The original Dark Souls was very much a revolutionary game, taking many of the mechanics and design sensibilities of Demon’s Souls and refining them into a winning formula that’s still beloved to this day. The popularity of Dark Souls has ensured it has a thriving modding community, and one ambitious team is on the cusp of a major release. In this guide, we’ll explain how to download and install the Dark Souls: Nightfall demo.
Dark Souls: Nightfall is a massive modding project that essentially uses the original game’s assets and engine to build a brand new campaign from the ground up. According to an explanation offered on the blog of one of the modders, Grimrukh, Nightfall features an original story with new characters and bosses in a newly built game world. The mod is built around a touched-up, faster-paced combat system that takes inspiration from one of the team’s favorite games, The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. The team isn’t quite done putting everything together yet; they’re a little too excited about Elden Ring to focus on work. In the meantime, though, they have managed to assemble a demo version for Nightfall that anyone can download and play to get a feel for the changes before the main release.
How to Download and Install Dark Souls Nightfall Demo
To install the Dark Souls: Nightfall demo
- Download the mod and extract its contents
- Run the installer and guide it to the Dark Souls executable
- Let the mod install, then run the game
Before anything else, it should go without saying that you need to own Dark Souls: Remastered on Steam and have it installed on your computer. It has to be the remastered version; this won’t work with the old Prepare to Die Edition.
Download Dark Souls Nightfall
Next, you’ll need to download the mod. Grimrukh has a download for the installer hosted on Mega up on their blog. They’re planning on hosting the installer on Nexus in the future, and did previously have a page set up with a link redirect, though Nexus has temporarily delisted it. Anyway, follow Grimrukh’s link and download the mod installer. It’s 1.3GB, so as long as your internet isn’t terrible, it shouldn’t take too long.
Run the Installer
The installer is stored in a .zip file, so you’ll need to open it with a program like 7-Zip or WinRar. Make a new folder in your computer’s storage, preferably somewhere you can easily find, and extract the file’s contents to it. At this point, you should open Steam and go offline; you don’t want the game verifying its files while you’re tinkering with them.
Go to the folder where you extracted the mod files and run NightfallMod.exe. This will launch the mod installer (complete with a lovely ASCII logo), and prompt you to identify the file path of the game’s executable, which should be titled DarkSoulsRemastered.exe. You can find the game’s vanilla files by opening your Steam library, right-clicking Dark Souls: Remastered in the list, and clicking Properties. Go to the local files tab and click the Browse button, and an Explorer window will open with the files. Grab the exe file, paste it into the installer, and wait a moment for it to catch up. You should then get a prompt to press the 1 key to begin installation.
Launch Dark Souls
Let the installer do its business, and when it’s finished, launch Dark Souls: Remastered and you should be greeted with the Nightfall menu.
