Nightingale is a game of fascinating contradictions. This Early Access co-op survival crafting game jumps wildly between intriguing and confusing, aesthetically pleasing and outright ugly, intuitive and obtuse. It does a lot right, and it is a joy to build a life from the ground up across its varied and mysterious realms – but it also does a lot wrong, often stalling your progress with an infuriating economy. Nightingale’s creative systems can certainly make it a fun time, but be prepared for frustration to rear its ugly head time and time again.

Nightingale takes place in a gaslamp fantasy world, a Victorian almost-steampunk-but-with-magic setting that feels fresh and unique in this genre – sure, games like Dishonored or The Order 1886 had similar styles, but it’s still a seldom used framework that really stood out to me here. Earth as we know it is being swallowed up by a strange fog, which has scattered humanity across the realms of the Fae, mythical beings pulled from European Folklore. As a Realmwalker, you have the ability to travel from one realm to another, which puts you on the search to find the magical city of Nightingale, the last human refuge.

The mysterious Fae Puck acts as your guide on that quest, first helping you to activate a portal and escape to a far off forest realm. Puck stands out as a fascinating character, and his flowery olde tyme language is an early highlight, particularly thanks to how well it is performed. His ability to appear out of nowhere and lead you along does a solid job moving the story forward, and lends itself to funny surprises, like when he popped in just to make fun of me for cooking and eating the exact same meal every day.

Unfortunately, the rest of the characters you meet are currently voiceless at Nightingale’s Early Access launch, and any story elements that don’t come from Puck are purely text-based exposition dumps. There are no cutscenes or big interactive story moments to speak of, just menus telling you why you need to go to a certain spot, kill a specific thing, and then turn in whatever it drops. That’s a shame, and feels like it wastes the cool setting and structure Puck’s introduction sets up.

Quality is inconsistent across Nightingale. That disparity is a good example of the inconsistent quality prevalent across Nightingale. The character creator, for example, has surprising depth, allowing for impressive customization of minute details like tooth decay, with extensive family trees whose genetic lineage can be applied to your appearance… but the end results of those interesting options always seem to look like they are models formed from clay, rather than believable faces.

The realms you travel to offer more than just a new sandbox to explore. The flora and fauna vary wildly, and each presents unique hazards that are good at recontextualizing the survival aspects of Nightingale. Sure, the scorching heat of the desert is a pain if you aren’t in the shade, but at least you aren’t being beaten to death by the hail that falls in the forest. The way each forces you to adapt to survive really drives home that these are untamed worlds you are simply lost within.

Each realm has unique enemies; you might find yourself fighting off overgrown spiders in the swamp one moment, running from a pack of wolves in the forest another, and then having a duel with a giant in the desert the next. The designs of all of them look really cool, and the materials you gather from fallen foes become resources used for crafting or cooking. That last bit matters quite a bit as this is a survival game in the truest sense of the word, and sometimes the only thing between you and starvation is a fresh giant bug for you to roast. Bon appetit!

You have control over what realms you visit thanks to Realm Cards. Major Realm cards can be played at portals, which then determines the biome and setting that portal will lead to. For example, you can create a mostly peaceful forest, perfect for building your base of operations, by pairing a Forest card with an Abeyance card. Alternatively, you could combine a Desert card with an industry-themed Provisioner card to create a sparse and arid factory complex. It’s a simple but powerful system, and one of the best parts of Nightingale.

Once you pick your cards and step through the portal, the realm itself is procedurally generated, which allows for potentially limitless exploration, but also makes things feel disconnected much of the time. Happening across a ruined building is less exciting without the surprises that a curated level-designer may include, especially once you start to see the exact same structures repeated in different places. The lack of planned geography can be an actual issue at times, too – I once had a quest to speak with a person who was placed at the top of a high cliff, but there was no path up to reach them. Clambering up the side of the hill and hoping to get lucky with the layout of rocks is not a fun way to move about.

How realm-hopping ties into crafting and dungeons is really clever. Minor cards can be played while within Realms to modify them further, like the duelist card, which makes everything (you included) take more damage. Others improve the yield of harvesting materials, affect how you swim, or myriad other things. It’s a good way to let you tailor the realm towards what you are trying to work on at a given time.

