Choose My Adventure: Nightingale’s Welkin’s Reach offers high intrigue and slight annoyance

Welkin’s Reach is going to stick out in my mind after having moved through the zone in Nightingale. This was a realm of odd beauty, weird mechanics, interesting style, and yet another series of minor frustrations all wrapped up in to one.

Yet despite those frustrations, I think that I’m starting to actually enjoy some of the dumb things that this game is doing in terms of mechanics. Or at least I’m getting more comfortable with them; I’m not completely sure which is the case, honestly.

Entering this realm for the first time saw me get the obnoxious crap out of the way first: finding another set of hide-and-seek glyphs in order to unlock a bundle of essence. I was fixated on this because I wanted to know if I was going to unlock Tier 3 crafting, but as it turned out, this was still a Tier 2 realm. So maybe my gear would be sufficient to carry me along?

No, dear reader, it was certainly not. While I got by in a couple of initial encounters by the skin of my teeth, I ultimately was handed my first death in this game. My first several deaths, in fact. The only reason I won my first combat encounter with the Bound here was just sheer bull-headed persistence as I kept throwing myself at the foes until they died.

This rather neatly leads to the death penalty in Nightingale: You respawn at the nearest major checkpoint or arrival site, repair your gear, and try again. This was a significantly big step up from previous builds where you had to head to your dropped bag in order to get all of the inventory items.

Still, dying a bunch of times over and over in the realm did lead me to understand that I had to get back to upgrading my equipment. I was stubbornly trying to follow the main story path (mainly because I was streaming the game at the time and nobody wants to see me stand around and craft a bunch of stuff), which led me to an observatory that had barred windows and doors that were locked by some very cryptic riddle. After some attempts to try and worm my way in without cracking the code, I elected to call it a wrap and just keep exploring a bit more to complete a side objective.

As I was roaming Welkin’s Reach, I started to come to grips with how it all operated. This pastel region had some lowered gravity and a bunch of jump pads scattered throughout. This meant that I had to start looking at things vertically on top of horizontally, particularly since several POIs were placed on some small floating rocks that were dotted around overhead. This also, yet again, pointed out how meager my equipment was. The umbrella glider I was using did not have enough flight time to make exploring worthwhile.

And so I headed back to my home, which incidentally still stands instead of being built at a new site; the polling ended in a tie between not moving and building within a forest, and a coin flip determined that I would stay put. It’s just as well, honestly. Using the crafting tables I have here and now was just going to be more expedient.

After a few hours of building new crafting tables, starting new crafts, and realizing I didn’t have the right mats and rebuilding old crafting tables temporarily, I slowly started to build up a new arsenal. I got better (and fancier) clothing crafted. I got a chonkier backpack. I crafted my first set of firearms.

It was time to head back.

I was completely ready to journey back into Welkin’s Reach to both test my equipment and to unlock the observatory I had to delve in to, which turned out to be something possible by completing agility courses dotted around the zone – a fact that I only came to learn after opening my bloody map. Coincidentally, I apologize to my stream viewers for watching me muddle around this round building for several minutes. That was probably very boring.

Or would I have to do these agility courses? As it turns out, there was indeed a way to enter the observatory without needing to jump through possibly literal hoops – a fact that I learned only by the good graces of one of our fine readers, Darthbawl. As you can see in the picture, the answer was literally right under my nose. Unless, of course, there was something possibly barring that way in?

No. No there was nothing stopping me from just… walking in to the open roof window.

Embarrassed but buoyed by the fact that previous combat encounters confirmed my newly built kit was up to snuff, I started to make my way in to the observatory, which brought on another round of enemy spawner killings, minor puzzle solving (this time it was just engaging pillars in the right sequence), and some surprise platforming (the holes in the floor shocked me a couple of times). After that, I was able to unlock a power that would orotect me from the health-draining miasma of a place called The Well. I dived in.

This was yet another encounter full of combat, floor switches, and pillar lighting, except once again verticality was the primary feature. This in turn meant that I had to do a bunch of platforming in first person view, and let me tell you, platforming in first person absolutely sucks in Nightingale. Or just in general, really. The only game that did that right was the Metroid Prime series, frankly.

Still, I managed to work my way through, all the while being spoken to by this entity known as Sheliak, who referenced the fact that I was in its prison. So obviously that meant I was going to have to fight it.

Once again I was treated to a boss fight that was both distinct and annoying all at once. This time around I didn’t fight a super bear; I fought a gigantic beetle that had an armored carapace all around it, and the only way to get to its squishy underbelly was to make it run in to pillars. Easy enough! There were some pillars standing, and I was able to work out how to use the jump pads scattered around to leap into the air and fire some bullets into Sheliak’s soft parts.

But then the pillars were not around. There were corporeal blueprints of them, but they otherwise didn’t exist. A bit of panic settled in up until the point when I noticed there was some new ores sitting around. As it turns out, I had to mine these ores and rebuild the pillars mid-fight. Once again Nightingale managed to combine gathering and combat into its boss encounter seamlessly. It was genuinely inventive. I just wish the combat in this game were better; ideas this good deserve a tighter combat model.

After I defeated Sheliak, gathered more of this ore for my own purposes, and listened to the boss whine about imprisonment and being freed via death, I made my way out of Welkin’s Reach with a new realm card in tow and a whole bunch of confidence. I also had some intrigue and concern with what lay next: The next realm is known as Magwytch Marsh, which is likely a poisonous bog, but I also have just gotten the Tier 3 recipes opened up and waiting to be filled with Tier 3 essences.

So! We’re on to the next step! Or are we? That’s right, it’s basically time to answer the same poll question as last time! On the one hand, I am interested in seeing what this place is like, but on the other hand, I feel like I could use the possible break from the main path. I’m genuinely fine with either option, so that leads to poll one:

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Next up is about rebuilding the base. Yes, I am going to do this. Genuinely. And I will follow the previous poll’s instruction to find a wood to build in. The question is: What sort of tileset should I use in this build?

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Lastly, we’ve got one more choice to consider. That’s right, three polls in one piece! Can you believe it? I sure can’t! And this is obviously the most vital of the lot. There are realm cards I can use to change the environment of my abeyance realm. That means we’ve got some fun additional options we can use to dress up our space even more. Here are the options:

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Polling will wrap up at the usual 1:00 p.m. EDT time on Friday, April 18th. For now, I have to once again sit and wait to see where things go in terms of polling results. Or I could be smart and start the process of moving my base. But then, considering that I didn’t notice a giant opening in the observatory roof, I don’t think I can be accused of being smart.

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.