During The Game Awards last year, we were treated to a reveal trailer for a first-person survival game called Nightingale, mixing steampunk and fairytale creatures as humans try to make their way home through an infinite tangle of Faerealms. Six months later, we’ve now seen a brief overview of the gameplay on the Summer Game Fest 2022 stream.
In some respects, Nightingale appears to have a kinship with other survival games such as Rust or The Forest. Food, shelter, tools; these things are going to be necessary to eke out the basics of survival. But where you have wild animals in Rust and mutants in The Forest, the wildlife of Nightingale appears to be…well, wild. Strange creatures, semi-recognizable from fairy tales, as well as monsters you’ve probably never seen previously outside of a Brian Froud coffee table book fill a dizzying array of potential environments.
The big mechanic separating Nightingale from other survival games comes from the means of its procedural generation. Worlds like Valheim rely on complete generation cloaked by a fog of war. Nightingale, on the other hand, lets the player have a say in the process through the creation of Realm Cards. The processes for gathering materials is unknown, as is whether the cards themselves remain available to use in a deck, or if they’re single-use catalysts to open up a particular world. But, as detailed in a blog post from the developers, the mechanics for using the cards seems to be one where experimentation is encouraged, and understanding how the various combinations of cards interact can yield better results.
There is currently no definitive release date for Nightingale, though Inflexion Games is promising that playtesting will start sometime later this year, with a tentative release window of Q4. It can be wishlisted now on Steam and Epic Games Store.
