Nightingale is a brand new survival craft to enter early access, allowing players to test and experience the game as it progresses. While absolutely packed with potential, some serious problems held back my enjoyment of the game. While the developers have promised to address many of these issues, we can be sure that Nightingale will go a long way before its full release. Many of these problems have yet to be addressed.
Nightingale immediately captures your imagination with both its visuals and its setting. As you’ll quickly learn, the game sees our frail human players attempting to survive the whimsical, wild, and supremely dangerous realms of the Fae, otherworldly beings that do not follow our laws of physics. Guided by your caretaker, Puck, you venture across multiple realms of strange and breathtakingly beautiful environments to prove yourself and survive.
Everything about how the game presents itself is utterly unique and highly interesting. You won’t see environments, enemies, armor sets, weapons, or anything like what Nightingale offers anywhere else.
The presentation of the game can, at times, be a bit too overwhelming. This is especially true regarding the game’s UI, which is complicated, to say the least, and not the most straightforward with the information it’s trying to share. You have to manually click close every time you craft something to exit the UI, as there are no hotkeys to close the menus.
Alongside the game’s unique setting are some interesting takes on survival craft mechanics. One such system allows you to build the blueprint of a structure and then add the resources needed to complete the entire build at once, rather than making each piece one at a time.
One of these unique mechanics is the Essence currency, which can be acquired from anything in the game. Kill a wolf? Get essence. Have a bundle of 100 sticks? Convert it into essence. It’s a cool way to add a mystical vibe to the game and reward you for interacting with several aspects of the survival-craft gameplay. Unfortunately, however, there are multiple tiers of the essence, and you can’t convert lower essence into higher. Basically, a hundred pennies does not equal a dollar, no matter how much you would imagine it should.
Upgrading your base is kind of a hassle because you can’t just replace what you’ve already built with new, better recipes, forcing you to tear your base down without destroying the many, many (way too many, honestly) crafting benches you make during your journey.
The combat, honestly, feels a bit uninspired. Picture Skyrim, where you more or less mindlessly swing your weapon at an enemy until you deplete your stamina bar and wait for it to recharge (which happens in gathering with tools, too.) The power level of gear is kind of unbalanced, with you going from doing hardly any damage to one-shotting foes after one upgrade, though you’re never quite strong enough not to get one-shot by another enemy yourself.
While the game has a mix of great visuals, mechanics I like and mechanics I don’t, I can’t say I had too much time to experience them, as most of the time I spent playing Nightingale looked like this:
One glaring issue I have with Nightingale’s current build is its reliance on a constant connection with the game’s servers and the accompanying issues.
In my time with Nightingale, I consistently lost connection to the game servers through some network error. If I’m being totally honest, I really don’t blame my connection for this issue; I’m hardwired straight into my network adapter and set up to run games professionally—It is, after all, my job. Yet I consistently had issues staying connected to Nightgale’s servers, which severely impacted my ability to play the game.
When you lose connection to Nightingale’s servers, you’re returned to the game’s main menu and forced to reconnect to your game. This consistently stopped my progress, and at certain checkpoints, it would boot me out just before something I had already done, making me retrace my steps. An especially notable example was when I was at the end of the game’s tutorial, passing through the final portal and getting the game’s title cutscene. I had to sit through it about four times before I could get into the game properly.
Despite a setback to my progress and a big annoyance, this was indicative of something that really bothered me about Nightingale. It would appear to be a live service game then, not just suggesting you play online but requiring it. Without an internet connection, you cannot play the game.
That means no offline play, no solo play, no experiencing the game without jumping into an online server. Granted, I didn’t research to see if you can make your game private, but that really isn’t the point here.
Nightingale, in its current early access game, is a $30 release. I should under no circumstances be required to be connected to the internet to enjoy it. This, I feel, is especially true for the genre; Some of my best experiences in games like Conan Exiles, 7 Days to Die, and other survival crafts have been offline, especially when the game has such an emphasis on story content and PVE or exploration… like Nightingale does.
To the credit of the developers, they have addressed that this will change, saying:
“Co-operative gameplay associated with having party members across multiple Realms was the more technically challenging problem and therefore the one we chose to tackle first. Looking back on that decision, we misjudged what some of you were looking for in your experience. We are now prioritizing and developing an offline mode that we plan to release as soon as feasible.”
Implementation of this feature would greatly change my experience with Nightingale. However, while I tried to give the devs time to put it in, it is at the time of writing ten days after my deadline for this article, and I simply cannot wait any longer. While I hope to see what the game will be with this issue fixed, I simply cannot omit how seriously it affected my enjoyment and ability to play it.
Pros:
- It is an incredibly unique setting with an uninteresting, whimsical, and mysterious story to tell.
- Beautiful graphics that capture the strange awe of the Faelands
- Developers who seem to listen to community feedback and are already addressing some of the issues in this review
Cons:
- A current reliance on online play and a faulty server system that prevents access to the game
- Poor balance in an already pretty uninteresting combat system
- Busy, hard-to-navigate UI
- An overabundance of crafting stations and resource requirements can make the game feel grindy