Nightingale

Nightingale is in Early Access but feels complete in so many ways.

The game is visually stunning. The curated realms in Realms Rebuilt take it to the next level. Skyboxes are incredible. Art designers of this game are at a different creative level than any other game I've played.

I love the fact that you can play melee, ranged, or magic depending on the materials you use to create your gear. You can even use different materials to take advantage of multiple gear builds that will give you combinations of the different playing styles.

I love that you can set the playing level of the game. You can choose whether you want to play at a level that allows you to concentrate on the beauty of the realms or throw caution to the wind and play at the highest level that will definitely challenge your skills.

I like that you can go to different realms at levels to gather materials. The build count limits have been update in the Realms Rebuilt, and I have plans for the most glorious base builds! Now I just have to learn how to do that. I am a newbie at these open world games.

I like the idea that you can play offline or online. You can recruit an NPC, play with friends, or just travel the realms solo.

For now, I play online as I've set up a Steam account for my grandson and bought him Nightingale. He's only 10, but he thinks this game is AWESOME!! Especially the umbrella :-)

Big shout out to Puck. Excellent choice for voice. I don't think I've been snarked at by anyone quite so profoundly. I look forward to interactions with him. He makes me laugh -- at least for now. There are things hidden with Puck. Adding voice to other NPCs is coming along and adds to the richness of the game play. The Realms Rebuilt added a curated ream with an imprisoned Empyrean. It was really well done. The language was beautiful.

I love the gas lamp feel and am looking forward to more clothing choices -- hopefully some dyes. They added a glamour station that will allow you to wear a higher tier clothing but change the look to one that might be lower tier, or designed for a different build (ie. melee, ranged, or magic). It opens up the clothing/armor look that characters can use to project their style in the Realms.

Game play has been uneventful for me. I don't have any issues with "glitches". My movement through the Realms is smooth.

I never knew that I didn't know so much!! This is my first open world survivor game. I was a babe in the woods. This really is a terrific game. I've put in more than 1100 hours in the game. I've played through past the Watch with my character and have helped my grandson get through on his. I love the fact that we can join groups to take on more difficult realms.

The Watch. Goodness. The first time I entered the watch with my big bad self. -- I mean, I was clobbering those bound on the Easy level of the realms. So... the Watch couldn't be that bad, could it? Welp... I was dead in 2 seconds. An Elite Knight got me. It wouldn't have been so bad, but he was laughing as I held down the "Give Up" button. After much reflection on my Nightingale life choices, I started gearing up to be better prepared. But, The Watch is challenging for solo players if you do not have the experience and the gear (along with really good fighting skills). The designers have provided Realmwalkers with Vault cards where they can set the difficulty and test themselves and their build before going into the public Vaults.

I am looking forward to the hinted Winter Realms and getting to Nightingale. I hope players will give the game a chance and try it out. There are hundreds of hours of great gameplay for less than the cost of a movie theater experience; and you can play in your pjs with a very large cup of coffee.

Until Nightingale -- Happy Exploring Realmwalkers!

