Recent reviews by Sorrow

Half joking tldr; this game, at a friend's recommendation, got me into several anime and into finally learning Japanese; I also now know way, way, way too much about many, many horses, and cry openly at sad horse girl stories.
11/10
Not joke note: while it is improving on PC (sometimes), it is currently significantly faster on phones. It's also made for mobile and while it's mostly ported very very well, you're just going to have an easier time with long presses etc by the nature of it.
Also seriously if you haven't watched the show, go watch it.

Do you, like me, have adhd but want to learn something?
Then this is an immediate buy. On sale, buy it yesterday.

This is amazing. I've looked for apps like this on my phone and that sort of thing, but the ones I've previously found on PC didn't quite have the tools I needed to do what I'm best at - bringing my own sounds to my tabletop with easy button presses and a simple, easy-to-understand (and customizable!) ui.
Now, I can compose scenes of ten audio loops and have a bunch of quick-play sounds on the fly to use; I have a whole bar for combat for my players and their vampires for VtM, I've got a whole one for footsteps, laughter, and scientific-sounding nonsense for my buddy's Monster of the Week game, and I'm helping set up a few rows of sounds for my girlfriend's upcoming game and teach her how to use it. Still haven't run out of space.
Scenes, on the other hand - the bits comprised of up to ten loops? You seem to be able to create them infinitely, and you can seperate them out by campaign or area or whatever as a heading to those individual scenes. You can adjust the individual loop's volume, fade it right to left, and slightly change the reverb and such with a little setting.
This is an incredibly lightweight bit of software that is capable of doing a crazy amount of heavy lifting.
Cannot recommend it enough.

Editing to change my review now after however long: you may now want to try to setup Kenku FM or Bard Bot as this no longer does precisely what it says on the tin. That is to say that the hosting feature (provide a link to your players, let them listen to your sounds with very little latency between what you pick and what they hear) is no longer there, and as such it has to be streamed in some way. While I have tested this myself with my own players, they have discord exclusively on their phones and are used to varying audio quality, so I haven't been able to get a solid "yes, it sounds good" that is objective.
If there were a neutral option I would pick it, as in terms of UI and setup/design I think it is still functionally my favorite of these types of programs. However, ymmv and the loss of such sort of invalidates one of the major good points of this.
(No shade or shame to the devs, i understand money is involved in upkeep and you likely had to do what you had to for sales etc)

Nothing I previously said matters. They continue to throw away every bit of good will they can, treat players as banks without caring, and ignore what made this start successfully. The people who had bad vibes about this game were right. Someone else said it best: "I've never played a game that WANTS to fail."
And yet, here we are.

Fifty-four hours in at the time of this review!
This review will be long as hell as it's taken me nearly twenty minutes to get my thoughts together; it will also touch on my thoughts on a lot of negatives people are listing in their reviews / on Reddit.

I one-hundred percent recommend Nightingale... for a limited selection of people. Don't get me wrong, I'd love if a bunch of people wanted to pick it up, but it is a strange blend of survival mechanics, mmo-ish presence and servers, exploration game and (easy, mostly) puzzler. The theme is going to appeal to more people's tastes than the gameplay itself, I think, especially judging by many of the negative reviews I've glanced through. (Common complaints I'm seeing are about the building system, the UI, the grind, or specific items / too many item types, just to state what I'm seeing.)

For me, this mix is perfect. This is ABSOLUTELY what I hoped Nightingale would be. I'm always stumbling over strange finds and exploring them, or being a busybody around my Abeyance (home) realm, or grinding materials with a gorgeous view.

Notes on the negatives people have listed as follows for those in-between in opinion.

-On grinding: I expect the grind from a survival game - I've dumped a hilarious amount of hours into Conan Exiles, No Man's Sky on xbox (not so much on pc), etc. I personally enjoy it - not everyone will.

-On the UI: I honestly don't see a problem with any of it. It's to my taste, and I think it fits the game very well.

-The building system is ... like most other survival games? Again, I'm so used to this that it just works how I expect. It's not good or bad, really. I do see lots of frustration about Augmentations - little items you place near a workbench to increase it's speed / give it new recipes - but when I figured out to build a different one for my workbench that was overloaded, my mental response was, "oh, I'll just move one of these away real quick then, they look like furniture anyway." Boom, solved. Now, if you're coming from Enshrouded, you're going to be disappointed if you're expecting that, because Enshrouded *literally has the best building system I've ever seen* and I personally don't hold any other dev to that standard. Enshrouded also wasn't for me, despite the cool building system.

-Itemization. There are SO many different items. I will agree that it can get annoying trying to sort them all, because different items do not stack (in those items' defense, they are different items, so... duh?) which means to store them, they need to take up separate storage slots, which means that you need to build a BUNCH of chests. At the moment there is no craft-from-chests option, so you end up running to and from your chests a bunch while crafting if you're like me and have a short memory span or don't like to hold onto more than the necessities while at home. However, as an upside, this means the crafting is SO wildly varied - I can farm the materials that are right for me as they all have different stats. It isn't immediately clear which stats will modify an item based on type, but I honestly am so fine with experimentation that this wasn't a negative to me.

