With Elden Ring Nightreign, FromSoftware added just a little agility to Elden Ring’s controls, and then it added more and more until players became the cliff-jumping, marathon-sprinting, castle-scaling athletes that they are today. Inventive players have used the game’s expansive and forgiving climbing system to find parkour shortcuts all over the map, and one player has cooked up a new one that I’m adding to my personal cheat sheet just below the ever-reliable castle corner jump.
Reddit user Scott_Yeung shared a short clip of him scaling a fort facade with Revenant – funnily enough, the smallest playable character in Nightreign, though I suppose tiny feet could be a good thing when dealing with tiny footholds. “In case you didn’t know this shortcut,” they said, demonstrating one of the most ridiculous and convoluted shortcuts I’ve seen so far. (I tried to embed the video, but Reddit embeds have been broken for days.)
“Bro thinks he’s playing Assassin’s Creed,” one player said in the replies.
“OF COURSE I don’t know this shortcut!!” another wrote.
The short version of the shortcut is this: scale the rubble to the right of a fort gate, use it to leap onto the thin stone framing around the gate itself, then launch off of that up to a small stone window and then a pillar on the left side. From there, you should be able to reach the top of the fort itself. When in doubt, hit the jump button like it owes you money.
This shortcut is a cool demonstration of what Nightreign’s movement system is capable of, but it comes with a few caveats. Firstly, locked forts are pretty easy to scale the intended way by just running up the interior staircase accessed via the basement past the usual merchant spawn point. Secondly, this route misses the interior treasure chest spawn entirely. And thirdly, this shortcut looks extremely easy to screw up, and a single fall and do-over would probably add more time than what you would’ve spent taking the traditional, guaranteed route up.
All of that being said, I live for micro-optimizations in Nightreign, and if you were in a dead-heat rush to kill a fort boss as fast as possible, this would probably be the way to do it. Will I try it the next time I play Nightreign? Absolutely. Will I fall flat on my face, and fall afoul of my own third stipulation? Almost certainly.