Survival games are a dime a dozen nowadays, so one has to do some pretty unique things to set oneself apart. Ever since I first saw the Mary Poppins-esque umbrella flight in Nightingale’s previews and trailers, this Gaslamp Fantasy survival MOG has stuck in my mind.
Not many games take their inspiration from the Victorian Era, its gas lamps, steam power and cutting edge technology of the 1800s heralding the wave of innovation that would define the early 20th. Pulling characters from history such as Ada Lovelace, Nellie Bly, as well as literature from the time, such as Henry Hyde, an “amalgamation of Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde,” as Inflexion put it in a press preview last week. The team mentions that the characters from literature we see in Nightingale are written about as real people - meaning Alan Quartermane and Jekyll and Hyde were real in Nightingale’s lore rather than just characters on a page.
This conceit unlocks so much in terms of who we can potentially see in Nightingale as the team builds upon the survival game in the future as well, which I’m excited to see play out.
As far as the setting, Nightingale takes place in an alternate history timeline from our own, where humanity was introduced to the Fae around the 1500s, sharing their knowledge of magic and the mystical with Man. This, in turn, changed the trajectory of humanity, and over time the magical city of Nightingale was established by humans, as well as a portal system that allows humanity to traverse the Fae Realms and explore.
Walking The Realms
Realmwalkers, as the players are called, traverse the Fae Realms, gathering resources, exploring the ruins and lands of the Fae, and more through the use of the survival game’s portal system. This system, and the cards you play to affect what you see on the other side, can take you from stunning deserts to marshy bogs, complete with disease and the giant Humbaba to hunt.
As I got started in my nearly four-hour gameplay session, partially solo and then co-op with the dev team, I was rather excited to set up shop and go explore. Survival games are one of my favorite genres on the market, even if they are feeling a bit samey overall right now, so the idea of jumping into a unique setting and checking out this incredibly flexible portal system was rather exciting.
Like all survival games, Realmwalkers stepping through the portals for the first time into the Fae Realms have nothing but the clothes on their backs - rather dapper clothes given the timeline, but clothes nonetheless. Following the rhyming Fae, Puck, Realmwalkers are taught the ropes, from hiding form the sweltering sun in the desert to constructing their first Cairn, the totem that is used to mark out the territory within which to build a base.
It’s all standard survival fare. You can overheat in the sun, you need to eat to survive, and you can even suffer from disease if you spend too much time in a wet, stinky bog. You’ll need to manage hunger while also gathering your resources and crafting, though while eating is mandatory, certain foods do confer bonuses, making the practice worthwhile.
Everything in Nightingale is influenced by its setting. From the types of clothes and weapons you can craft, right down to the Mary Poppins umbrellas you can use to glid through the landscape. It never got tiring jumping from a small hill and gliding, even for a short while, and this was further enhanced when jumping from a cliff, only to pull the umbrella out at the last moment to safely float to the ground. It’s my new favorite means of video game traversal.
The realms themselves take the form of three biomes for now - forest, desert and swamp - and these can be enhanced with Realm Cards that change the properties of nature itself once you’re inside one. Realm Cards are used at a Realmic Transmuter, which typically sits somewhere in each realm and requires some work to unlock. But once you do, you can enhance - or give yourself more of a challenge - by utilizing one of these magickal cards.
One card, Blood Moon, does exactly what it sounds like: turns the moon red, allowing ferocious creatures to stalk the night. My favorite has to be Thinly Veiled, which effectively turns on low gravity mode, making gliding with the umbrella even more enjoyable overall.
Some Realm Cards affect the way resources work on a biome, such as Lumber Mill which increases the yield of wood from felled trees. There is a ton to play with here, and Inflexion will be adding more as Early Access continues, so the possibilities will only increase.
Through The Portal
Portals themselves are how you traverse the various realms, unlocking new resources and exploring more of what Nightingale has on offer. Cards come into play here as well, as the types of cards you insert into the portal will dictate how the realm is set up on the other side.
Three cards - Biome, Major, and Minor - are played when you open a portal, and each determines a specific portion of the world to be uncovered. Biomes set what type of world you’ll enter, while the Major card can establish a theme, such as a Hunt card to do just that - go hunting for some major game. Minor cards establish weather and other variables that influence gameplay.
This take allows for some pretty interesting possibilities, and I’m very curious how long it’ll take players to miin-max the perfect portal card combinations, coupled with the Realm Cards once inside, to create the best realms to explore.
Crafting The Perfect Experience
Like any good survival multiplayer online game, Nightingale offers a pretty decent crafting loop. This is good, since this loop makes up the majority of time inside the Realm. Gathering resources is rather painless, though you’ll want to upgrade your tools the first chance you get, and building is a rather complex, yet strangely simple affair, of placing blueprint versions of what you want to build and then starting on it.
I like this blueprint model of building as well, which I didn’t think I would at first. I thought because building doesn’t immediately take the resources and construct what I want instantaneously, that it would end up being tedious, but I came to enjoy being able to effectively preview what I want to build before actually doing so.
