I cannot emphasize enough how much more difficult Elden Ring Nightreign: The Forsaken Hollows is compared to the base game. At first, I thought that my stumbles were just the natural outcome of playing something new where no one knows how anything works. Now, even as the community has sorted out things like boss weaknesses, routing, and strong class spreads, it's obvious that Nightreign's DLC was concocted to extract as much pain as possible.

To give some context: I am good enough at Nightreign that I often reach level 10 on day one. Boss health bars sometimes get deleted in seconds, depending on my build and synergy with my teammates. After spending a weekend with The Forsaken Hollows, though, I'll be lucky to make it to day three at all. Hell, half the time I'm dying at the Nightlord at the end of day one.

Where to even begin? One of the main castles on the new map has a fun mechanic where, the entire time you're there, your health is halved. In practice, what this means is that, even if your character is fairly leveled up, enemies can still one-shot you if you're playing a squishier class. Often, this area will appear near the start of your run.

The landscape itself seems arranged odiously. Unlike the basic map, where you can more or less walk a straight line from point A to B, there are portions of The Forsaken Hollows that are divided by giant chasms of death. It's hard to tell sometimes when there's solid ground below you — especially if you're trying to outrun the storm. Many areas are designed so densely, you can spend entire minutes just trying to figure out how to leave. The number of times I've had my entire team wipe because we all confidently launched ourselves off a cliff is hilarious. I've yet to experience a run where someone didn't lose a level somewhere along the line.

As if that weren't enough,........

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