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You know, there was a time when games just were hard. They were hard, just, because. Plenty of games’ marketing in the NES era leaned heavily on challenging you to get through the evilest, most fucked-up-est challenges imaginable. Nobody said, “I like hard games,” because liking games at all meant you liked hard games. What’s worth noting is that most of the games we remember as being good — Zelda, Mega Man, DuckTales — were not games about being hard. Zelda was an exercise in exploration and discovery, Mega Man introduced a layer of strategy to the still-new platforming genre, and DuckTales simulated the joys of being the world’s richest and least responsible child caretaker. All of these games are hard, sure, so much so that if they came out today their difficulty would almost certainly be a talking point, but none relied on that to sell you on their quality. Nowhere in Zelda will enemies spawn in from off-screen to one-shot you (an NES staple), and Mega Man is famously gracious about teaching new players about enemies and traps before they pose a threat. Castlevania might be an ass-beater, but it doesn’t brag about it on the back of the box.

The games that did sell themselves on being the toughest games around typically aren’t remembered with the same fondness. Do you even know the game the “are you a bad enough dude” line comes from? It’s from Bad Dudes Vs. DragonNinja. But we don’t remember those specific dudes, nor their specific badness, we just remember a funny piece of marketing that snuck its way into the game. Ghosts ‘n Goblins, another example of a game without much aim beyond being hard, might be fondly looked back on by some, but it ain’t Mario, and I doubt most reading this today have ever seriously sat down and played it start to finish. A lesser known fact about PAC-MAN, remembered today as being generally pretty tough, is that it was actually designed to be accessible to newer or less hardcore gamers. Case in point, the games we remember as being truly outstanding aren’t the ones that were content to be defined by their difficulty, but the ones that wanted to be something new and innovative in gaming.

So let’s talk about From Software.

I used to roll my eyes when I’d hear someone describe From Software as a company that makes hard games. It was annoying when gatekeepy fans bragged about their skill; it was annoying when haters called Dark Souls a game for masochists; it was even annoying when FromSoft itself labeled the rerelease of Dark Souls the “Prepare to Die Edition.” Since when is Dark Souls actually, like, about the dying? This isn’t BattleToads. Rarely is the “good player” rewarded in a way that the cautious player couldn’t also be. There are endless equalizers in Dark Souls that ensure everyone can get through the game in their own way. A guy hiding in your blind spot when you walk through a doorway — a trap so ubiquitous in these games that it should probably be called “The FromSoft” at this point — will get you the first time no matter how good you are at dodge-rolling. That first Mimic Chest is going to be a motherfucker whether Dark Souls is your first video game or your thousandth. FromSoft games weren’t just “hard.” They were different.

Dark Souls isn’t about filtering out the players who aren’t good enough at dodge-rolling. It’s about creating a world that feels unfair, malicious, and imposing, regardless of your skill level. If you need proof of that, just go look at the number of people attempting and completing “SL1 challenge runs” of the game, a playthrough where you never level up your character beyond their starting stats. Mastering the dodge-roll is the one singular thing Dark Souls’ combat loop ever, ever asks you to do on a mechanical level, and getting good enough at it has led many players to ignore the literal hundreds of mechanics designed to assist them in favor of turning it into what is essentially a high-stakes game of 3D Punch-Out!! in the hopes of extracting even a morsel of challenge out of the game. When we consider the game offers us a robust leveling system, tons of shields and armor, a magic system that lets you attack from a distance, and weapons to suit most any playstyle, suddenly it doesn’t sound like such an evil game. It actually sounds pretty easy, doesn’t it?

What I’m belaboring to explain here is that FromSoft, when it first struck out onto the scene with the “soulslike” genre, was not interested in crafting games about brick walls, it was interested in crafting games with brick walls. What do I mean by brick walls? Come on, you know what I’m talking about. The hours, days, weeks you spend on what feels like every single boss you encounter in later FromSoft titles. That sensation you get when you come up against yet another guy who can blow up half your health bar by sneezing. The feeling that worked beautifully when it was a smaller part of a greater whole — as in the original Demon’s Souls — but has slowly become more and more the entire focus of the games, with Shadow of the Erdtree swapping anything, well, interesting, for a series of empty fields with huge monsters waiting to one-shot you back to your last checkpoint. The increasingly occurring moments where FromSoft hands you a piece of string and tells you to scale a mountain with it. And nowadays, what’s waiting for you behind that brick wall? Another brick wall. This is the most poorly constructed house I’ve ever been in.

