Your First Nodusfall Contract

This walkthrough is built from GameRant’s, Inven’s, and PC Gamer’s notes of the same demo chain. When a paragraph is mostly one outlet’s words, that outlet is named so a reader can audit the claim. Nothing here is invented; the goal is to let a first-time player picture what a contract looks like before they sit down for the next beta.

Read this alongside Getting Started for orientation, Co-op Combat for the verbs, Hunt Dreadnodi for boss specifics, and Controls for the buttons.

The hour before the contract

GameRant’s session opened with a character select: four designed heroes with MMO archetypes. The earliest minutes were a very short tutorial covering attacks and abilities in brief detail. If you have ever read the Famitsu kit summary, that tutorial is the same one the Japanese press received a day earlier.

You spawn into a hub area. GameRant called it “a kind of treehouse-like hub area”; creator coverage mentioned hot springs and visible other players if you waited in the public square. There are no daily quests and no shop where you spend energy on a leash. The hub is mostly a staging area. Pick a contract off the board; that is the entire onboarding.

Nodusfall Gamescom hands-on gameplay from 4Gamer

The contract board

GameRant’s writer specifically said the team had to head to an in-game notice board to pick the contract. Press this, it gives you a target, you can ride to it. Inven’s party did the same in a dressed venue near Koelnmesse and stayed on the same flow.

This is the place where the social layer lives. The board is also where you decide to solo queue or squad up. Until matchmaking specifics ship, treat the board as the only guaranteed source of contracts in pre-release builds.

The mount ride

Most contracts in the booth demo opened with a mount ride to the mark. Not a fast-travel screen and not a hub teleport. A real, on-foot of a beast, ride between regions. TechNode’s writeup calls the same moment a traversal scene; Inven called it the start of the hunt proper.

When you see the first beast, you may already be inside the contract. GameRant’s first boss was waiting at the base of a waterfall; the ride ended where the arena started. There was no “teleport into a sub-zone” transition in press footage.

Boss one, the waterfall bruiser

GameRant called the first boss Cleaver Fellstone. The press’s coinage, not a HUD name. A heavy-set creature at the base of a waterfall; four Weavers dismount; the tank rushes in; the ranged Weavers rain from the backline. The Hexsworn sat with nothing to do because nobody on the squad was taking damage yet.

This is the easiest of the three in any preview set. Even so, GameRant’s writer noted that a poorly-prepared team could find it boring — boss design also rewards you for knowing what to look at, not just for arriving on schedule. If you walk away from a hunt saying “it was fine,” check that you were actually chasing the boss mechanic, not just teleporting to the next pinch.

Boss two, the cavern lion

Famitsu called this one チョンチー, GameRant romanised it as Qionqi. A winged horned lion in an underground cavern. AoE on every swing, four players layering their own VFX on top of telegraphs, the tank’s normal pattern obscured by the floor and the wing geometry. GameRant’s party died more on this one than on the others.

The clean finish the press reported: the tank’s Divine Skill transformed the party into a tall knight for a cinematic finisher that beheaded the lion. GameRant’s writer was uncertain whether that finisher was a fixed health-bar trigger or an activated prompt. Until a published breakdown says otherwise, assume the finisher is opt-in: a window that opens when the boss is low, a button prompt you must press, an animation you must commit to.

Boss three, the dragon and rider

GameRant’s closing fight was a black dragon paired with an armored rider. The press comparison was to Dark Souls 3’s King of Storm and the Nameless King. The dragon’s AoE plus the rider’s lance damage forced the Hexsworn to actually heal, and the support’s three-secondary passive became the loop: chip damage, empowered ability, heal through a swing or ice-beam for damage.

Important press footnote: a bow player met the same Maldrake duel without the rider. The horse-style knight had dismounted earlier in the chain, so the bow player fought a clean two-target arena. Plan your party loadouts around whether you expect to arrive at the dragon inside a chain or as the day’s closer.

The execution prompt

Across all three encounters, the press consistently described a party-finisher prompt. One player starts a cinematic execution; the others are given a prompt to lock in. GameRant explicitly said they were unsure whether the original opener stays in third-person or in cinematic camera; the follower windows vary.

Creator footage of the Fire Drake fight showed on-screen text reading “waiting to join execution.” That string is the only direct HUD quote the press has printed. Treat the prompt as the party mechanic the demo was built to showcase.

Loot and the loop hook

Defeating the Dreadnodi pays out materials used to unlock weapons, skills, and the Divine Skill for your kit. That is the long-term progression on display in Gamescom. There is no gacha-style banner.

If your build depends on a specific Divine Skill, the loop is: hunt the Dreadnodi whose power matches your goal, harvest the materials, and unlock the skill at the bench. The “Slay, Forge, Build, Evolve” feature copy makes that progression the headline arc of launch.

Hub return

Footage after a kill looped back to the hub. There is no formal boss-rush ladder in press copy. The cycle is contract, ride, fight, return, swap roles, repeat. The demo built that cycle as a circle, not a list.

What this walkthrough does not cover

There is no public enemy-resist chart, no per-boss loot table, no published cooldown number for the Divine Skills, no confirmed party finder interface, no matchmaking spec. When a published breakdown ships any of that, this walkthrough inherits it second; the verb lists in combat get it first.