ELDEN RING NIGHTREIGN The Forsaken Hollows

I went into The Forsaken Hollows expecting a slim content drop to tide fans over, and I came out with frost-covered fingerprints and a grudging respect for FromSoftware's continued commitment to making me suffer artfully. The DLC lands squarely in the camp of "more of the same, but harder" which, depending on your feelings about base Nightreign, either reads as a promise or a warning. The centrepiece addition is the Great Hollow, a Shifting Earth event that functions less like a map modifier and more like an entirely different world. Where Limveld is a familiar, if chaotic, open plain, the Great Hollow tilts everything toward verticality: subterranean landmasses connected by Spiritsprings, crystalline ramps, and spectral hawk trees that pull visually from both Shadow of the Erdtree's underground biome and the original Dark Souls Ash Lake descent. It is genuinely gorgeous, and genuinely punishing. A significant portion of the map is a fall-to-your-death zone, and first-time runs through it will involve a lot of confused sprinting and untimely plunges. That learning curve does eventually flatten, but expect the Great Hollow to humble you before it impresses you. The two new Nightfarers, Undertaker and Scholar, are the DLC's other headline act. The Undertaker is a Strength-Faith hybrid whose kit revolves around her Loathsome Hex ultimate: a wide-range heavy strike that refreshes for free every time an ally uses their own ultimate, enabling some genuinely explosive burst windows in a coordinated trio. Her Trance class skill trades normal dodge timing for a fugue state that chains combos and boosts damage, rewarding players who commit to aggression. The Scholar plays the opposite game, sitting at mid-range with a thrusting sword and arcane-scaling consumable buffs, debuffing enemies and stacking status effects through his Analyze skill and Communion ultimate. He demands more deliberate positioning and is harder to pilot, but the synergy ceiling with a well-built trio is noticeably high. Both characters come with Remembrance questlines that give their backstories proper FromSoftware lore treatment, which matters more to me than it probably should. The sole disappointing note is that neither character arrives alongside new weapons or spells. The community had been vocal about wanting expanded arsenals, and the absence of new armaments is a real gap that limits build variety for everyone, not just players of the new Nightfarers. On the boss side, the two new Nightlords, Weapon-Bequeathed Harmonia and Dreglord Straghess, are both strong additions. Harmonia is a multi-target group encounter that demands awareness management across the whole party; Straghess is a more classical FromSoft duel, unpredictable and vicious in the best way. Day-cycle bosses bring back faces from across the Soulsborne catalogue, including Knight Artorias and the Divine Dancing Lion, though the community consensus is that several of these have health pools that push fights from challenging into attrition. It is a fair criticism. There are moments where a boss fight stops feeling tense and starts feeling like a stamina check on the clock. The DLC also gates access behind defeating at least one base-game Nightlord, which is reasonable for returning players but is worth flagging if you are considering the DLC as a re-entry point. The honest summary: this is an expansion built for Nightreign's existing believers. Solo players will find the Great Hollow close to unmanageable, and random matchmaking remains a coin-flip with no built-in voice chat and a ping system that cannot carry the coordination the new map demands. Bring two friends or prepare to hurt. If you have them, and you already like what Nightreign does, The Forsaken Hollows is a genuinely meaty addition that extends the game's lifespan with content that feels like FromSoftware at their most confident within this format. The missing weapons keep it from being the definitive DLC it could have been.

Monika · Scout Team

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