n the late 1 800s, towering metal
pylons loom over the Victorian city
of Nightingale, crackling with
magical energy. In this alt-history
timeline, ancient mystical
creatures from another realm
known as the Fae revealed
themselves to the world in the
1500s, changing the course of
human history by introducing us
to magic. Nightingale essentially
became the new centre of the
world as people flocked to the city
to learn the ways of arcane sorcery
and put it to use in science and
industry. Magic portals were
opened and human explorers,
known as Realmwalkers, began
stepping through them to explore
unknown worlds, returning with
new resources, discoveries, and a
whole lot of treasure.
But in 1889 this bold new age of
magic came crashing to an end. A
mysterious cataclysm called the Pale
invaded our world. To flee its
destruction, humans across the
planet attempted to use their portals
to reach the relative safety of
Nightingale, but the portal network
had already been destroyed. Instead
of arriving at Nightingale, these
humans stepped out of their portals
and found themselves trapped in the
Fae realms with no way to return
home, armed with nothing but their
wits and resourcefulness in a strange
and hostile world.
That’s a lot to absorb before
you’ve fashioned your first axe and
chopped down your first tree in
Nightingale, the upcoming shared-
world survival game from Inflexion
Games. But there’s another, less
complicated way to explain it.
“It’s all about top hats,” says Aaryn
Flynn, ex-BioWare general manager
and CEO of Inflexion Games tells me.
“There’s a lot of top hats.”FASHION AND FUNCTION
The Victorian style is certainly potent
in the concept art, screenshots, and
footage I’m shown when I meet with
members of the development team
via Zoom. Yes, you’ll kill an angry
boar and strip its hide with a knife
like in any other number of survival
games, but you won’t wind up
dressed in crude leather rags and a
loincloth in Nightingale. Our
Realmwalkers may be stranded in a
savage world of monsters and magic,
but that’s no excuse for not dressing
up all fancy. You’ll take your collected
resources to an old-fashioned sewing
machine and create dapper
waistcoats, bowler hats and bustle
gowns. Classy duds. The basics of
survival are familiar: trees need to be
chopped for wood and berries picked
for sustenance. But this is a
particularly stylish gaslamp fantasy.While a lot of details are still
under wraps, and many features still
in the works or not fully fleshed out
yet, we know Nightingale plans to
support up to ten co-op players in a
single game when it launches into
Early Access near the end of 2 022.
No PvP is planned for Nightingale- this is a strictly co-operative affair
more along the lines of Valheim,
where you work together with
friends, than something like Rust
where you spend your time
murdering strangers. You can also
play solo, though from the looks of
the boss monsters I’m shown, which
Inflexion calls “apex creatures”,
bringing along a couple pals for the
battle sure seems like a good idea.
BOSS LEVEL
One apex, called Ishmael, is a massive
leathery swamp beast capable of
turning ranged combat into a melee
affair by crossing the distance with a
single leap. The Fae has a race of
giants as well, towering humanoids
with great shaggy beards and feet big
enough to flatten a building. I’m
shown the concept art of a third apex
creature, a massive bronze being with
four arms and a clockwork head that
looks like it could serve as a god to a
race of copper robots, which I’m told
is called an automaton.
“We have this concept within the
Fae mythology,” says Neil Thompson,
art and audio director for Nightingale.
“They’re not strictly machines,
because the Fae would never do
something as crass as [build]
something that requires gears and
fuel, but they have these magically
infused, we call them automatons,
which were built millennia ago but
still exist. And the bloodlines that
build them have long since passed
into obscurity but the automatons
themselves still exist within some of
the realms. So, you know, what is
their motivation? And what are their
particular abilities? Well, that’s
something for players to find out.”
But not all encounters with the
creatures of these realms need to end
in violence. There may be peaceful
solutions that can be explored instead
of simply solving every problem you
come across by unleashing a
Victorian shotgun blast. The
Nightingale trailer revealed at the
Game Awards in December 2021
shows a massive giant angrily
stomping on stone structures while a
player backpedals and fires a
bolt-action rifle at it. But another clipVICTORIAN VS VIKING
How does Nightingale stack up against
2021 ’s most popular survival game?P
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VALHEIM NIGHTINGALE
Nightingale