Will Nightingale's crafting card menus be its downfall?

By now you'll probably have read quite a bit about our preview adventures in Inflexion Games' upcoming fantasy survival adventure Nightingale - including our slightly raucous attempts to interview CEO Aaryn Flynn while instant KO-ing tree monsters and abusing our supplies of ice bullets. But outside this guided co-op session, several members of the RPS Treehouse were playing it on their lonesome last week, too, getting to grips with Nightingale's particular flavour of sticks-and-stones crafting, cooking up meat and berry wraps to keep ourselves fed, and generally being cajoled and maybe even lightly seduced by our fae Shakespearean guide, Puck.

With so many folks playing it - some diehard survival heads and others who are mostly just glad to be having a break from Palworld for a spell - it quickly became apparent that lots of us had quite different takes on how Nightingale worked as a craft 'em up. I swear, I don't think our RPS Slack chat has ever seen such passionate discussions about UI layouts and hotkey assignments, so we thought it might be fun (and useful) to try and distil some of those thoughts for you. Will Nightingale succeed in capturing survival newcomers with its peculiar blend of gaslamp tea leaves, or will it chaff like a Victorian corset for the survival hardcore? Join us as we discuss some of its finer points below.

Now, Inflexion told us during our preview session that they're already working on a lot of changes to the UI ahead of its newly-shifted early access launch on February 20th, so here's hoping some of these concerns are addressed by the time the game launches in full. But based on what we've played and experienced of Nightingale so far, let's first talk about the biggest hurdles some of us had getting into the game. Ollie and James, I know you both have many thoughts on this.

James: Yeah, a lot of the UI is (was? We haven’t seen the redesign) either a mass of empty space or a cluttered card collection. Not every menu needs to be a dull text list but it wasn’t even doing something interesting and diegetic instead, like The Forest’s junk-on-the-floor crafting screen and doodled build guides.

I’m obviously glad it’s being refined, but there are other basics that Nightingale didn’t get right for me. Some of the movement, especially climbing with your wall picks, was janky in the extreme, and the combat is dreadful. Weightless, drawn-out number subtraction exercises against monsters that jitter around like they’ve connected via 3G and don’t react to having elephant rounds slung into their foreheads.

Ollie: I will happily pick up the baton on the clunky card-based UI, which bulked out every element in the crafting and building screen so that you more or less had to resort to using the search bar to find what you needed. The UI’s common theme seemed to be that everything required multiple clicks when common sense dictates one should do. Nightingale has what Inflexion calls a “parametric crafting system” where you can use different materials of the same type (e.g. different types of fibre or wood) to create the same recipe in different quality levels. Which is cool in theory, but when every ingredient slot requires you to click on it to open a dropdown for you to click the right ingredient, it gets tedious very quickly. And the devs knew that, because they added an “autofill” option, which I can’t help but think defeats the purpose of the parametric crafting in the first place.

And don’t get me started on the bizarre reverse hotbar. I get it - 1-5 are your main hand, 6-0 are your offhand. And because everyone in the Fae Realms is apparently right-handed, 6-0 go on the left and 1-5 go on the right. But it doesn’t serve anything to restrict the player in this way! It’s only there to be different! And that difference makes it worse than every hotbar in every other survival crafting game! Gah! Nightingale’s UI is not good for my blood pressure.

Katharine: Controversial opinion: I actually quite liked the drop-down menus and little card drawings. Perhaps I'm a more visual kind of survival game player, but neither they nor the hotkey number situation really bothered me that much (I mostly scroll through weapons, anyway), and I liked being able to see what objects look like beforehand. Admittedly, I can see this becoming a bigger burden as more and more crafting recipes get added, but in the early hours at least, I found it a lot more approachable than I was expecting. I also want to give a big thumbs up for being able to place objects temporarily in the landscape, even if you don't have all the resources to finish building them right away. That was one thing I was really missing in Palworld (among many others, like an enjoyable, visually interesting world, an actual story, purpose - all things Nightingale has in spades), and laying out objects like this makes planning your base and outpost much easier.

As for the combat, I agree the melee bashing is just as airy and 'not really my bag' as yer Skyrims and other first-person sword slingers, but I'm taking this as a clear sign that none of you tried the very good revolver and its pow pow pow pow chamber-emptying special move. Very, very satisfying that (as was your big swoopy dodge move), and this made navigating its hectic co-op fights way more gratifying.

The only real UI nitpick that really threw me for a loop was all the numbers attached to trees and rocks. I realised eventually these were related to the power level of the tools you can craft - slamming a level 2 axe into a level 10 tree, for example, isn't going to get you anywhere fast - but it would have been nice for the game to tell me this itself, preferably through a menu, or at least some kind of vague, Puck-ish quip during the tutorial section (though, to be fair, the thought of Puck trying to relay this kind of information in setting-appropriate Shakespearean iambic pentameter does make me chuckle).

Ed: My problem with Nightingale so far, lies in what response it elicits from me: digging sleep out of my eyes. Like Ollie and James, I found the combat jittery and swipey, with a lot of the UI requiring an extra button press from me than I'd like. Sure, the setting is quite different for a survival game, which is nice! But what you're doing in these swamps and deserts isn't all that different. I'm still picking up sticks and plant fibres to create crafting benches and bedrolls, maybe a nice house with nice vases. Maybe when its full release swings around and with a bit more time, I'll come to find each of these magical worlds brimming with possibility.

