Elden Ring Nightreign: The Forsaken Hollows
The Forsaken Hollows DLC for Elden Ring Nightreign introduces two new playable characters, another two Nightlord bosses, and a shifting earth event transforming the standard Limveld map into an underground labyrinth featuring new landmarks, new relics, and many new dangers.
The new characters are good additions. The Undertaker is an aggressive warrior with a Strength-Faith focus, and her Ultimate Art allowing her to streak across the battlefield using a hovering bone spike — just go with it — is brilliant fun because players can activate it for free whenever another player performs their own art! It’s awesome finding combos for this ability and chaining together strikes that will stagger even the most stubborn enemy.
The Scholar is a subtler character with weaker statistics, but he has the unique ability of levelling up consumables to increase their potency. Continue to throw fiery pots, for example, and you’ll find those pots becoming stronger as the run progresses. The Scholar has a very different play style from the other characters, and his ultimate art can tether enemies in line-of-sight, so they share any incoming damage with their allies. This can be devastatingly effective in crowded fights, and is further complimented by the Scholar being able to inflict negative statuses on enemies by analysing their movements. Fun stuff all round!
The new bosses are likewise very good. The Balancers is a fun boss where players battle a squad of malevolent angels, and it’s followed by a dramatic showdown with the rancid Dreglord — a vile enemy whose corrosive crusade forms the basis of this DLC’s lore. The art style is grotesquely beautiful in both cases, and FromSoftware have since released a thrilling “Everdark” variant of the Balancers for even more value. Lovely!
I won’t spoil the identities of the new mini bosses, but I will say it’s disappointing how small their pools are. In the base game, each Nightlord is preceded by mini bosses drawn from a pool of possible night 1 and night 2 invaders. The base game pools are larger and more varied than the ones from The Forsaken Hollows, so those new surprises, as lovely as they are, dry up quickly. Similarly, The Great Hollow map only loads when players choose to hunt one of these new Nightlords. Not only does this hurt variety, but the map is also considered a shifting earth event, so players can’t select it when creating a lobby. This event is forced to appear when the DLC is first started, but afterwards players have to spend a Sovereign Sigil to turn it back on. This sucks because said tokens are hard to earn and they can’t be gotten offline either, which is concerning for console owners because it forces them to buy a network subscription first. I assume online matchmaking is to blame for some of these gripes (ensuring DLC owners and non-owners don’t conflict), and it might have been easier to fit within the existing game engine this way. Still, it makes accessing the new map way too fussy.
The Great Hollow is, thankfully, nothing like the dreaded Dark Souls area it shares a name with. It’s a gigantic and layered map which is dense with runes, and while its best routes will likely get repetitive after multiple runs, there’s still incredible variety in where players can go and what they can see. A powerful blessing awaits the party who can locate and smash a set of randomly spawning crystals, and they’ll need this blessing if they hope to explore the cursed castles to the north and south. It’s a nice puzzle, and the map itself crawls with yet more familiar enemies to create an adventurous new environment where players can be absorbed in the thrill of discovery once again.
However, The Great Hollow is also a difficult map which is certain to frustrate some players with its confounding vertical geography, especially when they accidentally fall into the bottomless pit and drop their runes on the opposite side of a gaping chasm. At least they can enjoy the lovely new music while they flap!
The Great Hollow also sees FromSoftware shaking up the meta by removing the evergaols which were perhaps a little too easy to abuse on the original Limveld map. As I said before, I just wish they hadn’t also shook up the way this new map is deployed because it makes optimising your relics even fiddlier than usual.
And for one last parting criticism, where are the new weapons? Introducing some exotic armaments from Shadow of the Erdtree, for example, would have been great fun. Aside from the two starter weapons for the new characters, though, there aren’t any new additions in this space at all, which is very disappointing.
Overall, The Forsaken Hollows is worth playing if you enjoyed Elden Ring Nightreign and want more, but it also needs some improvements to make the user experience a more embraceable offering than what it is right now.
Elden Ring Nightreign: The Forsaken Hollows on Steam »
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