Elden Ring Nightreign Parkour Spots Are Marked In White

Elden Ring Nightreign Parkour Spots Are Marked In White



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Summary

  • With Sekiro-style movement, Elden Ring Nightreign also has subtle white chalk to mark climbable spots.
  • This is FromSoftware’s answer to ‘yellow paint’, a controversial way to clearly signpost interactable elements of a game that might get lost in the noise of realistic graphics.

As games veer evermore into realism, it gets harder to make out what’s part of the scenery and what’s not. The loose bricks in old Assassin’s Creed games or the polygons plastered on top of hand-painted backgrounds in Final Fantasy were obvious, but it’s getting difficult to make out what’s interactable with each generation.

The solution? Yellow paint, which isn’t always yellow, and isn’t always paint. We saw this more literally in Horizon Zero Dawn with cliff edges that you could climb marked in yellow, clearly signposting a path. And we saw it in Resident Evil 4 Remake where even barrels and boxes were splattered in the stuff. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, a less traditional FromSoftware soulslike, introduced a ‘yellow paint’ of its own, though it was subtle enough to fly under the radar.

Sekiro uses far more subdued white chalk to mark ledges you can climb up and hang onto. The game’s movement was a huge step forward for FromSoftware, introducing a dedicated jump button, grappling hook, and fluid parkour, and so white chalk was used to guide players from area to area more clearly. Elden Ring Nightreign, the roguelite spin-off to Hidetaka Miyazaki and George R. R. Martin’s seminal open-world soulslike, has movement far closer to Sekiro’s, so it also uses subtle white chalk to mark climbable spots.

White Chalk And Parkour Return

Elden Ring Nightreign witch leaping off a cliff.

Elden Ring Nightreign isn’t just a roguelite, it also has battle royale elements with its Fortnite-inspired Ring of Fire. Across the three days of each match, the circle closes in until an Erdtree appears above the final boss in the final zone. Get caught in the circle at any point and you take damage. This makes exploration far more rapid pace than the comparatively laid-back Elden Ring.

With more pressure piled on top, there are some key changes: every map marker appears at the start, there’s no fall damage, and you can parkour. If you fall into a ravine, you won’t get stuck finding a way out until the circle suffocates you. Instead, there are key spots marked with white chalk that you can scale up. In the above image, you can see one such spot, the escalating stairway of graves.

The white chalk on each ledge is more pronounced up close, but after an hour or so, you’ll see those graves piled against a cliff and immediately recognise them as a way up. They, and the white chalk scrawled along their edges, make the improved movement of Elden Ring Nightreign feel far more intuitive. And hopefully it’s subtle enough to avoid the usual complaints yellow paint so often brings.

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Systems

Released

2025

Developer(s)

From Software

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