My first time playing Elden Ring Nightreign, I was stressed the hell out. My team and I were in an underground dungeon, trying to make our way past traps and dangerous blind corners, all while knowing there was an invisible clock ominously ticking down above our heads. If we were still underground when it hit zero a deadly storm called Night’s Tide would close in, potentially trapping us. That kind of anxiety was exactly what Elden Ring combat designer and Nightreign’s game director Junya Ishizaki had in mind.

Speaking with Ishizaki after my time with the game, I was surprised to learn one of the main inspirations for Nightreign – a co-op focused PvE action game – was the board game Pandemic. Ishizaki said that one of the things he enjoyed about Pandemic, which he later incorporated into Nightreign, was the idea of playing under pressure. “When you come up against these seemingly insurmountable odds, it’s up to the player to choose how to use their time in order to overcome the seemingly impossible challenge,” he explained.

The tension between whether to continue through the dungeon as the HP-draining Night’s Tide storm slowly closed in, or to cut bait and run, was one of the most satisfying feelings I had during the hands-on. But I also felt another, far less pleasing type of tension – the one between me and my companions. I was scared I wouldn’t be able to hold my own against bosses or that a decision I made would turn out to be a waste of precious time. Since I play FromSoftware games as a strictly solo enterprise, that anxiety was new to me. But according to Ishizaki, that anxiety is also part of the plan.

He explained that the development team’s approach to Nightreign was a desire to incorporate elements learned from Elden Ring reconfigured into a new experience. Since FromSoftware is known for games with punishing combat, they focused their ideas on revamping the combat system including tweaking the number of combatants. “One of the ways we could make [combat] really exciting and interesting was having co-op be the main focus, and having players have to work together,” Ishizaki said.

This approach was interesting because one of the things many people enjoyed about Elden Ring was that it’s a very solitary and lonesome game. It’s also a difficult one. You are subject to violent death over and over and it’s powerfully satisfying when you’re able to take what you learned from those deaths to beat a tough encounter. But the goal of Nightreign isn’t to replicate the experience of Elden Ring with a multiplayer modifier: it’s to make something fundamentally new.

“We wanted to break from this feeling of loneliness and isolation and overcoming things on your own.” Ishizaki said. Since the team wanted to make Nightreign feel fresh and exciting that meant doing away with the creature comforts players expect from Elden Ring.

“Part of that means working together,” he said. So while my two favorite aspects of Elden Ring are totally absent in Nightreign, I don’t feel alienated by the game. The good internal tension I experience as a solo player is replaced by an external tension – learning to work together in a group – that I could learn to love once I get my hands on the full game.

But Ishizaki understands that there still might be other players who look at Nightreign and can’t get past the game’s frenetic multiplayer focus. “Existing fans may seem quite bewildered at first when it comes to Nightreign,” he said. “But we feel like once players get it in their hands and actually start playing, it’s actually not too big of a hurdle to overcome.”