Nightingale

This game is beautiful. There's a decent bit of stuff to figure out, systems wise, but the progression is perfectly woven together in a way where you're incentivized to progress every kind of crafting. This is the only game I know of that allows you to make an incredible base with ease, and then shoot a green deer with your gun immediately after stabbing a giant yellow spider with your red hot sword made with the bones of a jabberwocky. The varieties of material types offering different bonuses offers a layer of complexity for your min-maxing munchkins, while letting the casual people still make guns or swords with only marginally reduced damage, and I think it's truly beautiful watching it all come together, making the "Hole in yo head 4000" as I dubbed my rifle. Playing with a friend makes this even easier to hypothetically open and then play for 10.6 hours straight. That doesn't even mention the look of the game. Genuinely I feel like a 15 dollar price tag is criminally low for this. The sole complaint I could level is just that early game especially, storage feels low. The variety of items make it very easy to fill several chests easily. Anyways, play this. Like, full stop, you're a fool if you don't

Not recommended. Was on the fence on buying this game, been on the fence on buying any Early Access game since the last few i did were a disappointment, studios delivering half baked games and abandoning further development should be a crime... Or at least Steam should allow it's CUSTOMERS, you know... the one's that are actually paying for stuff.. to obtain a reimbursement when that sort of thing happens.. Anyways.. ranting aside. The game has nice graphics, nice music however, quests are quite stale, go fetch resources, assist someone with building stuff... combat animations are quite bland.... I'd say it's more of an action adventure with survival. What did it for me was having my character disappear after almost 50 hours of playing. I guess if the game was good enough it wouldn't bother me as much to start from scratch once again... afterall, who hasn't replayed some good games in their life... well... this one's not going to be it.

To effectively communicate how I think Nightingale plays, I think I'll just step back and extrapolate what I think the design philosophy is, and work backwards from there. The philosophy of the design of Nightingale is to bring all of the elements of survival games to the forefront. These elements are: Exploring, Gathering, Building and Crafting. These elements are presented in an almost equal representation. This has a pendulum effect on the mechanics which I'll go on to explain, starting at the most impacted mechanic. Crafting. (Edit: A preface and point I wanted to make but forgot to is that at no point in this SURVIVAL GAME is actually surviving ever a consideration. This is Minecraft not Green Hell. I like both games but that could impact your decision). Compared to it's contemporaries, the crafting in Nightgale is a extremely complex affair and it's probably what turns a lot of average gamers off. It's just so dang bloated. There are distinctions made between crafting materials that simply do not need to be made. For example the animal hides are seperated into "Prey" and "Predator", which I think is supposed to represent a supple leather and a thick leather, but both prey and predators are attacked by other animals so their skin isnt based off that. This is to accomodate an extremely complex crafting system where if you engage with it fully you'll end up with a 5% bonus and 50 extra hp, at least in the early game. It seems really cool when you start and then when you look at the sum total of your time spent against the possible bonuses you can gain it almost always feels like a total waste of your time. I can't help but admire that I can make a sword out of basically any metal that I want, but seethe every time I open my menu and there are 16 different types of metal I need to catalogue and remember the effects of. Similarly, the hilt can be made out of a variety of woods that all have their own effects. These items might need to be processed multiple times through crafting stations such as creating a metal plate then creating a hand guard for your sword, a hilt, a shaft, a pommel or whatever unique part is required for what you're making. With automatic pulling from inventory containers in the same structure it sounds like it could be neat, but when it interacts with the gathering, a lot of the crafting ends up feeling like an endless chore. There is also a repair system that uses magic balls that drop constantly from every action so I don't really understand the point of having the repair system. It doesn't need to exist. I still use the same wood splitting axe that I bought when I moved out of home over 20 years ago. If you maintain your tools they don't explode every 72 seconds. This is some weird computer programmer only buys budget tools from supermarkets level of shenaningans. Moving on to the building, it has also been brought forward and needs to take up equal time in the gameplay loop as exploration... Which saying that alone should kind of set off some alarm bells for the average player. Unlike crafting, building doesn't pull from local containers. Your character is also extremely weight limited. So the only way to realistically build a structure in this game is to load a companion NPC with all of the materials you'll need and then pull the items from their inventory as you need, little by little. It's a bit annoying. All workstations have attached modulation items that can augment the task at hand, but thankfully these items can link to multiple stations. Having a barrel of water is useful for both your farm and your forge for example. There are still dozens of them in tiers that eventually become redundant so it can be really annoying going through the full list trying to find that melee damage item that you needed for your forge, and then going around to all your chests, getting out the materials, and one by one making these dozens of items, only to find out you don't have enough arse hair from a purple boar that has blue teeth, not one of the purple ones with orange teeth. I'm sure this is good for a player who likes building but if you aren't one of the three people in the discord of a survival game competing with streamers who have 8 people farm their materials for them to make a megastructure and just lie, this system is going to feel very bloated and annoying, especially as it handshakes with your crafting items being actually good. If you dont engage with this, you dont get items and cannot progress. This is juxtaposed against the gathering, where you can make gathering stations at your estate and just have NPCs infinitely spawn selected resources. The bulk of many survival games is in gathering the materials you need to survive because thats the deifnition of what survival is and this game just sorta... collapses all of that. That rush of serotonin, the roll of the dice on some great loot, repurposing the tools of your enemies. None of that is here. The gathering is strictly pick up rocks, sticks and fiber, hit trees with an axe or hit rocks/metal veins with a pick. That's it. Most of the time you make an NPC do that anyway. The klepomaniac power fantasy is nipped right in the bud, which can feel especially bare compared to similar indie titles like Abiotic Factor. And all of this leads to the exploration, which I'll say for clarity's sake includes the combat and hunting. Again, this is a major factor of a lot of survival games and titles like Subnautica would actually have you spend MORE of your time exploring the map than staying at your base. Not the case here at all. You'll spend 4 hours making a base so that you can make crafting stations so you can make a weapon so you have the raw stats to fight the boss who is 10 times the speed of you and had guarenteed damage, so if you DONT have those stats you'll get 1 shot and have to hit him 50 times. The exploration is delegated to an ubisoft look at the (actually really small) map and gets the nodes, then go fight the really epic boss that the combat system doesnt really allow to be interesting. It's kind of a shame because there are some cool ideas like using an umbrella in place of a glider/wing suit, and the general Victorian theme is pretty novel, though having some surrounding Gothic and late medieval styles would be nice as well. There was a time in history when a knight in full plate armour fired a flintlock pistol and developments don't happen in vacuums independent of one another. This has the effect of making your character customization feel extremely limited to a very specific style that was only relevant for a short time in history, and even then you're a caricature of one of those people. Suits are thrown on willy nilly with no consideration for the tailor of the suit, the cut, padding or making the person look like anything other that a hobo that found a suit in the dumpster. Men are not shaped like triangles pointing down and women are not shaped like hourglasses, which was the style at the time. Ultimately, this game suffers from having that post 2010s, first person melee Unreal "Feel". You can throw as many artists and writers at is as you want, you aren't going to make Avowed interesting. I'm not a designer but even I can tell this design direction is a dead end that reached it's peak 6 months after it was created. When this is over I won't be able to differentiate the experience from We Happy Few, Avowed or Dishonoured and in 12 months time I'll be googling the name of that one survival game that did that one thing that was interesting but was otherwise unremarkable. It's not terrible. It's not an asset flip. It's not unreal survival garbage ♥♥♥♥ out to try to make a buck. Someone involved in this project, at some point cared a lot, especially the artists. They were just let down by an incompetent director who doesn't know what he's making and just tried to throw spaghetti at the wall and hope most of it sticks. Most of it does not stick.

