Nightingale Preview – Strong Foundation, Weak Landing

Nightingale was in pretty much every “most expected games for 2024” that I came across since late last year. It would be an understatement to say that reception has been rough, and this is not without cause. However, I’m glad I decided to give it some more time before writing up this preview since the team at Inflexion Games was quick to release a number of patches over the first few weeks of the Early Access. 

With that being said, Nightingale is still an overall rougher experience that you may want to fiddle with at the moment, which makes it all the more frustrating that, looking past the glaring issues and problems, you do get a glimpse of the brilliant parts of the equation that sometimes shine under all the grime. 

Nightingale is available on Steam Early Access for US $29.99

Story – Fantastical World Jumping

So, what the titular “Nightingale” is, is a place, where you are striving to reach. The way you traverse the world in the game is one of the interesting concepts Inflexion is playing with, especially for a survival game. You collect or craft or are given these cards that you feed into a machine next to a portal. The cards you use will determine the type and size of biome that you’ll get to visit. 

Portals between realms

Some of these are designed to be smaller junctions in between larger areas, and visiting them is an opportunity to farm the resources of the specific biome for your crafting. This whole world jumping idea is not necessarily new, but it does offer a twist to the survival scene. 

While in your survival journey, you are aided at first by a curious character called Puck. He’s also the cryptic narrator and the main source of exposition. His demeanor is posh and with a lot of flare in his speech, which I was pleasantly surprised to not entirely hate. All too often posh characters miss the mark and are just plain unlikable, but Puck is quite alright.

Gameplay – Doesn’t Quite Land

Nightingale is an ambitious title. From the early trailers we all saw, you wouldn’t be blamed for expecting a refined survival experience with an English flare and dress-up, from what little you can appreciate in the trailers as far as style goes. In reality, Nightingale tries to walk a fine line in between survival and exploration and maybe some adventure sprinkled on top. 

Building in Nightingale is streamlined and easier than in other titles. Also a bit more restrictive

And don’t get me wrong, I like all three of those genres. I was just torn at times trying to wrap my mind around what the game was trying to be, since it’s mainly split in between wondrous exploration and simplified crafting/survival. From that last sentence you can probably gather that I think the exploration side is better than the survival, and you wouldn’t be entirely off. 

And it’s not that the survival-crafting side of it is bad, because it isn’t. But it’s so streamlined and polished that it sometimes felt like a chore on top of a chore to get the camp going or try and find resources and I found myself thinking that maybe a more exploration focused with light crafting would have worked better. It’s on the moments where you are willing to ignore the beautiful world around you that you can get into the survival-crafting side of the game. 

Graphics & Sound – Marvelous and Bland

Inflexion took a page from other recent survivals also still in Early Access and made sure you always had something to look at. It wasn’t until about half an hour in that it occurred to me to look up at the sky and I was blown away by the plethora of colors and flashy elements they have going on there, at least graphically. 

A lot of sights in Nightingale are spectacular

The world is equally fantastic, with industrial looking towers raising behind tree lines, a ship’s mast crowning a small landlocked hill, what looked like a settlement inside a giant’s monster head… the worldbuilding that Nightingale has going on is one that has you constantly imagining some epic scenes that could have happened in this world years or centuries prior. 

Sound-wise, however, the game falls flat. There is constantly some relaxed music playing and then the tribal drums come out when you are fighting. Some different musical themes depending on the biome and zone you are in, too. I ended playing music on the background for most of my runes, still making sure to turn it off occasionally to see if the music was improving but it never did. Hopefully something they can improve for the proper launch?

It’s worth taking a break and looking up, especially at night

An Enjoyable, Albeit Buggy Experience

So, is Nightingale for you? Well, as most things in life, it depends. Nightingale in its current state offers a beautiful world to look at and explore and let your imagination run wild. It also offers interesting mechanics like a double quickbar for each of your hands, and a somewhat unique control scheme to use either one, and the realm traveling premise is interesting, for sure. 

The developer has also been hard at work since the Early Access begun. This is not surprising since they were pretty active on the game’s page even since before the game launched, which, now that I look back to the notes, they actually launched ahead of what they intended, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they wished to have stayed with their original dates. 

Exploration is rewarded

If you go back to the community page on Steam you can see that since February 21st, they have been patching the game sometimes even multiple times a day, which is commendable. You can also find messages from the CEO regarding developments and such, which I applaud. 

However, the most glaring issue with Nightingale is not one single thing in particular that you can easily overlook and push through, and while I celebrate the developer being so invested in the upgrade and betterment of the experience, the fact of the matter, is that playing Nightingale makes you feel like you are playing a solid Early Access game one second, only to make you feel like you are paying a Beta the next. 

Combat is rather simplistic

From my sessions in the game, a lot of issues were addressed like odd animations or sounds and weird alignment issues with some of the building assets and things like that. Some others weren’t as promptly addressed, and having the shadows move in a blocky fashion instead of slide with the sunset or having your screen turn suddenly almost entirely black for a few secs when the nights started or watching a tree trunk weirdly spawn over where you were cutting as the tree-falling animation never completed a fall… those were jarring. 

There is plenty to enjoy in Nightingale, but it is, as I said above, mostly buried under a lot of grime. If you are patient and don’t mind a rougher experience or will likely get the game when it releases fully but want to take advantage of the Early Access price, then it’s worth it. If you are easily annoyed by graphical bugs and a lingering sensation of beta testing, then you should probably hold off for now.

Nightingale was previewed on PC with a code provided by ICO Partners.