In essence, when you place a building tile, such as a wall, floor and so on, instead of the actual structure being placed, it throws out a transparent facsimile of what you’re trying to build, and anyone with the resources can come along and add it to the blueprint, building together. This allows for some great teamwork if you’ve got a team with you, but it also allows a way for players to preview the build before committing. I’m a fan.
Crafting, though, has some point points to work through. While it’s not as convoluted as some other survival crafting MMOs out there like what we saw in Pax Dei during its alpha last year, it does have a few quality of life features that the developers are keen to add to improve things.
Crafting largely takes place in various stations devoted to a task, such as the sewing station to craft gear or the tannery to make cloth and leather. You can’t queue up tasks right now, so you’re relegated to only crafting one type of item at a time - meaning this isn’t a set and forget affair - and the process to craft feels somewhat tedious in practice.
While you can have the station pull the resources automatically from your inventory, you might not want to thanks to small differences in some crafting ingredients. Hides from a predator versus prey may look the same, but have subtle stat differences that might influence how you want to craft, for example. Instead of bespoke recipes for versions using one kind over the other, it instead leaves that decision up to you (and you can’t mix and match either, for some reason).
You also need to have these materials in your very limited inventory space early on, which isa bummer. However, the developers stated during a press preview that they are working on crafting from chests, so it is coming, I’m just not sure it’ll be in time for launch.
The loop, though, is rather tight when you get the hang of things. I found myself early one moving between the various stations, grabbing healing salve from the campfire, my rock marble bullets for my slingshot from the workstation and repairing my gear from the sewing station before heading out into the wilds to explore.
Exploration is key, also, as you’ll uncover puzzles and more to encounter. One very important unlock is a vendor that sells blueprints to unlock more recipes, including the building blocks to a freeform structure. You can also hire NPCs to work on your land, gathering resources and more while you’re away Realmwalking.
On The Hunt
As part of my gameplay session last week, I had the chance to go on a hunt for the Humbaba, the giant hulking monsters seen in Nightingale’s trailers. Equipped with some high-end gear by the developers, we set out in a swamp biome to track the beast.
Magic in Nightingale is less spell-slinging and more enchantnig, I’ve discovered. You’re not going to have a powerful wizard running around in robes with a staff, chanting cantrips while the rest of the party fires their long-guns at an enemy. Instead, spells are effectively imbued into the weapons you carry, giving them special properties to fit your style.
There are still spells to sling, mind you - a healing spell imbued into our giant Mace can be thrown at allies to bring them back from the brink, though that was really the only example I saw in my playthrough. Our hunting knife, on the flip side, was given an enchantment to track our prey, allowing us to easily find the Humbaba through the muck and mire.
Combat in Nightingale leaves a little to be desired, though, especially the melee combat. Firing a gun such as the revolver feels impactful, but swinging the Mace or hunting knife surprisingly doesn’t, event when I can see if make contact.
Getting hit also doesn’t fully register, especially in the more chaotic fights the developers got us into, making for more than one occasion where I was low on health and really didn’t realize it until it was too late. There isn’t a lot of visual feedback when getting hit in combat, and it made combat feel floaty overall. Hopefully this can be tuned further to make combat feel more impactful overall.
Ranged combat, which seems to be the bread and butter of the experience, feels a lot better than melee for sure. Firing off a quick six-round burst with my revolver and then dodging an incoming attack always felt great to pull off, and the shotgun just decimates at close range. Different ammo types are also helpful dealing extra damage, such as fire cartridges to set Bound, the zombie-esque enemies sent by vengeful Fae, ablaze, while poison was actually a great indicator that I was hitting my targets consistently.
Hunting the Humbaba was a lot of fun as well, as just because the hunt enchantment led you to a location, it didn’t mean it was still there. The Humbaba moves, meaning the hunt took us all over the swamplands looking for signs of the giant creature.
Then we heard it, its thundering feet shuddering the Realm around us.
The fight agains the Humbaba felt much like an MMO boss battle in a way, as each of us tried to drop the giant beast as quickly as possible. Fire ammo rocketed through the air, setting the creature ablaze, while one of our team members bravely ran in wielding his enchanted mace to attack the Humbaba at the knees.
It hit hard, and I found myself chugging health potions with my off hand constantly trying to stay alive. Then came the Harpy monster spawns to distract us. These two legged creatures were difficult to slay, especially with the giant Humbaba still there causing mayhem. More than once it looked like our group would wipe, if not for a timely heal from someone to keep at least one or two of us afloat.
After what seemed like ages we finally felled the beast, the forest and swamplands around our battle were utterly devastated by the chaos (The Humbaba is so large it literally knocks down trees in its path). It was a fitting end to a fun-filled day, and made me feel genuinely like a Victorian-era explorer. I felt like we had set out as an old-school hunting society, eager to take on the wilds the world threw at us, and came home laden with the trophies and loot of our adventures.
Nightingale has promise, and I’m eager to see where it goes from here. In a market saturated with survival MMOs right now, it needed to do something to stand out among the crowd. And I think, by and large, it has.From its unique setting to the modularity of its realms, there is a lot on offer here to explore with friends. I can’t wait to dive back into the Fae Realms come February 20th.
