Nightingale - Early Access Review

When Inflexion Games announced Nightingale in 2021, I was mildly interested in what I saw. I genuinely like survival games, having dabbled in Valheim and V Rising quite a bit. But what drew me towards this particular game was its setting. 

Gaslamp Fantasy isn’t something you see all that much in games, and when it came closer to Nightingale’s release, I found myself more and more interested in what this game could offer. And though Nightingale does tread some familiar ground, it uses its unique setting to create something fun and exciting for the player while incorporating a new mechanic that allows for hours upon hours of gameplay.

I was able to play Nightingale on two different PCs; a laptop running a 1060 and a desktop with a 3080ti, and performance between the two was fairly solid. Naturally, the 3080ti was capable of running Nightingale with better graphics. Still, the game played and functioned perfectly on my minimum systems requirement laptop, which was great, since I spent more than half of my time with the survival game while traveling through Europe. 

The only real issue I had with Nightingale, at least regarding its performance, was loading times. These disappeared the moment I booted up the game on my desktop once I was back in the United States. Loading times shortened considerably, but I was also playing the game on much better hardware.

However, Nightingale is full of minor technical issues — which is to be expected, it’s an Early Access game. Animations are clunky and sometimes don’t complete, depending on what weapon or item you have equipped. Sometimes, when felling trees, the game wouldn’t register that I had successfully broken through the trunk with my ax and the remains of it would remain floating in mid-air. 

Climbing is a sordid affair, even through the use of craftable climbing picks. I attempted to scale several steep cliff faces but never made much progress. This was due to how finicky the system is, as sometimes the game would register