This is a heavy Early Access review, just like the title itself. Please keep in mind - it doesn’t mean the game is bad, it’s just not finished yet.
The Good:
First of all, while the game is in the heavy Early Access, it is fun to play and has a lot of exciting moments.
Art - this game answers the question - what would have happened, if we discovered magic during Belle Epoque. Not surprising - it would have been awesome. Everything, from clothing and items, to shaders and VFX, and even some vegetation - is a work of pure passion and talent in this game. It can only be described as an “eye candy”.
Story - it is… Special. In a good way.
Without any spoilers - you’re being thrown away from the Earth world to those Realms, which were inhabited by Fae - a mysterious race of magical beings. Now there is a goal of finding out what actually happened to Earth, while constantly trying to find a way back. And you realize, that every event is somehow interconnected.
So far, it was very intriguing and fun to explore, but there is no conclusion or major revelations as of right now.
Sound is also very well made. And while the soundtrack is limited, it feels professional and very pleasant.
Building- oh it is good. You can build anything anywhere you want. Even setting your home base as simple as picking any place with a great view. There are plenty of architectural styles to pick from, so it’s completely up to you, what your home or a castle or whatever you want will look like.
The Neutral:
This might be a matter of taste, but…
Crafting - while the crafting itself is really well done, there are issues with it’s complexity. Now, it is truly amazing, that the whole item crafting system really depends on what materials you’re using - like, literally, it changes the appearance of a weapon or clothing, depending on which type of metal you have used, but it leads to… Crafting chains. I, personally, hate when a crafting depth exceeds 2 or 3, so you need to craft an intermediate material, so can craft another one and so on, until you can reach the actual item crafting.
And trust me, there are a lot of materials. Perhaps, too many, but it is a matter of taste.
Realm Variety - it is… limited. Yes, there are different types of “dressing”, like weather and props, but most Realms are represent by one of 3 types: Desert, Forrest and Swamp. And while they are beautiful on their own, it’s just isn’t enough. But i tend to believe this is an Early Access issue.
Combat - it is there. And since there is an enemy power-scaling, you typically want to cheese them with a rifle from some inaccessible point. But we’ll get to it later…
The Bad:
Optimization - it isn’t there yet. As i said, graphics do look amazing, but my machine struggles to get a stable FPS (Titan RTX, Intel i9 11k, 32Gb RAM) and usually gets a lot of micro-stuttering, which is annoying, but manageable.
And such issues also lead to a very, very long loading times, even on an SSD, which breaks the pacing even further…
Story Pacing - while the story itself is captivating, there are some pacing issues, most of which related to the fact, that it was initially developed as an MMO game. Because of that, there is barely any exposition, most characters are not voiced and it is a real shame. This game should be very cinematic, but as of right now - it isn’t. While developers are trying to make it more story focused, there is still a question, if they’ll actually make it.
Same goes for an in-game lore - it is mostly presented through text messages you find scattered through Realms, making everything feel disjointed.
Exploration - the previous issue also extends to any Realm you visit - there is no sense of exploration. Every world feels already explored, like there is no discoveries left for you, which is a real shame. You simply go in through the portal, visit all the POIs, and get out. The best thing you could find is a note, describing some past events.
Animations - and this goes for overall feeling of movement and combat - while animations aren’t necessarily bad, they are… Robotic? I mean it feels clunky, an MMO type of clunky. Your character barely reacts to anything happening in the world, there are no physical interactions, and it makes combat boring.
Conclusion:
Now, it might seem, that there I’ve written mostly negative stuff (might be guilty of that), but this game is very special. I rarely follow development of videogames in Early Access, or excitingly wait for any news to come. But with this one?
I read and play every update they make and always wait for more. Nightingale is a game i honestly want to succeed and it is a good one already, but i want it to be perfect, as there is definitely talent, passion and capability to do so in it’s development team. And i genuinely mean that, and wish them to continue making this project better and better, as it might become a new Skyrim one day - the game we want to replay and endlessly enjoy from time to time.
And is it worth buying right now? Yes, if you’re willing to excuse some of those issues. If not, at least put it to your wishlist and wait for a while.
Currently, i would rate it somewhere between 7 or 8 out of 10.
As for this review, I’ll probably change it a lot during the course of development, so it is only valid for current “Realms Rebuilt” major update.

Pre Realms Rebuilt, this was like any other sandbox survival/open world survival game. My ADHD couldnt handle all of the things to do in the game, as I was bombarded with information all at once. maintain your equipment level, while attempting various combinations of cards to unlock various ways of advancing the game.

Post Realms Rebuilt - what a breath of fresh air. I'm presented with a semi-linear storyline, and If I happen to get bored with that, I can open up a custom portal. This is like a different game completely, and imo much much better.

I have played the Realms Rebuilt content for about 7 hours now, and completely love the direction this game is going. It's very difficult for me to play sandbox survival/open world survival games. Due to lack of tutorial or direction. I think that Inflexion has done what I have always wanted in a survival game, let me do what I want while telling me where to go at the same time.

Goodness does this game need time to cook, but given the 'recipe' they have this game could be great. The art style is unique and sticks out, they have a wonderfully complex crafting system that rewards you for really sitting down and focusing, and there's always something you could be doing.

Downsides? It's a little bare at the moment. Copy-pasted dungeons will quickly become redundant and without more in the way of variety it becomes more of a chore than an adventure. Sometimes things are really confusing too, don't be afraid to google help when it comes to this game.

Overall? I'd say let them cook. I'm happy I have the game but I recognize it's flaws.