The way that realm-hopping ties into crafting and dungeon crawling is really clever, too. Blueprints to create new Realm Cards come from Sites of Power, Nightingale’s version of dungeons. Entry to these places is gated by your Gear Score, which is determined by the quality of equipment you possess – and better Blueprints and materials to upgrade your gear lie in higher level realms. It’s a well tuned loop that layers these systems together seamlessly, which makes investing time into any given task meaningful.

Crafting is largely very good. Gathering materials to begin the typical climb from a destitute castaway to a thriving survivor is compelling, and if you’ve played pretty much any games like this before, it is very intuitive. Blueprints are given out as quest rewards or bought from vendors, and the suite of options does a great job of naturally handing you new tasks in that layered “if you give a mouse a cookie” sort of way.

For instance, at one point I was asked to create an Infusion, a mod that can be socketed into equipment to do things like increase durability or reduce stamina consumption. To create it, I would need to build an Enchanter’s Focus – this required Lumber, which comes from a saw mill, which is built using Animal Fibre, which is made at a Tanning Station. By the time I was actually ready to put the mod to use, I had progressed from being more or less feral in the woods to owning a construction facility that would be the envy of any high school shop teacher. It accomplished exactly what a good crafting system should do by rewarding me with tools and knowledge alongside the thing I actually set out to make.

This setup is fun and engaging… until it all comes to a screeching halt. As of Nightingale’s Early Access launch, there are substantial gaps where higher level materials can’t be crafted yet, and you instead need to find a realm with a vendor who sells them. Crafting the cards to access these realms can compound the issue by also requiring high level materials, creating a painful loop of stopping and starting my progress with roadblock after roadblock as I bought material after material.

A resource called Essence forms the economic backbone of this adventure, and while it does a good job in the early going of simplifying a lot of things, it’s also one of the main culprits behind this loss of momentum. It’s used in crafting, to purchase goods from vendors, and to repair your equipment. Essence is awarded for completing puzzles or finishing Sites of Power, and can even be extracted from any material or piece of equipment – you have to destroy that item to get it, but it’s worth it if you can then afford a new blueprint or make something that will help keep you in the fight.

Higher tier Essences can be tedious to gather. The problem is that higher tier Essences are needed for more powerful crafting and equipment, and those can be tedious to gather. They can only be found in specific realms, most commonly by clearing Dungeons and solving simple “find the hidden button” puzzles scattered around. It was always really disappointing to be on the verge of crafting the last gear upgrade I needed to advance in a quest only to find out I’m a few Tier 1 Essences short, sending me on a long march back to a portal and into a different realm is search of something that might drop what I was missing.

Time sinks like this happen all the time in Nightingale. At one point I needed to gather a bunch of materials from The Bound, goblin like enemies with a penchant for appearing from thin air, in order to progress the main quest. The things I needed were random chance drops from quite a few different enemy types, and you had to be in the right type of realm for them to appear. That meant finding the realm, making the cards, gearing up for said realm, and hunting until I gathered enough. The amount of time it took was painful, and this was all to complete one part of an even larger mission with more steps like this.

Thankfully you don’t need to walk the realms alone, and playing with friends is a great way to take some of the sting out of the slower parts of this adventure. A few simple clicks is all it takes to add a friend, party up, and invite them to your realm. You can share equipment freely, which is excellent if one player is further along and wants to gear up their buddy so they can join in some harder dungeon diving.

It’s particularly impressive that co-op is completely untethered, which means your friends are free to come and go through various realms, joining or separating as they see fit. Everyone can have one NPC following to help in combat or carry things, similar to how companions worked in Skyrim, so getting a group of people together quickly forms a small army, which is good fun.

It’s also really nice to build together. Structures can be fully planned out before you spend any materials, allowing you to design the fortress of your dreams. Then, anyone can interact with that in-progress creation to contribute materials toward its construction. It feels really good to collaborate on a large building, planning and constructing it with friends. Anyone from your group can then build an Estate Cairn, making it their home base, allowing them to load in and fast travel there anytime.

I won’t spoil the specifics, but late in the game you also get access to a public area. Seeing other Realmwalkers run around in their finery is pretty cool, and this opens up some new raid-like missions with random strangers, allowing you to work towards the highest level loot. There’s not much to the end game beyond just grinding these encounters out at the moment, but it’s nice to have something to aim for after wrapping up the approximately 40-hour campaign. Just know that while the main quest itself has an end already, the actual story around it isn’t finished yet, presumably coming in some future Early Access update.