The boss design isn’t something I specifically love about Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls, or Bloodborne. Rather, that boss design, often so punishing and overwhelming, is just one ingredient in a game design philosophy aiming to immerse you in a world. The traps, the confusing level layouts, the item descriptions that feel like they were written by a troll who only speaks in riddles, and yes, that occasional brick wall you’ll spend hours chipping away at were all once relevant to the FromSoft formula, to the intended experience of exploring a world that feels hostile and unknowable. Why can important NPCs just die? Why do basic game mechanics go unexplained if you’re not going far and beyond out of your way to seek out explanations? Why, to get to the snow level in Dark Souls, do I have to randomly jump out of an elevator, do a speedrun dive over some random wall, pretend to be a bird egg so I can go back to the tutorial level (uh, okay, sure), pick up a doll that I guess I was just supposed to know had spawned there, travel to the literal opposite side of the world, and, once again, just know, somehow, to use the doll in the one completely random room in the entire game that has a Mario 64 painting inside of it? It’s a freaky-deaky space that wants you to think it hates you. It’s Rain World. It’s Pathologic. You don’t feel good because you spend 10 hours learning how to beat some random boss, you feel good because you spend 100 hours learning how to beat the entire world.

At some point around the release of Dark Souls II, FromSoft got big. Like, “buy a PS4 just for Bloodborne” big. And it didn’t get big for the weird stuff. The permanence of a dead NPC. The interweaving level design. The crazy person with a cage on his head who would rather run away from you than put up his fists. The inspired anticlimax when an old guy struggling to survive long before you showed up turns out to not stand his ground very effectively as a boss fight. No, FromSoft’s “soulslike” formula got huge for the same thing all those easily forgotten NES titles did before it: those damn brick walls. 

So tell me: Are you a bad enough dude to save The Lands Between?

Rather than use its newfound bigness to surprise the sudden influx of players with its once trademark trove of devious design decisions, FromSoft bent to expectation. Where Dark Souls asks players to interface with a bird who only shows up when you’re not looking to deliver the materials required to craft a magically enchanted weapon, Dark Souls III is begging players to pick up the fire-sword sitting so conveniently in a chest. Demon’s Souls actively kicks players while they’re down with its deliciously deranged world tendency system, and every game since has not only dropped the mechanic, but added more checkpoints while slowly evaporating any penalties for death beyond the corpse running mechanic that has probably only survived this long due to tradition. Elden Ring fares worst of all, paling in this regard in comparison to the games that preceded it. For every chest that unexpectedly warps you to Caelid, there’s…Well, there’s the entire rest of the game. And that’s because nowhere in Elden Ring will players find a trick as dastardly as the chest to Caelid, and it’s a trick the game pulls in the opening hours. It’s as if FromSoft only added this trap out of obligation to its earliest playerbase. Once you’ve seen that, if you’re expecting to love the game for the reasons you loved Demon’s Souls, you’re better off just putting it down then and there.

The reliance on checkpoints in Elden Ring’s design reaches such an absurd high that the game will very often drop the act altogether and just automatically trigger a respawn point for you right outside a boss arena, removing any fear of punishment for failure from the proceedings. It seems even the walk to a boss was too much time spent not fighting a boss for FromSoft’s liking. Similarly, because every boss has a gajillion health, finding a weapon that opens the crust of the earth and bursts bright purple magic from beneath the ground is as simple as fighting the guy who has it. It has to be. This focus on nonstop encounters against bigger and bigger bosses simply doesn’t leave room for anything else. One of Bloodborne’s meanest tricks is an ongoing one, where players unwittingly send NPCs not to the kindhearted doctor Iosefka, but to an imposter who runs experiments on these people that reduce them to shambling, grotesque, Roger-from-American-Dad-looking human/alien hybrids. Over in Elden Ring, any NPC deemed important enough will simply be unable to be harmed by any means whatsoever, removing the tension — and believability — of interacting with these once living, breathing characters. Maybe the most surprising change of all comes in the building of your character. FromSoft’s soulslike games all share one common source of stress — that is, deciding what to level, and when. Experience points are a resource that can be lost much easier than they can be earned, encouraging players to spend them quickly. This in turn creates tension as players sit and ponder what stats to focus on leveling up; tension that disappears thanks to Elden Ring allowing players to respec more times over the course of an average playthrough than even the most reckless leveler or the most meticulous minmaxer could ever reasonably ask for. Maybe you could say that particular change makes sense for an open world. I don’t know. Maybe you could also say an open world should also be more than a series of increasingly powerful mooks with increasingly inflated health bars placed scattershot across an at times shockingly barren map.