Over 1300 hours in, been playing since EA launch, and I've been nothing but impressed.
<Pros (short version. I'm trying not to write a book, but it's hard)>
Crafting: I prefer games with building and crafting options in a sandbox world, and this definitely has those. It has some minor quirks, but for the most part it follows reasonable physics (you need supports if you want a second story to have interior walls) and has some great tilesets ("crude" stone and wood variants, as well as themes that include Tudor, Bhutan, Pagoda, Viking and "Regency"). You were able to build anywhere, including on top of ruins floating in the air (because magic), but since the new 9/12/2024 update you can put your "Estate" (your base that you can instantly travel to at any time) in any realm; the realms are beautifully crafted even when procedurally generated, so it's always nice to find the "perfect spot" and make it your home.
Crafting is limited to specific items, but the diversity of materials that you can use to craft them lets you create unique combinations of attributes that fit your play style, and each material changes the appearance of the item; using a gold blade with silver filigree on an axe actually results in a golden axe with silver designs. The same applies to gems, wood, cloth from fibre, and hides; animal hides and fibre (made from their meat!) produce interesting patterns and colors based on what their source was. You make both tools/weapons and clothing, and even though their recipes are fixed, again, the materials you can use within those recipes are pretty diverse.
Travel: "I'm Marry Poppins!" Magic umbrella lets you glide (but not fly). 'Nuff said. Also picks that let you grapple to new heights and scale cliffs like you're Sylvester Stallone in Cliff Hanger...sort of. Travel requires stamina, and while there are mitigation options such as a special charm that reduces/eliminates sprinting costs or "realm cards" (expendable items that let you manipulate the reality of your current realm in different ways) that reduce stamina use, you still have to be careful not to run out while gliding or, you know, scream-splat-respawn.
Realm design: It's hard to do it justice, but a major draw in this game is the beauty of the scenery. Waterfalls of different sizes, rivers that cut through terrain on their way to the sea, lakes, forests, swamps, deserts, desert oases, hills, rocky plateau-like minor mountains...and of course the sky! Each "realm card" has its own visual effects, such as fog, eternal day or eternal night, rain, and others. Even the "bland" skies are impressive.
Challenge: There are several difficulties, but they're not set in stone. Each difficulty increases the realm level, which increases the damage and health capacities of creatures, the quality of materials you will find (lower tier materials from lower difficulties), and some other aspects. You can start at the lowest difficulty and then decide to go higher, or start high and go lower, all pretty smoothly; you can either rest and set the realm difficulty for when you wake up, or create/reset a realm at whatever difficulty you want (proc-gen realms are randomized, so resetting makes them different every time. Storied realms are hand-crafted, so resetting just refreshes them as though you are first arriving).
I've spent almost all of my time playing the highest difficulty, and it presents a bit of a challenge. Sometimes you feel like a zergling, but if you're careful you can do it with much fewer deaths (you don't lose your progress, just RL time). With Realms Rebuilt, "Nightmare" difficulty is, well, a nightmare. It's probably intended for multiplayer adventuring, especially as you go higher.
Lastly, multiplayer: This is a pro and a con, as their multiplayer system is missing some key components (friends list, block/mute, not catching conversation while loading, no real public channels, and some others. It's pretty common at this stage to use Discord for most coordination; so far the community is pretty helpful and positive). You can invite your party members to whatever realm you're in, but you can't travel to where they are without an invite; that's good because you should be invited if they are in their home base. There is no friendly fire, though I think there's an option for it which both parties have to accept, which is great as a way to minimize grief-trolling. I haven't spent much time with multiplayer except in "vaults" (party dungeons), but loot is whoever picks it up first, making trusting and working with your team pretty important if you want fair distributions.
Note: Realms Rebuilt only just came out so I haven't had a chance to play it much, but the story is pretty engaging compared to what it was. Before you could largely ignore the story and just go through each realm until you got to last (available, sequential) ones, but now you have to unlock them by going through the story which is really worth going through anyway.
<Cons>
It's hard to think of any, so I'll leave most of that to others. As I said, multiplayer still needs some work, particularly with the social aspects. The game is still in EA, so there are bugs to squash, but they are usually pretty minor.
The biggest issue that I can come up with is balancing. Since they're still in EA the materials and item recipes need a lot of balancing. Since I've been playing they've made a few efforts, but there's still work to be done. Basically, the only real cons are standard EA stuff.
<Conclusion>
If you're into sandbox semi-open world games with crafting and building, that allows for melee/ranged/magic builds, an interesting story with lore, and that begs you to explore, then this is a great game. The devs are pretty responsive on feature requests and bug reports, so there's definitely a lot of potential that isn't being neglected.

I won't lie, this game is working on finding itself. That being said, this game IS WORKING on finding itself. I have watched this game change and evolve a lot. It has it's ups and its downs. It still has many things it can improve on, but it has already gone through great lengths to improve many. That to me is a huge pro. The developers are passionate about this. It shows. I'll be honest, I'm absolutely bias, the game just does something for me personally. In it's current state I find myself knocking out large projects then taking a break. That being said, it is one game I consistently come back to and when I do come back I realize I've missed playing it. I would love to see this game at it's full potential. Until then, I keep enjoying the journey.

