Nightingale raised eyebrows when it was first revealed at 2022’s The Game Awards thanks to its developer, Inflexion Games, boasting developers from series like Far Cry, Dragon Age, and Mass Effect. Now, it’s in early access, giving players a mystical new Victorian world to explore. However, Nightingale‘s state at launch leaves it struggling to follow in the wake of other recent survival game releases.
The most immediately striking element of Nightingale is its setting. Players step into the role of realmwalkers, survivors of an apocalyptic event on Earth who adventure through other realms in search of an enclave of survivors known as Nightingale. Along the way, they build sprawling estates, slay strange creatures, and craft gear to improve their abilities.
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Nightingale‘s Victorian flavor serves as a foundational reference point for players. While they play, players wear frock coats and wield early firearms to stay close to their human roots. This is then contrasted by the pure strangeness of the worlds that players visit. Players will go to dozens of different realms as they play, with each being procedurally generated to include imaginatively alien creatures and unique landscapes. You will find the most fun in Nightingale when you are exploring a new world, seeing the strange inhabitants and vistas it holds.
To visit different realms, players use Nightingale‘s unique card system. Players collect cards that can then be combined to generate realms at portals with different traits and biomes. With this system, you are able to seek particular resources or enemies before returning to your base to rest and get upgrades. The card system works well to give players control over their progress through the game, and finding new cards to experiment with is always exciting. It contributes to the exploration that makes Nightingale feel special, but it is so buried under the rest of the game that it cannot elevate the rest of the experience.
Apart from its unique card system, Nightingale is built around the usual three tenets of survival games: resource gathering, building, and combat. The game has interesting ideas within each element but stumbles more than it succeeds.
To start, resource gathering. Players collect resources by picking them up from the ground or harvesting them with tools like axes. Higher-tier resources can only be harvested with higher-tier equipment, creating a standard gameplay loop of gathering and upgrading to gather more. However, the disrupting visual glitches that plague the activity hampered Gathering in Nightingale. Trees jitter awkwardly to the ground before popping into logs. Rocks pop into a clipping soup of indiscernible chunks. Resource gathering, at its best, is a relaxing, even immersive experience, but the constant visual issues make the process feel awkward more than anything.
Once you’ve gathered a healthy number of resources, you’ll want to use them to build something. The building systems of Nightingale are constructed on top of a familiar foundation. Players have various lights, walls, stairs, and foundations to pick from that all snap together. I was frustrated with the mechanic’s stringent placement rules, but it works well enough overall.
The interesting part of Nightingale‘s building comes from its estate mechanics. Rather than just building a base players construct proper Victorian estates with helpers, comforts, and displays of affluence. The building typically has ancillary elements like decorations or furniture other than a bed, increase the estate’s comfort level. The more comfortable the estate, the better buffs and effects players get from using it. The estates work wonders to encourage players to really invest in every element of building. But it also leads to extreme difficulties in making creative or less conventional bases.
Nightingale‘s biggest flounder comes in its third tenet, the combat. Despite how varied and inspired its creature designs are, fighting them is often a chore. Melee combat feels weightless as players wildly flail weapons without being able to register hits. Meanwhile, firearms take seemingly forever to unlock. Even once you do craft them, they feel underwhelming and clunky. Overall, combat lacks variety. You might come across dozens of different types of enemies throughout the realms but fighting them feels homogenous.
Nightingale is starting in an okay place as an early-access title. With time and some polish, Nightingale could capitalize on its unique setting and strong core mechanics to stand out from its peers. In its current state, however, Nightingale is a tough sell. For players who love its aesthetic or the genre overall, Nightingale likely has enough on offer that is worth exploring. For others, though, it is likely better to wait for the developer’s planned updates and improvements to be released.
Nightingale is now available for early access on PC.