What do we get in place of all those once defining features? Exactly what the new wave of fans have asked for: big, dramatic, multi-phase shonen encounters against giant brick walls with Game of Thrones names. Some brick walls turn into dragons, some trigger wide-reaching explosions, some have seemingly endless combos that track player movement, and all can be handily defeated with one of the game’s many poorly balanced and easily attainable weapons. The game’s DLC, Shadow of the Erdtree, continues the trend. The leveling system has largely been replaced by finding unique upgrade items, raising player stats across the board so as to eliminate any last remaining element of that pesky tough decision-making. FromSoft’s once densely packed and intelligently designed environments are shoved aside in favor of long, empty treks, punctuated by big, mean, dramatic — would you believe it? — boss fights. In Elden Ring, some bosses turn into dragons, some explode, and some combo. In Shadow of the Erdtree, they all turn into dragons, they all explode, and they all have such long god damn combos. It’s a truly tragic step away from not only what FromSoft once excelled at, but also what were once the primary goals of the company’s games. And does FromSoft make the combat any more interesting to account for this? No such luck. It’s the same slow paced high damage Punch-Out!! it’s always been. Only now, that’s all it is.

And people loved it.

“Well,” it seems FromSoft has said. “Let’s just cut the pretense and get right to the bit that makes us money.” Case in point? Elden Ring: Nightreign is not a soulslike. At least, it’s not the soulslike I remember being introduced to back in the late 2000s. It’s good! Put down the pitchforks, nobody said it ain’t good — but it’s about as far removed from the goals laid out by Demon’s Souls as it could reasonably be. The aesthetics are the same but the feel is all new.

Elden Ring was a newer, duller gameplay formula, wearing the skin of Dark Souls. Nightreign doesn’t even try to hide it. Nightreign so aggressively doesn’t care about a single one of the traditional soulslike concepts Elden Ring at least pretended to be trying that I honestly can’t conceive of why they bothered to call it Elden Ring at all other than, you know, capitalism, branding, all that. Nightreign is about you and a pair of other bozos traipsing around the world, scaling hills at a speed somewhere between Link and fucking Spider-Man, spotting a boss minding its own business, and divebombing the poor bastard to kick off an onslaught of furious attacks. You run way faster than was possible in Elden Ring, and they’ve even gone ahead and removed fall damage, a bold choice for a series that usually has at least one “figure out how not to die of fall damage” room per game. It actually leans more Monster Hunter than Dark Souls. If Monster Hunter had the Fortnite storm in it. Goof around, explore, spot a boss, turn it into a corpse.

Gone are the thoughtful traps, the anxious exploration, the quiet moments of introspection — hell, even the pre-boss fight anxiety (you know, the one thing FromSoft has been laser-focusing on more and more?) has been eliminated. Something about that tension gets lost when you and your squad are full-speed charging at a guy and doing Assassin’s Creed wall runs up the side of his body. This is what I was afraid of. This is what I always knew was coming. FromSoft has lost their way, and their flagship series is forever ruined.

Nah, I’m playin’. Game rocks.

