That FromSoftware’s best-loved games are formulaic is a criticism rarely, but fairly, levelled. Whether you’re exploring the peaty woods of Dark Souls’ Lordran, the cobbled streets of Bloodborne’s Yharnam, or Elden Ring’s wispy fields, the studio’s big-ticket games employ a unified set of design blocks that have acquired a familiar shape. Fallen enemies drop spectral currency which you leave behind when you die. Bonfires, once lit, provide grip points in the world where you can spend currency on upgrades. And each area is crowned with a dramatic boss battle in which button-mashing is futile – you must instead learn your opponents’ feints and lunges or perhaps summon a fellow player to offer mute assistance.

This peculiar concoction of ideas, invented and perfected by Hidetaka Miyazaki and his team, has been a reliable blueprint for 15 years. Until now, it seems. Nightreign is neither an expansion nor an evolution of Elden Ring. Rather, this is a courageous reinvention, one that remixes its namesake’s enviable compendium of assets – the landscape, physical structures, weapons, and those old, grotesque, familiar foes – into an entirely new arrangement. It is a rare and curious thing: a game that feels both intimately familiar and bracingly new.

You begin in the Roundtable Hold, Elden Ring’s hub area, altered in appearance and purpose by the passage of time. The layout and corridors remain, but some walls have crumbled away, allowing you to break from the building’s confines and stand wistfully on the shoreline. As well as being the place where you can buy gems and trinkets – although never weapons, spells or armour – it acts as a holding area. You consult the map on the table, select one of several missions (which appear only when the first, demanding challenge is cleared), then wait to be matched with fellow adventurers.