Right now, though, Nightingale's worlds strike me as pretty crops to be harvested. I swing my mace in average dungeons, I pick flowers, and I crush beasts of little intelligence. Also, a lot of planets make you "Hot" in the sweaty sense, so you constantly have to whip out your umbrella for some shade. If you don't have an umbrella, enjoy roasting in the sun, or darting between pockets of shade. Yes, I'm being a bit grumpy - sorry. But given the sheer number of survival games out at the moment, I'd hoped for an initial impression that would've left a bit more of a mark. I really hope it proves me wrong.

Edwin: As somebody whose interface design insight usually begins and ends with “ooh, this feels a bit faffy,” I appreciate James and Ollie’s steely dismantlings here. But I will poke my head above the parapet and say that I think I’ll learn to live with Nightingale’s crafting systems and hotbar layout, moment to moment. For me, the problem with the default UI is a broader and more familiar one - there’s too much of it, or at least too much of the explicit, non-diegetic stuff. You’ve made this gorgeous gaslamp fairytale world, Inflexion, this sparkling expanse of myths and legends lifted from all over and folded together care of an intriguing multiversal cardgame, and I can barely see the bloody grass for combat logs and button prompts!

I guess the overkill is in keeping with the theme of Victorian adventurers conquering and exploiting an "unspoilt" world, and I suspect Inflexion have ample playtester feedback to call on which indicates that this level of guidance is necessary. All the same, the very next thing I’m going to do in Nightingale once I’ve recovered from our hectic co-op session is turn as much of the UI off as I can without jeopardising myself.

James: I both liked and disliked the dodge move. Disliked it because it always hurled me way further than I was expecting, liked it because that actually is kinda funny.

I will also agree with Edwin that the world of Nightingale is delightful. The world-altering resets you can induce at the top of Fae towers were especially spectacular, while conveying just about the right amount of in-universe instability to suggest the technology was dreamt up by a moustachioed cad after a productive morning at the opium den. I just wish reaching the top of those towers was a tighter, more satisfying raid.

Katharine: I'm mostly just looking forward to seeing how those dungeon towers play out as solo endeavours, a) because I'm a mostly solitary player (aka: has no willing friends to co-ordinate these kinds of games with), and b) I never felt like I really got the full measure of its combat possibilities. When five or six people are all laying into a boss at once, everything happens a lot faster than I'd like.

Jeremy: I don’t play too many survival games, and I’m coming to Nightingale from the perspective of having spent a month in the dungeon that is Palworld. Nevertheless, while I can understand complaints about the game’s UI, I’m not bothered by it that much. The inversion of the hotbar is unusual for sure, and I did experience difficulty picking items off the ground until I realised that you could just hold down E to collect everything at once. I was also playing in third person view - which the game clearly states is “experimental” - and there is a noticeable jank present in navigating across rocks and spamming enemies with attacks that sort of reminded me of a 2000s-era game, like the first Witcher. But just like how I was able to overlook a lot of The Witcher 1’s foibles due to the strong writing and setting, Nightingale somehow wins me over. Like Edwin wrote in his preview, at its best the game truly does feel like an Elder Scrolls from ages past, radiating a Morrowind-esque vibe that somehow brainwashes me into thinking the odd UI is a feature to be learnt and slowly digested rather than one to be rebelled against.

Maybe I’m just seeing everything through rose-tinted Victorian spectacles. There is, of course, the wider question of whether the enticing fae lore that Inflexion Games has whipped up here is the right kind of thing for a survival game. As Ed said, the gameplay loop still boils down to running around a map collecting junk to build structures that will enable you to collect bigger and better junk. But there’s still something about Nightingale that compels me, with its strange quirks and card-based mechanics that seem like they were partially inspired by the niche Gamecube RPGs Lost Kingdoms and Baten Kaitos. It may not surpass the likes of Palworld or Enshrouded in popularity, as the conflicting opinions within the RPS Treehouse and on the Nightingale Subreddit probably indicate, but I think this might be a sleeper hit that appeals to those who aren’t normally invested in survival games and are able to overlook weird gameplay for an experience soaked in atmosphere.

Kiera: I am starting to see that I am a simple creature compared to the rest of the Treehouse. I do think that Nightingale's UI could use some polish - it falls into the dreaded realm of 'telling not showing' for me, and when I see too much text on a screen my brain just goes foggy and refuses to play along. However, I had a nice time with Nightingale regardless and for me, setting and tone are much more important, even in survival crafting games. Perhaps more so because of the sheer number of them that have come out recently.

In particular, I liked the feedback response you get when gathering materials and snatching up brambles. So much so, that I soon found myself terrorising the natural beauty of a landscape, stuffing my pockets full of trash until I became little more than a goblin hoarding treasures. Equally, I loved the dodge as well and the absolute chaos of not knowing how far forward you were going to be launched. After all, why walk somewhere when I can yeet myself through portals and cause havoc?

I will say that using the umbrella to negate the effect of overheating was slightly cumbersome as it automatically used up one of your precious hand slots. This meant that I had to resort to less eloquent techniques to take down foes (I mostly ran around, stabbing at ankles whilst clutching hold of my brolly). Flynn assured us, however, that there are other later-game ways to deal with climate control. Here's hoping for a fetching umbrella hat or an unwitting NPC, forced to follow and shade me like the high-society Victorian lady I plan to be.

Katharine: I'm starting the campaign right now: Puck for umbrella butler, why not?

Well, there we are. Some additional thoughts on Nightingale's crafting systems, there, suggesting that there may be more corset chaffing than expected for quite a number of us when it launches into early access. As I mentioned right up at the top, Inflexion have said they are working on polishing up various bits of Nightingale's UI and interface for its early access launch on February 20th, though whether they'll be able to magic away all of our concerns remains to be seen. Watch this space for further Nightingale chat next week.