The Haunted Hoard: Reflections: Nightingale (Playdate)

Fiction offers us a chance to see the world from someone else’s perspective, Reflections: Nightingale using that to help share the frustrations and concerns people with chronic illnesses experience but aren’t often heard properly. This narrative game does portray how confusing and unsettling it can be to suffer from an unclear illness while others don’t take it seriously, but after setting you up to be receptive to its heroine’s plight, it then wraps things up rather suddenly and without exploring the topic deeper than the surface level. Unfortunately, the game can end up ringing hollow as a result as it spends more time with dalliances into surreal horror rather than building off the core theme, the game leaning more towards symbolism than substance.

 

Reflections: Nightingale tells the tale of Elly, a girl who awakes in the hospital not entirely sure why she’s there and only able to go by the doctor’s word that she even had the issues that brought her in. The doctors don’t seem untrustworthy or cruel, but they can sometimes talk past Elly, undermine her concerns, and even when they try to tell her what’s wrong they don’t seem to consider her perspective too much, the player easily able to experience Elly’s frustrations secondhand as well as her ennui as there’s nothing she can do but put her health in the hands of these people who might know better. The hospital sections are almost entirely built of simple conversations or observations, your input being to select things from a menu from time to time but you don’t even really leave your hospital bed often. The game is relatively short so none of these segments stick around long enough to wear out their welcome, and whenever Elly goes under, we instead to get to see worlds that are more disturbing in a traditional sense.

Elly finds herself in a range of unsettling locations that are more fantastical than the mundane hospital setting. In a good deal of these, there is some unseen grossly organic threat, this unknown horror that leaves its mark on the environment pretty clearly meant to represent Elly’s uneasy feelings about whatever is wrong with her. There is an unusual section that is portrayed both as a flashback but a deliberately inaccurate one as Elly remembers her past home yet with alterations made to it that are less about injecting horror and more just strangely pastoral touches. Were this a more personal tale this segment would be a fine touch when it comes to helping us better understand Elly in the same way her texting her friend almost is, but while we see Elly’s thoughts, we don’t explore them too much. We learn Elly’s feelings and then an ending asks you to make a choice that doesn’t feel built up to properly, Elly not given much time to ruminate or grow as instead we need to take time to learn what the deal with an eerie new fantasy is that also gives us metaphors good for setting things up but not providing steps in a story. We are simply made aware of problems with the game’s message seeming to be that such things are frustrating, a stance that is true enough but not exactly a fulfilling backbone for a narrative.

There is a bit of puzzle-solving involved in Reflections: Nightingale when you are in the game’s creepy warped reality segments. When you find yourself somewhere besides the hospital, you will be able to explore more freely and even gather items to use on other objects. Inventory puzzles are your primary form of interaction, although they don’t require much figuring out because of how limited the game areas are and how obvious interactions are both through direct hints and limited use cases. You’ll see every interactive spot highlighted by sparkling starbursts so you won’t miss anything you need to investigate, but you can sometimes be told directly the item required for a puzzle or just not have the breadth of inventory items to make it really difficult. You are primed to use the appropriate object if you have it too so you can’t make mistakes even. If not for the simplistic graphics sometimes finding nifty ways to make an area seem uncanny or even have your mental state represented by odd effects on the side of the screen, these sections would feel fairly hollow as they are flights of fancy without interesting activities.

 

I do not wish to diminish the troubles people with chronic illnesses or unclear diagnoses experience, and Reflections: Nightingale actually sets things up well in making you sympathize with them. It’s the follow through that needs stronger work. Some things are clearly bundled metaphors, the night from Elly’s past is meant to represent something meant to take care of you failing you, and reading the author’s own intentions over in the itch.io comments is fascinating if not exactly fulfilling. It is nice to know there is purpose behind what you’re viewing even if some of them feel like a bit of a stretch, but it all feels like allegory even when the game already has more concrete situations to establish something similar. The nail is being hit on the head already after the point has been dug in well enough, and rather than getting a plot that progresses from this starting point, we’re shoved into a quick finale that makes the game feel too small for what it could have done with its themes and topic.

THE VERDICT: Reflections: Nightingale has some pretty basic inventory usage that can’t get too involved thanks to abundant hints and the fact the biggest areas are only three small screens with few interactive points, but it was clearly meant to be a narrative adventure first and it sadly feels like its engine never really gets started there. You get some meaningful and effective visuals and it’s very easy to empathize with Elly once you experience what it’s like to be in her situation, but the story feels rather inconclusive and possibly deliberately so. While it makes its points about being hospitalized for sometimes unclear maladies well, it feels more like it just wants to show that perspective rather than do much else with it.

 

And so, I give Reflections: Nightingale for Playdate…

A BAD rating. I did consider being a bit more moderate because I do believe the subject matter is worth discussing and its issues aren’t egregious, but the interactions are basic and the game feels often too steeped in its visual and situational metaphors to provide anything beyond nailing in its themes repeatedly. Elly’s tale isn’t really moving because our look into her headspace is either a bit too oblique with the surreal sections or rather straightforward. It feels like the narrative could have kept going, have moments where Elly isn’t just sitting in a hospital bed reflecting on things like her pain or feeling bored out of her mind. The horror sections would be great for giving a stronger gameplay setting for working through her concerns or addressing them one by one to build up to a proper apotheosis, even if that apotheosis ended up ultimately something negative, dour, or even mundane. Does she come to terms with this confusing affliction? How will it impact her life in the long term, or how does she even feel in the short term when it is effecting her actively? We get her grumbling about her personal relationships a touch, but even then it doesn’t dive deep into how this will effect those beyond the short period we see here. Reflections: Nightingale is apparently deeply connected to the true experiences of the creator and I end up in a situation similar to A Memoir Blue where I appreciate the fantastical twists to a human tale but also find them distracting from it, and both unfortunately take efforts to broaden their story rather than making it truly autobiographical so it can provide the needed emotional impact to bring the story home.

 

One really unfortunate element of giving this game a low rating is it can seem it is almost dismissive of its message, but here the issue is the messenger. Reflections: Nightingale is a solid start, perhaps on a system beyond the Playdate it would have been easier to keep telling the story and building on the themes laid down rather than leaning so hard on hoping the player picks up very specific metaphors. I love to interpret deeper messages in a text, but here we mostly get things reinforcing the same fundamentals. Compelling gameplay could have been built around that to make that less of an issue, but with the story being the primary focus, it feels like it needs to say more than just being a repeated reflection on how bad an awful thing is.