Elden Ring Nightreign artist wanted part of the game to feel ‘more cozy, more welcoming, more at home,’ so naturally she drew on Dark Souls for inspiration

You might not have much time to take in the atmosphere in Elden Ring Nightreign while you’re speedrunning between boss fights, but more attention and detail was put into the world design than you might expect for a spin-off game that reuses so many assets from the 2022 hit.

FromSoftware Environmental Artist Saori Mizuno dug into those details in a recent interview with IGN, where she revealed all the considerations that went into creating Limveld, as well as where she and her team drew inspiration from.

As its name suggests, Nightreign takes the bulk of its inspiration from Elden Ring, but the designers tried to put a fresh spin on a world that’s already deeply familiar to many players.

Mizuno explained, “We didn’t want to make it feel too different from Elden Ring, as it used that as a base for the design and the setting. One specific direction [we] did get early on was to create something that at first feels and looks familiar and gradually transforms into the unfamiliar and into the unknown.”

To do that, they leaned into the game’s themes of light and dark, day and night. Like Elden Ring, Nightreign’s environments are beautiful, albeit in a sort of moody, haunting way. The designers used the looming threat of the oncoming night to amp up that haunting tone.

“Even when designing Limveld, that initial environment on the first day, I wanted it to feel beautiful, like from an outward glance, that looks beautiful and inviting, but pretty quickly you feel like something’s off or something’s not quite right,” Mizuno said.

“We wanted players to begin to almost yearn for the night, and sort of look forward to this encroaching darkness.”

Mizuno said she was also inspired by the Studio Ghibli film Spirited Away, which she says brought “this feeling of being unable to go home, unable to escape from a dream, this sort of feeling I wanted to kind of harness while designing these worlds and tried to get that through to the player.”

Like Spirited Away, Nightreign also has moments of calm and safety that contrast with the more sinister outside world, specifically in the Round Table Hold, which was brought over from Elden Ring with some tweaks.

Mizuno said this hub and rest area took inspiration from Dark Souls, explaining, “We wanted it to feel, from a design perspective, more cozy, more welcoming, more at home. One inspiration was the Firelink Shrine from Dark Souls 1, where you feel sort of more embraced by the atmosphere, you feel like you’re coming home after these hardships, after a hard-fought battle.”

The battles in Nightreign definitely are “hard-fought,” if nothing else. As much as the high level of difficulty in Nightreign can leave me frustrated, I can’t help but enjoy being in the world of Limveld. One of my first comments after jumping into the game was that I wished I had more time to explore and just take in everything.

Nightreign isn’t in the business of giving you more time for anything, though, but maybe that’s just another reason to keep coming back to it so you can see everything Limveld has to offer (and everything waiting to kill your team).