Nightingale Proven: The Next Survival Phenomenon?

We thought we were done picking up rocks and punching trees, but we’ll make an exception for Nightingale. The survival genre has become more saturated than a television displayed in an electronics store: Steam is full of games where you have to manage a series of bars while collecting resources, and many of them, frankly, are terrible. Their worlds are bland and inconsistent, and the genre as a whole has few truly original ideas.

That’s why we will always shout to anyone who will listen how special Subnautica is. Sure, it’s a survival game, but the setting, story and set pieces drag you into its underwater world. It’s a hostile place, but it’s a place that the game makes you want to explore. Its siren song forces you to dig deeper and see what lies within its depths – it makes you want to be a small fish. We’ve only played for a few hours, but Nightingale hooked us for similar reasons.

Set in an alternate history – filled with real historical figures – Nightingale imagines a world where interdimensional creatures called Fae showed themselves to humanity and altered our trajectory by introducing humans to magic. The result is a gas lamp fantasy, which is like steampunk but with less focus on technology and more on the supernatural – and, you know, gas lamps.

The Faewild —

You are stranded in the Faewild, and forced to survive and ultimately thrive. You may start the game by collecting rocks and sticks, but eventually you’ll be able to conjure fire from your fingertips. You will be able to create spells and potions that will give you superhuman speed and divine powers. You will have access to powerful firearms. But first you will have to dominate the world. Or should we say, “worlds”?

Nightingale biomes are distinct instances where you can travel via portals, using a series of cards to set certain parameters. Before you go to a new place outside of your relatively safe space, you’ll know exactly what awaits you on the other side. Do you need specific resources from the desert? Simply create a portal, choose a biome card, choose a master card to change the biome parameters, and go.

Once you arrive in a new area, you can find landmarks that allow you to play minor cards that further modify the state of the world. Add fog and lower gravity, or conjure a blood moon that pierces the sky, paints it red and strengthens creatures – and the potential resources they drop when defeated. It’s as if everything you do has a great impact on the world around you.

How portals work —

But portals are at their best when playing with friends. If you want to visit the worlds of others, you can create a portal to their home base in your home. Once activated and approved by the other player, it is possible to cross the portal at any time, whether the friend is online or offline, without incurring server costs. At the time of writing, there is no limit to the number of friend portals you can have.

The fact that it is amazing to look at also helps. Using the latest Unreal Engine technology, every area we visited in the playable demo was gorgeous, from the lighting to the richness of the topography. In the forest, deer dart through the trees, hunted by strange velociraptor kangaroos. Mosquitoes dance in the air and monuments shimmer in the distance as their golden plates reflect the sunlight. Calm streams flow through the valleys, flanked by fields of vibrant flowers and water reeds swaying in the breeze.

These spaces are also surprisingly free to explore. Once you’ve mastered the basics, you have access to an umbrella to glide and climb to… well, you get the point. Using a similar stamina management system to that of Breath of the Wild, you are free to climb any surface, as long as your character doesn’t run out of stamina. We also appreciate the clever interaction between the various mechanics, such as the fact that exploration in the heat of the desert consumes stamina more quickly, but you can mitigate this problem by climbing into shaded areas. This means that you have to think before embarking on a climb, which forces you to deal with the world and its conformations.

Nightingale, the verdict (for now) —

Then there is what the developers call the “parametric crafting system”, which endows each resource with different parameters, allowing you to always create objects with an intention: you know the probable outcome of your efforts before wasting the resources. It might be surprising that the first game from a team of BioWare veterans is a crafting survival, but they haven’t forgotten that interesting choices make a better game. We’ve spent very little time in the early game experience, but we can’t wait to delve deeper into the history of the Faewild when Nightingale launches in Early Access for PC on February 20th.

Written by Kirk McKeand for GLHF