Choose My Adventure: A sense of confusion and curiosity mark the return to Nightingale

It’s pretty frequently noted by this point that when I return to a game, I tend to do so with a little bit of trepidation and confusion. That’s kind of the cross I have to bear for being someone who hops around multiple MMO and multiplayer titles for both work and leisure purposes. I’m going to have long spates where I am away from a title, elect to come back, and take a little bit to sort of work around what it was I was doing or how things work.

Nightingale is a survival sandbox game that, at a very brass tacks level, doesn’t take too much time to get reacquainted with. Yet at the same time, it has been quite a while since I came back to the game, peering in shortly after it did its progression and combat revamp last September – in fact you’ll recall that I had some thoughts after spending that time in the patch. But yet again, I just sort of drifted away for a while. And now I’m back.

So, as is often the case when it comes to effectively returning to a save file for a game I hadn’t touched in some time, I took a little bit of time to get my bearings. Mainly the controls, which didn’t totally leave my mind, I’m pleased to report. Except I had to look up how to eat food before my character starved to death (although that’s apparently not a thing now).

I recall that the game had given all of the tools/weapons new actions and I immediately found myself remembering why I was liking the sickle as much as I was. A combination melee and short-ranged weapon that lets me gather small swaths of materials by chucking it before me like some harvest-hungry boomerang? Also I have a bomb satchel that I forgot existed? Yes, this will do nicely.

I also kind of fell right back in to some initial old gameplay habits that I was taught when I was first elbows deep into Nightingale. My first instinct was to trundle around the map in the general cardinal direction of POIs in order to gain essence and get more stuff to build. It was all unremarkable but still a good time overall, and it got me back into the combat swing of things.

It’s here that I was reminded how nice the progression tree is from the way things used to be. Having free access to all of the things I needed to get to the process of crafting was instantly comfortable and familiar, though I did have to take a few moments to understand how to get the essence needed to unlock nodes along the tree. Gone are the days when I could just gather giant piles of grass and rock and transform it into currency.

Luckily the activities that were dotted around this realm map felt rewarding enough. Particularly the locations where I had to gather nearby materials in order to finish some previously started construction projects; when I was first playing this game, these were tedious, unsatisfying, and extremely unrewarding. Now, however, they’re tedious, unsatisfying, and extremely rewarding, granting me nice big piles of the Tier 2 essence I needed in order to move up to the next stage of material making and crafting.

Along the way, I was getting wrapped up a little bit in the realm’s tiny story line. There’s still an overarching narrative in terms of finding the titular city and moving through the realms, but it felt like there was a zone-specific thread to follow that was not there before. I suppose one could argue that this makes Nightingale more on-rails, but I’d argue it’s more like a little signpost than a hard requirement. Besides, some of the “quests” in question were literally ones to help finish construction. I have a pretty strong suspicion of one particular NPC in this area, and I genuinely hope I get to enjoy some schadenfreude at her expense.

Through it all, I found myself remembering what it was about this game that had me enraptured while also appreciating the sense that the game has progressed just that bit further. It really didn’t take me too long to get back in to old habits, the gameplay started to feel good, and of course the setting remains the absolute best sauce that keeps this one engaging for me. A Victorian-era inter-dimensional adventure isn’t really something that exists, and I am once again here for it.

This does lead me into this week’s poll choice. Now that I feel like I’ve got my footing and have a better handle on how things work in Nightingale, it’s time for me to determine a general course of action. Consider this a vote for the North Star for this next column. Assuming, of course, the objective doesn’t change sometime between now and then, though I suspect that won’t really be the case for this round.

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Polling will once more wrap up at the usual 1:00 p.m. EDT time on Friday, April 4th. As much as I’m enjoying my time right now, I think I’m going to sit back and see how polling shakes down before committing to one thing or the other. All I will say for now is that it’s starting to feel good to be back.

Welcome to Choose My Adventure, the column in which you join Chris each week as he journeys through mystical lands on fantastic adventures – and you get to decide his fate. Which is good because he can often be a pretty indecisive person unless he’s ordering a burger.