The most ambitious 'Dark Souls' mod ever now has a demo

It's now been over 5 years since the release of Dark Souls 3, the last "proper" Souls game, and some of us are jonesing for a new one. (Yes, Elden Ring comes out in a month, but that's a long time to wait!)

Luckily for us, the Dark Souls dev community has been hard at work on an ambitious new mega-mod called Nightfall. But while Nightfall won't make its previously-announced release date of January 2022, the modders have released a demo to hold us over until Elden Ring hits store shelves, and it looks pretty damn cool. While we don't know the new release date of Nightfall yet, Grimrukh has stated that it will come out after Elden Ring.

Watch out for the moon — A collaboration between many notable figures in the Dark Souls modding community, including Daughters of Ash creator Grimrukh, prolific coder Meowmaritus, and lore sage Zullie the Witch, Nightfall bills itself as a fan-made sequel to the original Dark Souls. It mixes in mechanics from other From Software games — such as Bloodborne's rally system — along with a time loop inspired by Majora's Mask.

Unlike many other Dark Souls 1 mods, Nightfall will only be available for the remastered version of the game on PC. The demo starts in an area that looks a lot like the original game's Demon Ruins, before proceeding into Darkroot Garden. Based on LobosJr.'s video playthrough, the mod contains some surprising mechanics, such as the ability to ride the weird skeleton dogs from Tomb of the Giants. (Yes, really.)

A menagerie of mods — While it took many years for the Dark Souls modding community to figure out how to modify the game on even a basic level, there are quite a few notable mods for each game these days. Dark Souls 3 has Cinders and The Convergence, which both add a lot of new goodies to the game, and Dark Souls 2 boasts Seeker of Fire and Augur of Darkness.

If you're interested in Nightfall, installing it is fairly easy, as you simply need to apply the game's files to a fresh install of Dark Souls: Remastered. However, you want to make sure that you're in offline mode before you install or play it, or you might get flagged as a cheater. If you're more of a Dark Souls 3 fan, check out the mod Archthrones, which aims to add mechanics like world tendency from Demon's Souls to the most recent game in the series.