A multidimensional universe

Your journey in Nightingale begins after planet Earth suffers a catastrophe and you, as an interdimensional traveler, escape to another dimension. There, you will meet Puck, the antagonist of the game, who will give you the not-so-easy mission of reaching "Nightingale," the magical city where the Realm Walkers (survivors of the magical cataclysm on Earth) call home.

At the beginning of the game, a few things were noticeable without much effort: first, the visuals are beautiful - and not just beautiful, it's art that really immerses you in a fantasy world -; second, the game's performance is poor - we'll talk more about that later -; and finally, the overall game audio is very good as well.

Starting with the first, the visual art! It's undeniable, the game is quite beautiful. Despite the fantastic lighting and world design that immerses you in fantasy, it's noticeable that there are still some areas that need polishing, both in terms of optimization, textures, animations, and effects, which in the end can be overlooked because it's a recently launched early access game. Among all, animations were the topic that displeased me the most and seemed the most primitive. However, overall, it's a fact that the game will be wonderfully beautiful when complete.

The Victorian and steampunk themes are very well constructed through the game's attire and HUD. The developers did a great job with the characters' outfits... Sometimes it's incredible how you are surrounded by nothing but vegetation, and yet just with the style of the character's glove in first person, you can feel immersed in the theme. However, despite the HUD contributing significantly to the theme, I feel that it often contains too much information and is not very intuitive. In the initial hours of the game, it's a constant struggle to find things and understand what's happening on your screen.

Moving to the second point, regarding performance, we will face one of the coolest aspects of the game. Nightingale mixes very innovative themes and concepts for the world of survival games - such as the fact that you can cross arcane portals to travel to other dimensions -. Although I find the idea very cool and appealing, it's complicated when it clashes with the problem of loading time when you cross a dimensional portal. At that specific moment, I would get a bit discouraged to play - every time I had to cross the portal to go to another dimension or return to my base, I felt a slight laziness due to the long waiting time on the loading screen -.

Regarding in-game performance, I feel that the game is not yet polished, nor good for a full release. However, once again, because it's early access, I believe it's okay - a medium PC struggles a bit to run the game -.

Addressing the third point, the game's audio: the voice acting is of excellent quality, although a bit scarce, just like the sound effects and ambient sound. The latter are spot on! As you walk through the different biomes, the sounds emitted by the world make it seem alive and truly bring that magical and fantastical vibe. I really like what I hear in the game.

Survival mechanics and gameplay

Let's get to the important stuff! This is where I feel the game will need more time to reach its potential and shine as expected. Overall, Nightingale's mechanics are quite similar to other survival games, with a few small additions:

The toolbar is divided into two bars instead of being numbered from 1-10, with one referring to the item you hold in your main hand (ranging from 1-5) and the other for items in the off-hand (6-0). In a way, it's brilliant to have two toolbar bars in the HUD and be able to change items in both hands without accessing the inventory. On the other hand, it's quite annoying that there are more than 5 tools you use in your basic gameplay and you have to keep opening the inventory to change the item in the main hand. Additionally, it's not possible to use the mouse scroll to navigate the toolbar. Finally, I'm not sure how to feel about it, because, as mentioned earlier, it's brilliant and annoying/frustrating at the same time.

Each type of animal skin is divided into Prey or Predator, and there are different levels of skin. In addition, there are legendary skins, insect skins... And each of them occupies a different inventory slot... You can be sure that all your chests will be full of skins. And then the question arises: why have six types of skins when crafting, the items accept any type of skin? The same logic applies to ores, gems, types of ammunition, fibers, fabrics, buttons, ingots... there are many unnecessary items. It becomes chaotic in your inventory and the storage chests of your base, becoming counterintuitive and visually cluttered.

Regarding combat, like the other points, it still needs further development to reach its potential. As mentioned earlier about animations, the mobs have very repetitive and primitive animations, which makes combat a bit less exciting. Additionally, there isn't much to explore in terms of enemy attack patterns or how to fight each one. In general, you choose a weapon that appeals to you and beat them until your stamina runs out or they stop moving - usually the first option happens a few times before the second option -. There is a mechanic that certain opponents take more damage from specific types of weapons (concussive, slashing, magical). Still, I feel that it fits into the example I gave earlier: choose the weapon that deals the most damage and keep hitting.

Finally, we will address the progression system of Nightingale. The game is full of different dimensions with various configurations, and each of these worlds is full of dungeons and puzzles to solve and explore. Despite sounding extremely inviting and fun, we have a few problems: the endless grind/slow progression and the repetitiveness of playable content.

Starting with the slow progression: just to give you an idea, the tutorial alone takes almost an hour to complete. In summary, you need to farm a lot of resources to craft the items necessary for progression, and as you progress, even more resources are spent. And although you are constantly building and unlocking new items, you don't always feel like you're evolving... The game is not very rewarding.

- As soon as you collect essences (the "currency" you use to improve your equipment and buy new technologies), you buy a new workbench technology from the merchant. Happy, you go and build the workbench thinking you would craft new items that would enhance your performance in gameplay. However, many of the new workbenches only allow you to create new resources and not exactly items. It's as if you have to use at least three workbenches to obtain the manufactured resources to then build the final product -. Overall, these are complications that make the game less intuitive.

Regarding the repetitiveness of the content, when you reach the end game, the new dimensions generated by new portals are actually just a rearrangement of what you have already played. The puzzles and dungeons repeat the structure and the mobs that inhabit them. And as mentioned earlier, the game just requires more resources from you. So you get stuck in an endless grind loop to reach a "new" dimension that you "already know." But, obviously, since the game has slow progression, it takes a certain amount of gameplay time to get to that point.

In the end, Nightingale brings us an experience full of innovative concepts and ideas that greatly enrich the survival genre. However, it shows a game that still needs further development to reach its potential and also the expectations that were aligned with its official release.

Remember that this review was made at the launch of Nightingale as early access!

And for the construction of this review, Nightingale was played on the Epic Games platform, on Windows (PC).