Every level takes place on a space ship, with both an interior and exterior. The exterior is accessed a variety of ways, and as Nina has a third lung, moving around in a zero-g and zero-oxygen environments poses no problems for her.

Every ship also has a set of four systems available. These are: vents, windows, airlocks, and trash chutes. They function as a traversal tools with added benefits. Vents let you sneak around and hide, windows can be broken to suck enemies into outer space, airlocks let you leave the ship the normal way, and trash chutes let you leave non-normally, at the cost of becoming smelly.

These systems often start off locked. You can unlock them by finding and interacting with their respective fuseboxes to turn them back on. Later on, the systems become locked down even further by enemies.

Image of a Fusebox locked from the video game Skin Deep.

Speaking of which: let’s talk about enemies. There are five types of enemies: 3 types of space pirate, a turret, and a floating knife fish robot. The space pirates make up the bulk of the challenge, with the turret and swordfish being mostly incidental.

The catch is that the space pirates are all wearing Skull Savers(TM) which, upon death, will transport their head to a revival platform, and regenerate their body. Unless—of course—you grab their head before that happens, and stuff it into your inventory.

Image of a Skull Saver from the video game Skin Deep.

Which is as good a time as any to talk about Nina a bit more. You have five inventory slots, so every head you’re carrying takes the space of one useful item. So the best way to deal with pirates in the long term is to chuck their heads into the sweet void of space.

Given that we’re five paragraphs in, hopefully I’ve explained enough that the next set of complaints is going to make sense.

Complaints

The very first level of Skin Deep opens with mini-tutorial that shows you the following message.

And it’s not wrong, but I want to contest it a little bit. It’s true that damaged enemies will find their way to health stations, and request repairs for broken control panels… but that’s all I ever saw them do. As far as immersive sims go, the game felt somewhat underwhelming. Enemies react to sound and smell, but won’t notice missing items, or change up their patrol patterns even after you’ve freed prisoners they’re supposed to be protecting.

This isn’t intrinsically bad, but it does prevent the game from ever feeling particularly alive, if that makes sense. It also leads to my bigger problem.

Different Day, Same Ship

By the end of Skin Deep, I found myself frustrated because I was using the same general strategy on every single ship. It went something like this: sneak around unlocking all the doors. Next up, find and unlock all the subsystems. After that, take over control of the ship cameras. Only then would I finally switch over to taking out enemies, or experimenting with whatever that ship’s gimmick was.

And the result was that every level felt samey. Not because they are! But even when each level had its own special gimmick, I tended to never use the gimmick until after I had already dealt with everything else. This leads to my big complaint.

For an immersive sim, I never felt incentivized to change up my primary plan, and adjust for the situation I was in, or to try to improvise. I did the same thing over and over again, because when I died (and I died a lot!) I would lose 10 minutes of progress, and have to start again. And it is very easy to die when enough things start to go wrong.

The last level is probably the peak example of this. Without spoilers, its “gimmick” is that it’s a lot larger than any other ship in the game. It also removes a few of the fallbacks or safeties that are available in other levels. The end result is that it’s much more punishing if you fail.

I don’t know if it’s a Blendo “thing” to make their final levels skill testing like this. I remember Quadrilateral Cowboy doing something similar, but in that game, it was only the final level where you finally got access to all the toys at once.

But Skin Deep didn’t give me more tools or toys to work with. Instead it was just more of a slog.

Bonus Round

So now let’s go over a few other things that didn’t quite fit anywhere else. First up, the writing is quite good, and narrative is quite weird. There’s one very clever soft touch done for building character relationships that I quite enjoyed. The setting is interesting, but mostly serves as a backdrop for the gameplay and the rest of the story about a specific set of characters.

Also, there are bonus objectives for each level. I have to wonder if having them show up at the start, instead of after you’ve completed the level, would have made me want to try to use the level gimmicks more?

The controls are also a bit wonky at times, and I threw multiple guns when I meant to be firing them. As a general note: yes, this is less effective than shooting with them.

Overall

I enjoyed Skin Deep, but I wish I enjoyed it more. I still like it enough to recommend. It was $20, and I mainlined the whole thing over two days.

But I wish I felt like it delivered on the promise of the immersive sim more than it actually did. Or at least forced me out of my comfort zone with the strategies and planning, instead of letting there be an “ideal” strategy to beat most levels.

