Nightingale Preview - Long Load Times and Odd Design Choices

The Victorian era is where some of the best science fiction and fantasy stories got their start. In Inflexion Games' Nightingale, you'll be able to experience a little bit of both genres in an always-online survival crafting adventure — though not without some stumbles along the way.

Nightingale puts you in the shoes of a "Realmwalker" — a human who explores a strange multiverse by traveling through portals. You (and everyone else) have been cut off from Earth, so you'll have to eke out a living in the wilds while trying to find your way back home. It's a solid premise, but Nightingale doesn't always execute it well.

Lost Amongst the Realms

The opening hours of Nightingale are a simple tutorial that will take you to each of the three biomes included in the Early Access launch version of the game. You'll learn how to gather resources, find food, and fight off hostile wildlife. Before you know it, you'll arrive in your first "Abeyance" realm and start setting up a home.

This is where we get to the real meat of your adventure. Progression in Nightingale comes down to a pretty straightforward gameplay loop: collect resources and Essence to make better gear, clear out a Site of Power to get a new realm difficulty card, and move up to the next tier of difficulty.

An Abeyance-difficulty Forest and an Antiquarian-difficulty Forest look noticeably different from one another. 

There's some variance here and there — occasionally, you'll need to complete a special quest to progress — but the formula is basically the same. That's not a slight against Nightingale, mind, but it feels a little like a lost opportunity for mixing up the gameplay a bit.

The higher-tier Realms aren't simply palette swaps, either. An Abeyance-difficulty Forest and an Antiquarian-difficulty Forest look noticeably different from one another. They have different factions, buildings, and variations in Points of Interest. The little bits of extra detail add some much-needed variety to the experience.

Being a Crafty Explorer

Nightingale is no slouch when it comes to the "survival" portion of survival crafting games; you'll have to contend with all sorts of environmental hazards and detrimental status effects. It is the "crafting" part of the equation, however, where the game really shines.

Most crafting recipes will demand a specific type of material such as an ingot or a piece of fabric. For example, you can make a pistol out of a barrel, a stock, and some other parts, and you can use any type of ore or type of wood to make it.

What's somewhat unique to this game, though, is that the source materials affect the stats of the end product. Creating a hat with leather made from a tier 1 will give you better health regeneration, whereas a hat created from tier 1 prey leather will give you stamina regeneration. You can fine-tune your gear through careful choice of materials.

Unfortunately, the appearance of your equipment is also informed by the materials used to make it. I spent the first 20 or so hours of the game trodding around the realms in a garish yellow outfit because that was all I had available to me. As far as I can tell, there is not yet a way to really change the color or pattern of your clothing.

Worst of all, there doesn't seem to be a way to know exactly how something will look until you actually spend the resources to make it. You may carefully put together a new overcoat only to find that you'll have to spend the next few hours walking around the multiverse looking like a traffic cone.

Online Design

Nightingale stands out as a survival crafting game in many ways, but the oddest design choice by far was the decision to make this an always-online game. Though I've had the odd technical hiccup, I'm more perturbed by the seeming inability to truly leverage this functionality (at least, not yet).

Every time you open a portal to a new realm, you'll have to stand around for a minute or two and fight off occasional waves of otherworldy enemies called "Bound." I can't imagine that this process would be slower if this were an offline game.

The decision to grant access to The Watch so late in the game is a questionable design choice, to say the least.

These long load times can even apply to your permanent home realm. Sometimes, it will take a full minute or two before I can get back to my house. While I don't have an amazingly high-end PC, I haven't encountered load times like this since I was using mechanical hard drives. This is downright unacceptable in the age of SSDs.

Nightingale's realms are limited to 6 players at a time, but there is a multiplayer hub city called "The Watch" that supports larger numbers of people. Getting there, however, requires getting multiple tiers of gear, fighting through half a dozen Sites of Power dungeons, and completing multiple quests.

It boggles the mind that the social player hub would be gated behind hours of grinding. Inflexion Games should open up The Watch to players much earlier to increase the opportunities for social gameplay. The decision to grant access to The Watch so late in the game is a questionable design choice, to say the least.

Nightingale Preview | Final Thoughts

Nightingale has "good bones," to use a bit of construction lingo — the fundamental structure supporting this game is solid. Broadly speaking, the concept behind the game is sound and the gameplay loop is largely entertaining. The execution of that concept, though, is somewhat shakier.

To Inflexion Games' credit, it has been highly responsive to player complaints and requests; for example, it announced that it would develop an offline mode just two days after the game's launch due to player demand.

That responsive attitude is a good sign for the future of Nightingale. I think it could establish a robust, long-term audience once some of the rough edges are polished off and the online experience gets more stable.

As it stands now, though, I'd recommend that you're fully aware of Nightingale's flaws before buying it and diving in. There's plenty of fun to be had here, but you'll have to deal with the odd janky parts and the occasional long server load times to get to it.

Nightingale was previewed on PC with a key provided by Ghost Ship Publishing over the course of 72.5 hours of gameplay. All screenshots were taken by the previewer during gameplay.