This is it! This is the solution. If they don’t want to make soulslikes anymore, all they had to do was say so! Remember when I said it’s more like Monster Hunter now? Guess what? I love Monster Hunter! Everybody loves Monster Hunter! No one ever said FromSoft had to keep making the same game forever. It just had to make good ones, and if Nightreign’s beta test was anything to go by, the company has struck gold here. The more I saw of Nightreign, the more I remembered that this isn’t even new for FromSoft. These guys made Sekiro! Anyone who tells you Sekiro is a soulslike simply hasn’t thought about it hard enough. Sekiro strips out the RPG elements and careful traversal to be faster, more frenetic, and more engaging moment to moment. Sure, it’s not what I come to Dark Souls for, but good news — it’s not Dark Souls! I’ve been silently begging for years, “if you’re not going to make good RPGs anymore because you want to make action games now, make the action game good.” I don’t even really like RPGs that much, but I adore action games. You know what else isn’t a soulslike? Devil May Cry. Bayonetta. But they’re still great, because they’re carefully designed around the big beefy boss encounters. It’s as if FromSoft read my mind, finally realized — or maybe just remembered, considering Sekiro — that if it wanted to make an action game, hey guys, just make an action game! A real action game. No half measures. If the bosses are going to be so overblown and aggressive, why aren’t I being made stronger to combat them? If FromSoft doesn’t care about dense and hostile level design anymore, why am I still taking fall damage? If the worlds are getting bigger and less intricate, let me run faster. If the tense decision-making is being taken out of character building, just let me choose a build from a character select screen. Best of all, if you expect me to fight the same bosses again and again, at least let me bring my friends along. It sounds back-handed, I’m sure, but I couldn’t be more sincere. Elden Ring was a flaccid compromise on conflicting design goals, but Nightreign is a powerful dismissal of the status quo in favor of a game that is more focused, more cohesive, and more honest about what it wants to be.

Nightreign isn’t out yet. All my opinions so far are based on a test build of the game. But I can’t express enough how hopeful I am for it. By removing any pretension that this is a traditional soulslike experience, FromSoft has allowed itself to fully jump into a style of play it’s clearly been wanting to explore more and more over the years. Nightreign arguably takes it further than Sekiro ever did. I mean, a Fortnite storm in a FromSoft game? What? The one truly genius action game concept FromSoft was working with from the start, strict stamina management, is still the star of the show here, but every other idea they’ve ever introduced that wasn’t in service of excellent combat has fallen by the wayside. 

The biggest change by far is one I previously mentioned. Bosses just aren’t that scary anymore. And it can’t be by accident that the game is this way, not when all of these bosses are returning versions of their highly intimidating original incarnations from across the franchise, and certainly not when the roguelike permadeath — oh yeah, it’s a roguelike now, welcome to the future — gives greater weight to failure than ever before. FromSoft is too good at making scary boss fights, and too invested in doing so, to just give it up by accident. No, the amount of work that surely went into eliminating fear from the proceedings, the number of core gameplay changes required to turn trepidation into excitement in a game like this, is nothing short of remarkable. This new vibe permeates the entire game. It’s a feel-good game. “Elden Ring: Nightreign is a feel-good game” is not something I expected to be saying, and it’s definitely not something I thought I’d be so happy to be saying. The complex lore? Who cares about complex lore when you and the gang are chopping up the Morgott boss who spawned on the map this playthrough? The convoluted steps required to get powerful weapons in earlier titles? There’s no time for that, this run ends when you die. In Dark Souls, your delicately designed player avatar spends most of the game stuck as a gross zombie person. And in an oppressive RPG, certainly that’s a great tonal choice. But Nightreign is a party, a specific type of party where you open the character select and the game says, “Hey, want to play as a bird guy? You can play as a bird guy.” None of your allies will betray you, or go insane, or die off-screen, because your allies are the friends you’ve rounded up into a Discord call with you to go jump the Nameless King.

The solution to the problem wasn’t to focus less on those big shonen encounters I complained about earlier; it was to give players the means to fight back. FromSoft didn’t tear down the brick wall, it just replaced the toothpick you’ve gotten so used to using with a sledgehammer.

This franchise has finally stopped trying to have its cake and eat it too. FromSoft clearly wanted to reinvent itself, and if sacrificing the RPG elements was the key to that, well, hey, they’ve been taking a backseat for years now anyway. I wish I could say more, and I’d love to once the full game is out. And who knows? Maybe with an outlet for more directly combat-focused games, the scary punishing soulslike RPGs in FromSoft’s lineup can cool it with the brick walls and return to being more unique experiences. I’m not too hopeful about that, but at least for now I have a FromSoft game to be excited about again. 

Don’t go into Nightreign expecting a soulslike. Go into it expecting an action game. Because it looks like, for now at least, FromSoft is all action.