cool

Amazing idea, horrible execution. It took 30 minutes to figure out you had to do a tutorial before you can join someone else as we got constant network errors. Picking up loot from the ground feels very anoying, half the time the stuff is in the floor. Combat, climbing and all kind of different animations look very off. The UI feels very clunky to navigate. In the end, my friend and I finally got to play together. We open the first portal and I get a connection error again. Both steam code and join code did not work anymore not allowing us to play duo

Constant disconnects while playing multiplayer

Do you want to play this game alone? hmm.. lets set you up on a laggy server. WHY??? Laggy servers are ruining my single player experience. PLEASE just let me play offline!

I was trudging through the swamp in nice clothes gathering plants when it started to hail. I pulled out my umbrella and continued wading through the water. Suddenly a pair of hippos ambushed me and charged. I pulled out my sword and proceeded to duel two hippos in a swamp while wearing nice clothes in a hail storm with my umbrella. A few trees were toppled in the fight that ensued. Not your typical AAA trope or clone. The pros: 1. Fun game mechanics 2. Very unique and creative 3. Deeper crafting system then most survival games 4. Estate system is pretty cool The Cons 1. There seems to only be multiple variations of three worlds. Forest, desert, and swamp. They need to add more worlds. 2. It is a story based survival game. So you need to progress the story to unlock the survival recipes. I am not a fan especially when the story is often mediocre. So far no consequence, no story branches, lots of clever word play, but at the end of the day you can just skip through most the story and still understand what is going on. 3. Tiered system of progression. Since you need to do the story to unlock the tiers, it has some unintended consequences: for example some recipes become obsolete before you need them because the focus is to complete the story. Other ones you use once just to be able to progress to the next tier. For example the first gun I unlocked I shot something like 20 rounds, and then got the next level gun. I honestly could have just skipped it entirely. Will never use it again because of the tier system (no point getting lower tier equipment when you've already unlocked higher tier gear). 4. Estate system although cool, is very under developed. Hopefully they add more to this before the game leaves early access. 5. Gear score. Can't mine a resource? Just slap a stamina enchantment on your tool and suddenly the pickaxe can break that resource because that sort of stuff is determined by your gear score. You have this intricate crafting system, just to do something simple like increase your gear score. Makes no sense to me. In spite of the cons, I am recommending this game solely because the experience (although not perfect) is very unique. It has potential especially if a sandbox mode (no story) with custom game settings is made available in the future.

I played at release and then again after the most recent updates. I am very much enjoying the game after the most recent updates. The visuals are great and story is interesting. It's far less repetitive after the most recent updates. Co-op still could use some work (I would love to be able to be in a realm with friends without a hosted server). But combat feels good. The puzzles are challenging without being frustrating. I like the intricacy level of the crafting. Materials matter. Overall a good survival crafting game.