Nightingale has a cool elevator pitch- what if folks from the Victorian era are stranded in a world filled with wildlife and possibly eldritch horror? When developers Inflexion Games announced the game, I was intrigued. What is this development, made up of many ex-Bioware veterans, cooking?
I spent a couple of hours in a preview build of Nightingale ahead of Early Access to see if I can answer that question. At the end of it, I still am not sure what the answer is, but I’m still curious to play more.
For the uninitiated, Nightingale is a survival game. You have to cook to eat to live, and craft to make tools, weapons, a home base, and the materials that comes with it. And the world is procedurally generated.
But there is some twists to this formula. Players take on the role of a Realmwalker, folks that manage to flee Earth and seek refuge in different, fantastical realms as the world is said to have collapse with only the city of Nightingale remain standing. The open world isn’t big, but traveling to different realms- different procedural open-world maps- is part of the gameplay loop here. And the realms you visit require the use of a Realm Card (to determine the biome), a Major card (to determine the main theme and challenge) before you can open a portal to a new Realm- a tiny island that’s procedurally generated in some form. Later on, you can also augment the realm with Minor cards. These cards need to be found or crafted.
There’s also a pretty strong story hook to it. The tutorial will walk you though not only the basics of surviving, but also give you some cryptic hints of what’s happening in the greater gaslamp world. There’s an air of snootiness- which means it’s capturing the vibe of what we think of now as the Victorian era well. And it’s not just snooty British people that is part of the world- one chain of text logs is a journal of written by someone who speaks Malay or Indonesian. They refer to their lover as “sayang”. That’s enough to get me, who hails from Malaysia, invested.
After the tutorial, you’ll be set on an Abbeyan Realm. This rather calm realm is where you build your permanent base, your estate as it refers in the game. The game slows down in pace rather significantly here, as you will be required to not only do a long trek across the map, but also craft a whole set of gear to raise your gear score.
You read that right: there’s gear score in Nightingale. The game supports co-op play up to 5 players, and promises that progression is “character-based”. And apparently this is what that means. Certain content are gated until you have enough gear score, so you’ll be doing a lot of gathering and crafting. No farming, in the literal sense that is. You can fish and hunt animals.
And by content, I mean exploring points of interest. Around the map in each realm are these points of interest where you can engage in either combat encounters or simple puzzles. The puzzles I’ve seen includes the usual “Simon Says” variety of memorising a simple pattern. Though I do spot one particular point of interest that seems out of reach, unless I Fortnite-style build my way up there.
If you die, you only drop your inventory, but not the equipped items (5 slots for the main hand, 5 on the off hand, and all the gear slots). Gear requires upkeep by spending essence to repair them and you can basically turn any resource you have, preferably excess ones, into essence. Handy if you accidentally hoard one too many crude sticks that you can’t stop picking up. Gear score improves by not only crafting better tools and gear, but also upgrading them and infusing them with various passives.
The time-to-gun in Nightingale is way more than 20 by my experience if you don’t count the simple crossbow-esque slingshot. But expect to spend a long, long time before your dashing explorer can regal in tweed apparel and shiny Lancaster pistols. But the tools you have in the early game are interestingly double as different weapon archetypes. Pickaxes are good at hitting prone enemies with its downward swings while climbing picks allows you to essentially have dual-wield daggers.
Another interesting feature Nightingale has is a follower system. You can recruit a follower to help you out, essentially having an NPC that can help mine, craft, or be a pack mule as you hoard too many stone blocks and plant fibers.
Speaking of hoarding, I have some bones to pick on Nightingale. The inventory system bothers me. In some games, you have an infinite amount of items you can carry but you are limited in weight, others limit your inventory by size as you can only carry a certain amount of stacks. So which system does Nightingale use? Both.
So you are limited in both amount of unique items, and by weight. The worst thing about it is the UI not making it clear that both quantity and weight matters. By default, the numbers you see next to an item in a stack, but you have no idea how a stack weighs unless you switch the sorting on the regular, which is cumbersome. And there’s no way to see at a glance how may items you have in that stack.
And this leads to another peculiarity in Nightingale. The way crafting works is that you pick an ingredient type to fulfill that recipe. So, a recipe may ask for leather. However, you can craft leather using different materials and they technically produce different kinds of leather. In this case, you can craft leather using pelts from prey animals and leather from predators. When crafting, when it asks you to supply two leathers, you can’t mix-and-match. The two leathers must be a stack of leather (prey) or leather (predator) and I may have spent an hour just couldn’t craft a new pair of breeches because of this. I keep staring at my inventory and it says there I have two leather (prey) and two leather (predator) but I still can’t craft it- only to realise the number 2 there represents overall weight.
What I’m trying to say with this specific example is that Nightingale’s UI isn’t fool-proof yet. And yes, I am the fool in this particular example, survival games are not my forte and I reckon experienced players should be able to parse the information the UI is presenting with no issues.
Would this particular situation will happen to you when the game launches in Early Access? Hopefully not. The preview build is an early version of the game rather than representative of what the Early Access release will be.
And one last note: the building mechanics are as good as you’d expect. You plop down blueprints- so that in a group you can have a designated architect while everyone else just gather the right materials. Crafting stations and various objects gets buffed or debuffed based on its placement- placing crafting stations that craft textiles together and they’ll produce strings and wicks faster, for example.
Closing Thoughts
Nightingale has the fundamentals of a competent survival game, though it needs a few more passes in some elements like the UI. Its unique hooks truly are unique. The strong worldbuilding and the gear score system should give more purpose and direction to the usual hunting and gathering gameplay.
Will it stand tall against a sea of an evermore overcrowded space that is multiplayer survival games, all vying for attention? Only time will tell. Even if my experience with the preview build isn’t necessarily ideal, I’m still curious to see how the game continues to take form as it launches in Early Access in February 20, and how it develops into a full release.
Played on PC. Preview key provided by the publisher.