DON'T BELIEVE THE HYPE.

Listen. I wanted to like this game. I was sure I was going to love this game. Know why? Because of the gameplay trailer. The game sure looks awesome and colorful in it. That's because that is end-game content. You will spend most of your time with a thatch umbrella and the beige-est of clothing because you can dye none of it. Your home will be either logs and sticks or stone and sticks until you can unlock better housing pieces. That's the smallest thing wrong with the game, however.

RPG progression was pretty much standardized when RPGs were invented. You have experience points, you have levels, and when you get enough of the former, you gain the latter. Gaining levels is typically how you gain an increase in your stats as well as unlock new capabilities or recipes. Nightingale does none of that; there are no experience points or levels. Instead, they appear to have adopted the Valheim model of stat increases, i.e. via consuming foods and crafting clothing. Consuming different foods will give you more health and endurance for as long as the buffs you receive from the food lasts. Food buffs can be on different timers.

But wait... if there is no leveling up, then how do you unlock better food and clothing? This, my friends, is where things get VERY stupid.

Whenever you kill or harvest things, you have a chance to receive a currency called "Essence," which comes in different tiers. You can also get Essence, in bigger quantities, from completing mini-quests (e.g., killing things or pressing things in a certain sequence). Much like copper, silver, gold, platinum, etc., Essence comes in different tiers. So here's how you unlock things: Step 1 is to locate each Realm's Essence Trader. They sell things and you buy them (but they only want specific Essence for the recipes. So, say, if you have more Tier 3 than Tier 2 Essence, but the trader only want Tier 2, you can't use an equivalent amount of Tier 3 Essence because this currency does not have an exchange rate, in any direction, which is why I have over 2K Tier 1 Essence and nothing to spend it on but the occasional repair. I digress). Now that you have the recipe, you still can't craft it. Why? Because you need to build something called an Augmentation.

Augmentations are the most WTF-filled, poorly-implemented piece of game design you will ever have the misbegotten bad luck to encounter. It is the opposite of "straightforward" to the extent that the word "opposite" doesn't even cover it.

An example of an Augmentation would be a Bellows, which you would think should apply to a forge (but for some reason also augments a crafting worktable, which does not use fire), and which you place on the ground as though it too is a workstation.

Here's where the nightmare begins: in order to unlock recipes you've already bought and paid for, you have to have Augmentations. These things work with multiple workstations. Here's where the nightmare unfolds: if too many Augmentations are augmenting a workstation you will actually lose access to crafting things you were previously able to craft. This is, to put it mildly, suboptimal design.

See, you have to keep your workstations near to things like a forge or a cooking station so that they can benefit from the "well-lit" and "warm" optimizations that reduce crafting time. That means your workstations will be near each other, which means the augmentations will also be near each other, and that's going to be an absolute nightmare to balance. There's a LOT of redundancy among the augmentations (i.e. a bunch of them unlock THE SAME RECIPES).

This means the optimal base build would be a multi-story tower where you have one workstation plus one cooking station *per floor,* including the ones with the forge and the alchemical boilers-- because the heat and light coming from those stations are not sufficient to supply those stations themselves with the "warm" and "well-lit" traits. Well, it would be optimal, anyway, if there was just one single tier of augmentations. There aren't! When you go to craft them, they aren't even color-coded differently.

Trying to balance this nonsense just so you can craft is hands down the most ragequit-inducing thing I have ever encountered in a game.

And speaking of traits, it is absolute clown-inspired nonsense that your grow beds receive disadvantages for being outside, where the sunlight and rain typically occur. The devs are foisting mechanics on things regardless of them making sense.

Now, I know some of you who are heavily invested in this game are going to blah blah blah at me about getting help with this in the official Discord, and that there is a spreadsheet or Google Doc I can view to get all this sorted out. Let me explain something to you: the SECOND somebody's game *requires* a spreadsheet in order to play it, that somebody has lost the plot. This is *needless complexity.* No part of any of that is necessary. I might actually still be playing the game if this BS were absent from it.

