, the story-driven, sanity-testing sandbox survival game from developer DRAGO Entertainment, embraces the bitter chill of a brutal winter as it launches on PC via Steam Early Access.
Nightingale Early Access Review in Progress
24.02.2024 - 01:15 / ign.com
Nightingale is a game of fascinating contradictions. While I’m still early on in the Early Access version of this co-op survival crafting game, it’s already jumping wildly between intriguing and confusing, aesthetically pleasing and outright ugly, intuitive and obtuse. It does a lot right, and I can see the potential of building a life from the ground up in this mysterious land – but it also does a lot wrong, particularly with how much time and effort it takes to make meaningful progress. I have a lot more to play before I put a score on this review, but so far I can’t quite tell if Nightingale's rough spots will eventually become part of its charm or hold its otherwise interesting ideas back.
Nightingale takes place in a gaslamp fantasy world, a Victorian almost-steampunk-but-with-magic setting that feels fresh and unique in this genre – sure, games like Dishonored or The Order 1886 have tried out similar styles, but it’s still a seldom used enough framework that really stood out to me here. Earth as we know it is being swallowed up by a strange fog, and people are scattered across realms of the Fae, mythical beings pulled from European Folklore. As a "Realmwalker," you have the ability to travel from one realm to another, which puts you on the search to find the magical city of Nightingale, the last refuge of humanity.
The mysterious Fae Puck acts as your guide on that quest, first helping you to activate a portal and escape to a far off forest realm. Puck stands out as a fascinating character, and his flowery olde tyme language is an early highlight, particularly thanks to how well it is performed.
After a whirlwind tour of short, tutorial-driven visits to a desert and swamp realm, I was dropped in the woods at the base of a large stone structure where some NPCs had set up their own camp. Curious, I made my way there and struck up a conversation with the three of them: a shopkeep, laborer, and an exposition dumping traveler. It was disappointing when I discovered that, unlike Puck, they were voiceless. That left me reading paragraphs of text any time I took on a quest or just wanted a conversation from that point on.
That disparity is a good example of the inconsistent quality prevalent across the parts of Nightingale I’ve seen so far. The character creator, for example, has surprising depth, allowing for impressive customization of minute details like tooth decay, or extensive family trees whose genetic lineage can be applied to your appearance… but the end results of those interesting options always seem to look like they are models formed from clay, rather than believable faces.
Crafting is similarly promising, but with a big caveat. Gathering materials to begin the typical climb from a destitute
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