-The AI is actually moronic. My companion is an idiot who actually stands in my way while I mine, 90% of the time. I end up yelling at her a lot. Fighting the Bound is personally very fun for me, though.

-Combat isn't really flashy, but I enjoy it anyway. Again, a personal thing.

-The big one for me personally: Nightingale doesn't hold your hand through a LOT. I'm seeing this here and on Reddit: there's nothing that I saw telling you to look at your Glossary (journal button (J), Glossary at the top) to find where you can find an item. Nothing that really explains that different materials have different capabilities when crafting. Sometimes the cards are weirdly worded so it's unclear what changes they'll make, even if you're reading the stats on a realmic transmogrifier (I forget exactly what those are called). This can be... testing. I've had a good few times where I out loud was like THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN GREAT INFORMATION HOURS AGO. I will say that, in general, maybe Nightingale's lack of hand-holding is awesome in most cases for some players - maybe for some, it's the thing that makes you want to refund. I won't judge one way or the other, you do you.

I will also quickly comment that, having made it to the watch, I genuinely see the point of "online only" and honestly do not have any inkling of an idea what they'll do to make this NOT the case. When in the watch, you are in a public area more akin to the Division's home base. The dungeons there are very, very public. My friend and I entered one on a whim and ended up fighting with (three? maybe two, I was tired) other people against a giant Eaton (ent). It was dope. If they can figure out how to make it not online-only without compromising their vision, props to them.

Last note here, and this isn't touching on a complaint but a huge positive from me towards the game. The ambiance is astounding. The other night I was in a gloom forest, where it's always night, with a piercing moon through the trees. Far-off cries of predator vs prey and distant screams occasionally filled the otherwise-still air, and I had limited bullets left in my pistol and very few health potions left, so I weighed returning but I pressed on for just a little while longer. It started raining, and then hailing, and the hail and rain drowned out the distant screams and for a moment, where before I felt hope and excitement toward the realms of the Fae in general, now I just felt unnerved.
The ambiance is amazing. Sound design, amazing. From the ridiculous PING on a headshot or heartshot to the sound puzzles to the crumbling dusty ruins to the cries of the birds in the forest to the desert wind, sound is amazing.

TLDR;
+This game will absolutely not be for everyone! You've gotta love the theme, survival games, exploration, not mind puzzles. If you're naturally curious and go explore crazy things in the distance, you might like this game. If you're into crazy crafting systems, you might like this game. If you don't like your hand-held and are stubborn, you might be into this game. I have mostly played alone, but this game IS better with other players; you should be good either way (though I can't speak for how the dungeons in the Watch might play out after the Online Only change coming). I personally am very excited for the future of this game.

-If you don't like bugs (I've had very few but my experience is rare and I'm aware of that), wait till Early Access is done before considering. If you don't like survival games, hate the concept of something being multiplayer, are not the explorer type, or are really not into the concept of sorting items / your group doesn't have someone who can, maybe pass on Nightingale.

If you made it all this way through my long-winded rambling in support of this game, get yourself a snack as a treat.

Figured instead of reading guides, I would just f around and find out.
I am certainly finding out

I am learning to fear the sun, similarly to how in real life, I've learned to fear the sun.

So far in my few hours after getting in, this is a walking simulator with mmorpg-like features in small doses, with little and carefully-planned communication, with an interesting fighting system, and with a general Myst-like sense of "what am I doing?"
Other such questions you'll ask yourself are, "what are these things??" and "is that a ghost?!" and "oh god, I forget - what was this knot for? Was it a quest? Did I loot it?"

It's .. kind of awesome so far. I'll update further as I have more to say.

A game that attempts one simple things and gets it right can be a masterpiece.
And, honestly? Unturned is pretty well close.

Wurm is absolutely not a game for everyone.
Let me preface this review with that - it's the truth of it. Wurm Online will likely not be for you, generally speaking. It has quite an old premium model, though things have been updated here and there. It's generally seen as low-graphic, and confusing.
But Wurm is the sort of world that if it suits you, you will get lost in, physically and mentally and emotionally.
Wurm Online (along with its sibling, Wurm Unlimited) is a sandbox that is about as sandbox as it gets, within its rules. It's still an RPG, ish - think Skyrim, but as a MUD with graphics, sort of - but it's a sandbox first. Everyone who is on a given land is on the same land, with no instances of any kind, and you can settle anywhere according to the rules and play how you want, truly. I myself tend to play a sort of lone wolf, and personally I use Wurm as a build-it and chore simulator to keep myself busy. But the friends I've gained here through Wurm have stayed since I've made them, and given that I was raised on the old MMO subscription model, literally since the age of two, it's a game that will always be in my heart.
If Wurm is for you, then it'll take over your gaming time. That's a threat and a promise both. But you'll never know if you don't give it a shot, and I recommend it wholeheartedly.