Furthermore, the game's progression is comically unbalanced. You will gain access to firearms and your strongest, most effective weapon will still be a mining pick. When you are given your first firearm (the comically ineffective Blunderbuss) you will also be given a charm that could apply to it *if* you had already unlocked the workstation necessary to upgrade your equipment so that enchantments could apply to it (and rest assured, you haven't yet). You will encounter minerals you can't even mine because you will need to unlock higher/harder realms to get the recipes necessary to mine them, but once you've done that, why would you ever go back to a lower realm? Especially when the Essence tier is capped at that realm's lower tier? You wouldn't. So why are those things there? (EDITED TO ADD:) Another WTF moment is having to jump through all the unlocking hoops just so you can unlock even worse gear than what you are currently wearing. I wish I were making that up.

And then there's offline mode. The game is stingy with achievements (but not challenges!) as it is, but if you satisfy the requirements of an achievement while in offline mode, you will not actually receive that achievement.

Yes, this game is in Early Access, but we got a good taste of what was possible in Early Access with Subnautica. When that game was just taking shape, it was obviously well-designed from the ground up, even if certain things were removed or altered later. This game's mechanics are straight-up designed badly, period.

If this changes, I will revisit this review, but I have no reason to believe it will.

Here's what I like :

- Fast gathering ( albeit occasionally finicky when trying to skin an animal for example ),
- Fast paced combat,
- Graphics are decent, artstyle however... is not my cup of tea,
- Realm cards add a bit of flavour to the world,
- Recruitable NPC's ( don't have carry limit :), can tank for you and help with building ),
- Building is fast and I like the fact you can place blueprints and add materials later,

Here's what I don't like :

- Progression is GEAR based. There is no character progression, no skills to unlock, no passives to enhance the playstyle... nothing.
- Grindy. Even though you can gather resources fast, the rest of crafting process is a slog. Add to that low durability of tools and it's started to wear down on me.
- Combat although fast paced and precision focused ( I like scoring those headshots! ) it's SIMPLISTIC ! From dumb A.I to lack of active skills... What a missed opportunity here.
- There is offline mode but characters are separate from online ( probably to prevent cheaters ). Sadly no private servers like in Enshrouded or Valheim...
- Same looking quests and activities regardless of "Realm"... It doesn't help that NPC's are not fully voiced ( aside from main "helper" )
- It gates content based on "Gear Score"... really don't like that kind of progression. It forces me to go back grind and craft better gear rather than explore, fight and find loot in the world.

Overall it's a "MID" experience made worse by some of the game mechanics that should be there to "assist" the players, but ultimately ends up being a secondary job.

Sadly there is no NEUTRAL choice in terms of Reviews.... I could only recommend it to a certain type of player... the one with lots of free time, patience and couple of buddies to brighten the experience. Solo players.... well it's not there yet.

Was fully excited before the game dropped, played for 80 hours, reached the current end game and was thoroughly satisfied with my experience.

I came back after a bunch of updates (including the offline update, which I was and still am in favour of.) to find new weapons, enemies, skills, an upgraded character creator, and a new traversal mechanic. People ragged on the devs for how they chose prioritisation, but they've delivered a good game experience, and a beautiful world.

I'll probably play to the end game again in solo, they let it sit for another six months and return to more new content.

It's an open world, survival, crafting game. If you haven't found one that you've liked yet: you probably won't like this one. The core mechanics of "fight, harvest, craft" and incremental upgrades probably just isn't for you. If you happen to like the gameplay loop; the steampunk/gas lamp aesthetic is well rendered, and core mechanics are solid.

Is there still work to do? Absolutely! Needs more content, needs optimisation, needs some more QoL stuff added to it. Is it an entertaining game experience now? Absolutely. I'm fully confident the devs will put in the work and build on the already solid foundation and make something awesome.