Still, if you want something interesting and weird, give it a shot. You might even enjoy it more than me.

Here’s a link to the Steam Page.

Type Help

I’m going to save both of us some time here. Did you like Return of the Obra Dinn? Did you like it a lot?

Yes? Great. Click this link and you will have an enjoyable several hours, and it will not cost you a penny.

Okay, time to deal with the rest of you.

Somehow it’s become “Free Web Based Indie Games That Are Novel Takes On Existing Systems” month. It doesn’t exactly roll of the tongue, but just like Dragonsweeper, Type Help is a FWBIGTANTOES.

I did not intend for that acronym to include BIG TAN TOES. Now that I am looking at it, it’s making me increasingly uncomfortable, so let’s move on.

Type Help is a mystery puzzle game played via a command line, all about deducing information. Specifically, it’s about deducing the names of a series of transcribed audio files, all which follow a specific naming convention.

Since it’s a puzzle game, and part of the puzzle is figuring out what the puzzle is, from here on out there will be heavy spoilers. Consider it your last chance to experience it on your own.

Here There Be Spoilers

Type Help is a murder mystery. As mentioned above, your primary goal is to deduce the names of various text files, all audio transcriptions of a house in which 12 strangers were found dead, with no clues as to who they were, or how they got there. Even more mysteriously, the individual working the case in question also died.

So the main gameplay is guessing the names of files. After you’re given a few starting points, it becomes clear that the title of each file follows a simple naming convention, like this:

02-EN-1-6-7-10

The first number indicates time in the sequence, the second set of letters indicates a location, and the remaining sequence of numbers indicates who of the 12 strangers were present in the scene. For example, early scenes will often end with characters saying things like “Person #1, please come with me to the Billiards Room” and so you can deduce that a file might exist named something like 03-BI-1-8. Typing that in will unlock the file.

Of course, it’s obviously not all that simple. Sometimes someone else will have already been in the billiards room, so you’ll need to deduce who that was. Sometimes people don’t leave a room they’re in. Ultimately, it’s a big puzzle of “Who was where, when?”

My Thoughts On It

I have roughly the same problems with Type Help that I had with Return of the Obra Dinn, but a different set of praise. I consider Type Help a far more compelling mystery—and more interesting sets of character dynamics—than Obra Dinn.

Unfortunately, just like Return of the Obra Dinn, once general gist of the mystery became clear, I didn’t find it particularly compelling to puzzle out a lot more of the busy work, and get the “true ending.” In both games, I got about 60-70% of the way through, and hit a wall where I was no longer having any fun.

Some people really enjoy color coding elaborate spreadsheets.

I am not one of them.

For Return of the Obra Dinn, I put the work in to finish it out. For Type Help, I just looked at the spoilers in the comment section, and frankly, I think I made the right choice. The initial puzzles, worldbuilding, and unfolding mystery were interesting. But it would have taken me an additional 5+ hours to find the finale and “big reveal,” and I bet it wouldn’t have felt worth it.

I did enjoy a large portion of Type Help. I think it’s good. But it’s like a cake that’s just a bit too large, with frosting a bit too rich. Maybe it’s somewhat dry in parts, preventing me from finishing the whole thing.

BIG TAN TOES

Dragonsweeper

I like Dragonsweeper. It’s also free. You should go play it in your browser here.

This is perhaps not the most elegant piece of writing I have opened a blog post with, but it’s also all true. Dragonsweeper is a small, clever twist on Minesweeper. It doesn’t cost any money. It won’t eat your entire day. There are no microtransactions, or other bullshit. It’s just good.

To quote the office: “Why use lot word when few word do trick.”

That said, you’re still reading, which means you haven’t been persuaded yet. That’s okay. Maybe you missed the first link. Here, I’ll link to again.

It’s possible that didn’t work either. Unlikely, given the incredible rhetorical barrage I’ve assembled so far, but possible.

It’s important to note though, that since Dragonsweeper is a puzzle game, in order to talk about it, I will be spoiling some of the puzzles. As few as I can! But some. This is your last chance to just back out and play it?

No? Well let’s continue.

Dragonsweeper is a puzzle version of Minesweeper. It uses the general framework of Minesweeper the same way Balatro uses poker: as a structure with so many things grafted onto it that it’s almost unrecognizable. But understanding the general concept or the original will make the initial exposure more tolerable.