When the game first arrived on Steam, I bought it immediately - because I loved the idea and the immense potential it had.
A few hours in, after figuring everything out - i stopped playing, because I didn't really vibe with that structure, you could just freestyle anything. After Realms Rebuilt....oh man, I fell in love so bad.
So NEW COMERS, if you read this, grab a chair, a coffee/tea and bear with me....
1. My issue at the beginning was with the freestyle gaming - now it had a STORY. For the people who commented already and for those who wonder.... Yes, there is a story you have to follow to progress. Yes, there is an increasing difficulty as you go. BUT, you can still do whatever you like. You can freestyle the story line then explore the realms, you can even refresh the realm and go back in. You can speedrun the storyline. Not to mention the fact that you can use cards to make realms more interesting :) I don't want to be mean or anything, but having sooo many possibilities in changing the realm as you please makes it so much more interesting.
2. If you truly like survival games and adventure, the need to hop from a realm to another actually gives you even more purpose. Yeah, you dont have to like every realm... i don't really enjoy deserts for example, but I make my experience better using cards. It can actually be fun if you keep experimenting stuff. And you get the purpose of moving on to see more, have more, become better and stronger.
3. Repetition of puzzles and such: Erm, it's a bit difficult to do ... (lets see how many...) around 100 DIFFERENT TYPES of puzzles. It takes time and money and energy. Which, for a game of this dimension and potential, you tend to focus on whats more urgent than the details at the beginning. I never minded this - I had enough fun with Bastilles of Intellect with 5 cones. Also yes, there are just 4 types of puzzles, but if you're grinding for essence - each of them are worth it.
4. Performance: I am playing on Intel i7, 2.60 GHz, 16GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti GAMING laptop(2019 btw). Had minor hiccups. Never ever had I experienced crashes or the game refusing to open or not being able to play. Yes, I don't get to set the Graphics at High and see the complete beauty of the game, but it's just as gorgeous on Medium. I don't know what's going on for others, I consider my set up very poor and it still works more than fine.
5. Crafting topic: Let me just tell you if you understand what's going on, it's pretty complex. I just realised this when I entered the late game and started seeing highest tier of materials. The amount of stuff you can create is huge: yeah, you have a limited number of craft-able items (you can't craft a fancy Gucci bag as your backpack), but you can craft with sooooo many types of materials, using different realm cards,using different augmentations, giving it a wide variety of stats ( coming from someone who now is trying to build her magik-tank set and her healer set). And this applies to ALL things: gear and tools.
6. Progression: Now, let me tell you that for someone who has a hard time figuring out stuff in games, the progression menu HELPED SO MUCH. It helps you have a decent overview of the stuff you can have and do, it also helps you know how much essence you need to grind it. Very helpful. And to be fair, if you could complete the whole progression from just one realm...wouldn't that be boring? In my opinion, it would. If you're a true adventurer ( and maybe a pinch of a grind person), you'll enjoy the progression in this game.
7. Kind reminder, for the people who mentioned its "boring": you have a difficulty option. If it doesn't challenge you, set the difficulty to Nightmare, add some fun Minor Cards and see how giddy you get after that. And regarding NPCs.... yep, there are a few interesting NPCs you can interact with and I am pretty sure there will be more, WITH TIME AND PATIENCE.
8. The community is VERY nice. Have not seen a drop of mean comments, nasty perspectives. People are actually very nice and helping each other.
9. Other:
-I don't see a reason why people should be allowed to jump directly into the city. If I were a baby realm walker with shit gear...it would unalive me in an instant. There is a purpose for all the progression and the hopping and everything. You start from being a person that survived the Pale, the greatest tragedy of modern world, a baby realm walker and you make your way up to more people, more danger, more thinking... more of everything. You have to become a stronger version of yourself before entering the city. They need strong warriors.
- Is the grind worth it? In my own 300 hours experience...i'm sorry i didn't grind more at any given opportunity. The more you explore, the more you do, the more you adventure in every realm, even if it doesn't look like it at first, you will be rewarded. Either with good mats, with more essence to progress, with rare stuff and so on...
- If you build like crazy, yes, OF COURSE it will take a whole lot of time to load :) I'm sorry, it's just logical.
- It takes around 2 to 6 or more weeks to develop a new being in a game (and that is just roughly). If I were you, I would be happy with 2 types of deers, wolves, bears and rabbits at the current state of ...what, 1 year and a bit since launch? If there are people out there who say its boring and dull, I kindly invite them to work on such a game and provide everything the end user wants: design, performance, content, diversity, story, options and so on, from day 1. Other than that, I saw the hard work that was put into the game regarding biodiversity and its absolutely perfect as it is for a game that launched last year.
- For people complaining about building :) I'll just leave The Collective's video here:
- My current status? I am making my home prettier and I am grinding to make all my tools and weapon top tier. I was bamboozled when i saw in the official Nightingale discord that people were talking about BiS gear and weapons, tanking builds, crit builds...it never occurred to me until recently just how complex this game actually is. So now I am calculating my options based on what I want to play forward in the end game :)
Conclusion: 10/10, great experience, it never disappointed me. I had to be patient every here and there, but with such a complex and filled with potential game, its understandable.
To the Inflexion Team: absolutely STUNNING work! I hope you have the energy, the time and the team to continue developing this game. Keep in mind that some of the best ever games started from being hated or "Mixed"reviewed. But with hard work, with a lot of support from your community... I'm sure you'll get to incredible results. Never stop creating or never stop dreaming of the amazing Realms out there.