I hate wrestling but love WWE games for one simple reason: they have great character creators. There’s almost nothing I enjoy more than customizing a character down to the color of their shoelaces and the style of their cufflinks, and wrestling games have a strong track record in that department. Unfortunately, survival-crafting is my favorite genre, and only a handful of survival-crafting games deliver the customization I’m looking for. Minecraft and Valheim? Not so much. Enter character creation in Nightingale: a system stuck somewhere museum-worthy masterpiece and nuclear plant meltdown. It horrifies me, but I can’t look away.
Character Creation in Nightingale
First, the caveat: Nightingale is in early access. Problems are expected, and the situation will only improve. That said, character creation is a blend of such good, bad, and weird design decisions that it’s climbed to the top of my favorites list. You won’t get Black Desert levels of customization, but there’s surprising depth here. Let’s talk about teeth. Nightingale gives you not one but four different sliders for your character’s teeth. You can alter crookedness, add tooth decay, and if you want a metal tooth, you get to pick which one gets the pirate treatment. Character creation in Nightingale has problems, but detail isn’t one of them.
There’s an age slider, but it doesn’t matter if your character is 16 or 60: they’re going to look like one of those eerily real but subtly wrong Halloween masks. Think less department store mannequin and more haunted wax museum. The hair, meanwhile, looks tacky, like someone doused it with no-budge hairspray. It’s not just my character, either. Every human I’ve met in Nightingale suffers from the Uncanny Valley. Something has gone terribly wrong in fairyland, and it seems to have started at the barbershop.
Nightingale’s 1.0 Roadmap
If all this sounds like a criticism of Nightingale, it’s not. Don’t get me wrong, there are some serious gaps and issues that Inflexion needs to fix before the game hits 1.0, but what’s here is already phenomenal, despite its eccentricities. The “something isn’t quite right here” vibe actually works in favor of the Faewilds setting, the same way that Kenshi‘s grotesque characters feel right at home in that blighted wasteland. I don’t want Nightingale‘s waxy, dentist-needing ensemble to change. Quite the opposite. Whatever the Nightingale roadmap looks like, I hope it stays this unsettling. I don’t want to go back to Roman Reigns and Rhea Ripley.
Nightingale is available for PC in early access.
