Choose My Adventure: Sylvan’s Cradle encapsulates the good and the bad of Nightingale

As directed by you fine poll-completing folks, I dived face-first into Nightingale with a singular purpose: power through the Sylvan’s Cradle zone, clearing out POIs and completing story beats along the way. And boy howdy did I get the job done.

It was a bulldozing effort on my part as I took to my task over the course of one extremely long and epic playthrough, which taught me quite a bit about where the game excels, where it still falters, and the limits of my patience with obnoxious puzzle and encounter design. We’ve got a bunch to cover, so let’s get in to it.

As is usually the case when I’ve entered other zones in this game, my first task was to simply head to markers on the map and try to clear them out, whether it was combat zones, platforming areas, or those insipid Bastilles of Intellect that spawn in the game. This sort of thing has always felt like the “purest” essence of Nightingale in that the game’s randomly generated realms sort of encouraged that kind of play, so it was nice to get back to basics in that regard.

To that point, many of these activities didn’t really surprise me all that much. Combat areas were still full of monsters, caves were still full of bears, puzzle zones were still deeply obnoxious. About the only thing that was different were the locations that ask you to build up pre-placed blueprints; the actual gameplay was still the same, but the rewards for doing so were actually worthwhile for once.

In doing all of these things, I started to get acclimated to the way fights were best approached in this game, which brings me to the matter of combat. Someone in the comments from last week asked if the fighting has been improved. I’m going to go ahead and say no: While there is the added mechanic of focusing on a spawner that has to be destroyed in order to stop enemies from appearing endlessly, and there are a bunch of different enemies that now spawn that require more reliance on using different weapons (a mix of ranged and melee specifically), things still feel very much Bethesda-like for lack of a better comparison.

That is to say, it’s still a bit clunky and weird and not what I would call very engaging. I haven’t had any deep problems with combat in Nightingale, but I also appreciate that it could be much better. If fighting in earlier builds of this early access survivalbox was your tripping point, there is probably little reason to come back. I’m not too fussed by it, but I also think it could suck much less.

Case in point: The very final boss fight in Sylvan’s Cradle was against a corrupted bear. I’ve fought myriad bears in this game before, even at least one named one, but this fight was just a miserable experience of bad camera work, wonky enemy behavior, and frankly cheap tactics.

The differentiating factor between this bear fight and other bear fights was the fact that it could spawn lines of damaging miasma and would also hook up to corrupted trees to slurp up their juices and heal, requiring me to cut the trees down before it could regenerate too much. That latter mechanic wasn’t too bad and was actually engaging – a fight that uses gathering mechanics is a welcome surprise – but the damaging lines attack would never fail to miss as the bear would perfectly spin around every time regardless of what animations the attack was telegraphing, forcing me to push through the line of DoTs.

Still, I suppose since previous boss fights involved me staying on a ramp and sniping a robot because the enemy AI was too stupid to navigate slight inclines, we’ll call that forward progress. I’ll give Inflexion half of a point here.

As I’ve been so subtly referencing through this column, the puzzles of Nightingale are still absolutely the worst. In fact, I’m loathe to use the word “puzzle” in relation to how you’re meant to solve certain encounters, but it’s shorter to type than “garbage hide-and-seek mechanics.” Most of the time when I needed to unlock something, whether it’s a bundle of essence or a path forward in a delve, I had to find some glyphs that were slapped against a wall or floor or column that would only reveal themselves when I was less than about five feet away.

This isn’t puzzle-solving. This isn’t using my brain or trying to work out interesting problems. This is fumbling around in the dark, endlessly circling the same few rooms, hoping that I didn’t miss something, whether it was a glyph itself or some wall I could knock over with my pickaxe to reveal one of the tiny hidden rooms that a glyph would be snuggled up in to. It’s basically the same thing Nightingale has done in previous builds, and it’s just as insipid and infuriating now as it was then.

This all came to a head when I managed to make my way into the final site of power that capped off my time in Sylvan’s Cradle, which combined the endless enemy spawner thing with the annoying glyph locating thing to create a stew of intense frustration, especially because the spawners were out of my reach for a couple of floors, one of which I couldn’t get down to until I did the stupid hide-and-seek game. It got to a point that I had to walk away and take a break for the rest of the night to lower my blood pressure.

Yet despite these deep and seething frustrations, Nightingale’s whole basic vibe and aesthetic are still such a big hook for me. The survivalbox mechanics feel pretty well balanced compared to others I’ve played, the basic combat beats aren’t a huge enough problem to push me away, the Victorian-era style is still immaculate, and the story of my realmwalker trying to find her way home are still engaging. I even like hearing not-John Hurt (aka John Warren as Puck) needle me. Seriously, that man could read a thesaurus and I’d be engaged.

With that said, Sylvan’s Cradle is cleared and conquered, and it’s time to move on to the next leg of my journey, which ultimately has a couple of steps to it. The first is, of course, about the next realm to go to, and while the storyline is pushing me in the direction of Welkin’s Reach, I’ve also unlocked the ability to build my own portal and delve into randomly generated realms if I choose to. Or more specifically, if you choose to.

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The second poll question is about base building. I am at a point now where I must take some time to craft and build, and while I have already established a little homestead (that even isn’t Baby’s First Survival Shack-shaped), I’ve also found some handsome new locations that would make for some lovely builds.

Yes, this would mean I would have to relocate all of my gatherings, which would suck because moving day is awful in both life and survivalboxes, but I’m also not so emotionally attached to my first location that I’m not against the rebuild. Unless, of course, none of this is interesting to any of you. We can just stay home instead.

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Polling concludes at the usual 1:00 p.m. EDT time on Friday, April 11th. For now, I’m going to lean back and just not play Nightingale for a bit. This epic ride was ultimately fun but I could also use the little break too.

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.