2024 has been the year for big survival crafting releases with Palworld and Enshrouded both doing well respectively. Can Nightingale carve out a chunk of the already saturated pie and make a name for itself?
At its core, Nightingale has what you would expect from a game coming out of this genre. So, it won’t come as a surprise to you when you’re picking up rocks and sticks to make your first mediocre shelter and starting work bench. From there, it’s business as usual as one new workbench leads to new recipes, which leads to new equipment, which leads to the ability to mine and harvest new resources that ultimately leads to another new workbench of some kind.
Whether or not you enjoy that kind of linear progression in these kinds of survival crafting games, Nightingale successfully attempts to integrate that gameplay loop into something much more ambitious. Because the whole time you’re going through these survival crafting motions, you’re also exploring a randomly generated island that’s yours and yours alone — until you populate it with friends but that comes later.
Every world or realm you will find yourself in is not only quite large, but also features its own biome, its own wildlife, resources, points of interest, and NPCs to shop from, do quests for, and even recruit — though they aren’t as cute. That said, you aren’t doing all of this for no reason. After booting up the game, you quickly find out that you’re a Realmwalker: a human from the late 1800s that, in an alternate history, discovers a race of magical beings called the Fae.
These beings have worked alongside humans for thousands of years prior and helped propel humanity forward through the use of Fae magick. The premise then takes a turn and explains that a deadly miasma called The Pale made its way to Earth and ruined much of the techno-magick progress humanity had built and obtained. Your character is one of many who escaped that situation and are now lost in the endless magical realms.
Luckily, Puck, a Fae who has taken quite an interest in you, will act as your main quest giver and guide you along this new and uncharted path. His guidance is the fuel behind everything I did in my first 10-15 hours of gameplay. Through his well-written and impeccably voiced dialogue, I learned how to make my first portal. Which is just the beginning in Nightingale, as you’ll be combining many different Biome and Major cards to make uniquely themed generated worlds.
But there’s more to just creating said realms. Once you’re in them, you can also manipulate them with consumable Minor cards that can be found as rewards from the various combat and puzzle points of interest that come integrated in these new realms. The Minor cards themselves are powerful and allow you to warp reality to your gain. For example, one of my favorite Minor cards lessened the atmosphere and made gravity more of a suggestion than a deadly rule. The result was that fall damage became a thing of the past and I could just glide everywhere at high speeds.
Meanwhile, the sky itself became transparent and I could see the stars beyond the atmosphere at all times of day. Nightingale is a visual treat since it uses the latest Unreal 5 Engine technology. Unfortunately, you trade a bit of performance for such visual luster. But I’m pretty confident that will be sorted out as the game launches and improves from patch to patch. I really only scratched the surface of this game in my limited time with it as there’s so much more I could go on and on about.
My weapons had magical spells built into them, while my firearms could be loaded with differing elemental ammunitions. A group I was with hunted and killed a large Apex monster that littered the surrounding area in poison fog. Which was then followed up with a straight up dungeon crawl with enemies, puzzles, and even jumping puzzles. Rewards for all of these activities were always useful, too. I obtained unique crafting materials and a currency that I could use to trade with NPCs for recipes, materials, and cards of varying rarity.
All in all, my time with Nightingale was a positive one. There’s a huge amount of potential that lies in the game’s worldbuilding, player-generated realms, and the dedicated server tech that keeps it all running — server tech that means friends of yours can visit one of your realms while you’re offline, it’s pretty damn neat. If that sounds appealing to you, then you’ll be glad to know that Nightingale goes into early access on Feb 20th on Steam for $29.99.
Ultimately, the developers seem quite committed to polishing the rougher aspects of this very unique survival crafter. I’m personally looking forward to what the developers at Inflexion Games have in store because it’s easy to see just how much inspiration went into making a game like this.