Like Minesweeper, Dragonsweeper consists of a grid of tiles. Clicking a tile reveals what’s beneath it. If the tile is empty, just like in Minesweeper, that tile then displays a number of the sum of the surrounding tiles.

Unlike Minesweeper, most tiles on the board are not empty, nor do they contain mines. Instead, they contain monsters. This is a problem for our boy Jorge.

As Jorge spawns with only 5 health, clicking on a Minotaur early is an easy way to game over.

When you click on a monster, Jorge loses health equal to its power. If Jorge goes below zero health, it’s game over. Fortunately, defeating monsters also gives experience, and after collecting enough EXP, Jorge levels up, refilling their health bar.

But after the first few levels, the amount of EXP needed to level up is higher than the Jorge’s total health, and just defeating monsters isn’t enough. Instead, it’s necessary to crack open treasure chests, use healing scrolls, or find some other sources of EXP.

If you’re just starting the game, you will almost certainly die.

And then the real game begins.

This is your Last Chance to Back Out Before I Start Spoiling The Puzzles I Mean It This Time

In the corner of the screen is a little tiny purple book. When you click on the book, it tells you which monsters have which values, and how many remain. It also includes this little bit of text.

This right here is the heart of Dragonsweeper. See, Dragonsweeper isn’t truly random. It’s randomized, but after a few death screens, you might notice that the 10 value monster, the Mine King, is always in one of the corners.

Or you might instead pick up on the fact that the Slime Wizard is always guarded by six 8-value purple slimes, and always on the edge of the map.

You might spot that the 4 value gargoyles will always be facing another Gargoyle in a cardinal direction.

There are at least another five or so little patterns and rules like this. There are some I haven’t even found, and there are several that I didn’t spot until I had beaten the game, and was showing it to a friend.

For me, spotting these, and figuring out how to use them is what makes Dragonsweeper so brilliant. It’s very clever puzzle design where learning about how the board can be laid out, and how some things interact is the progression.

Again. Dragonsweeper is really good, and you should play it, and it’s free.

And a request for the developer: please make a full game. I have given you money and I will give you more.

Fellowship Demo

Fellowship has a time limited demo until March 3rd 2025. If anything in this article sounds interesting, I highly encourage you to try it out.

I’m not good at, nor do I like MMO’s. They’ve always been too pricey for me, and while I’ve tried both WoW and FF XIV, neither made me want to play it long term. Somewhere, my character sits forgotten, having only gathered eight of the fourteen nut screws needed to advance to the next set of screw gathering.

Of course, then my friends who like such games will tell me that “I haven’t gotten to the raids or dungeons,” and that those are the good parts. I privately wonder in the back of my mind why, if those are the good parts, I have to spend my time gathering blinker fluid and elbow grease for twenty hours before I get to those parts.

Ultimately, I find myself wondering why someone doesn’t just make a game that’s just the “good” parts of the experience.

Well, someone has, and the game is called Fellowship. It has a demo right now, and it’s open until the end of the coming weekend.

I find Fellowship fascinating because I haven’t done classic MMO-style raids before. As such I don’t really have much to compare it to, and don’t really have too much to say on the subject that hasn’t been said before by others. There’s the classic tank/heal/DPS, extra mechanics are added at higher difficulties, and gear is rewarded on completion.

So why do I care about this game if it’s not really my thing?

Fellowship is interesting to me because it’s a chance to experience a set of mechanics that I’ve previously been locked off from. As an obsessive control freak who hates not being in charge, I chose to tank, and as a result, I now have a quiet seething hatred for all DPS players.

Okay, I joke, but I do find it really interesting how quickly I feel into some of the emotional responses I’ve seen folks make fun of for years, like getting upset when someone doesn’t know the boss, or fails a mechanic. Even if, y’know, I failed that mechanic and didn’t know the boss TWENTY MINUTES AGO. It’s fascinating, and I’m learning a lot about myself. Mostly that I’m an asshole when handed even the smallest ounce of authority.

There is some stuff here my friends complained about that didn’t bother me much, the big one being that there’s no character customization. But as an opportunity to experience the best part of MMO’s without 60 hours of mushroom bullshit? Sign me up.