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After a few hours, Nightingale feels like one of the weirder Elder Scrolls RPGsAt its worst, it’s about fighting the UI and stripmining the scenery
At its worst, it’s about fighting the UI and stripmining the scenery
Image credit:Inflexion Games
Image credit:Inflexion Games
The major thing Inflexion’s fantasysurvivalsimNightingalegets right is that it makes procedural generation feel like sorcery. “Procgen” has become a ubiquitous concept in game design and especially survival game design, and I fear we’ve all lost sight of how magical it is to summon a landscape full of idiosyncratic flourishes from a hidden dataset. It’s partly, in fairness, that many semi-randomised settings feel indistinct, smooshed together with little of the character you’d get from a “hand-made” environment and setting.Nightingaleslices through the ennui in a couple of ways.
Image credit:Inflexion Games/Rock Paper ShotgunImage credit:Inflexion GamesNightingale’s character creator allows you to choose two parents and adjust the degree to which your character inherits traits from them. Which is neat.
Image credit:Inflexion Games/Rock Paper Shotgun
Image credit:Inflexion Games
Depending on which Realm cards you play, there’s a chance of certain objects, groups and resources appearing. |Image credit:Inflexion Games
The forest was the first biome Inflexion created for Nightingale, and it feels like the game’s soul. Much as procedural generation pulls many variations from the same archive of props and assets, so forests (and perhaps especially, the twisty remnants of Britain’s old primordial rainforests) often seem much larger on the inside.
A little further afield, there’s a Swamp biome featuring huge iron derricks, where you’ll have to worry about slow movement and infections from polluted water. Last but not least, there’s a Desert biome that harbours towering observation platforms, where you can play Realm cards to modify the world in real-time - just watch you don’t overheat while roving around in full sunlight. The game’s weapons and gear include fancy umbrellas, which both guard against hostile weather and can be used for gliding. Initiating a glide after jumping is a little tricksy - I fell to my death, the first time I did it - but it makes for some amusing party multiplayer photography. How’s that for traversal,Destiny 2?
Thanks to guides writer Jeremy for this magnificent image of Nightingale players in formation. Chocks away, dearies! |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Inflexion Games
The umbrellas are a gentle homage to Mary Poppins, and the game as a whole is a love letter to British cultural exports. The worlds owe plentiful debts to Narnia, Alice In Wonderland and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. You see this lineage in the monster design, too, which ranges from rattling clockwork abominations through monstrous arachnids (or if you turnArachnophobia modeon, spider-teethed balloons) to sleeping sentient trees who can either be bartered with or felled to obtain rarer kinds of timber. Not every foe is worthy of a campfire yarn: you’ll face hordes of club-wielding goblins and larger, tougher variations of the same. But I’m eager nonetheless to encounter the rest of the bestiary, after a few hours wandering the opening Realms.
A small anecdote: after trying out the single player last week, RPS attended a group play session with Inflexion’s Aaryn Flynn in which we took on several later-game quests, including a hunt for one of the aforesaid sentient trees. At first, we couldn’t find the tree, leading to a suspenseful tour of the surrounding, misty forest, testing our axes on any especially ominous-looking vegetation. Flynn was naturally worried that we’d all lose interest, but I for one loved the experience of getting lost in the woods. Until an over-zealous NPC lumberjack dropped a trunk on me, anyway.
After such glorious tours of the undergrowth - the low sun springing through the boughs and colouring the ensorcelled air, forming a kind of Golden Hereafter at the forest’s distant perimeter - it’s a shock to stumble out into the open and get told to smash rocks 30 times so you can build a bungalow. The downside of Nightingale’s fancy-dan “gaslamp fantasy” premise is that certain underlying survival game routines feel all the more banal in context.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Inflexion Games
If you’ve playedArk: Survival EvolvedorValheimyou’ll know the drill: run around spamming the collect button to hoover up rudimentary crafting components, such as sticks and rocks. From these you will assemble tools such as woodaxes and mining picks, which allow you to break down larger chunks of scenery and obtain the ingredients for floors, walls, roofs, and ambient fixtures such as candles. You’ll also construct crafting tables of one kind or another, from tanning racks to sewing stations.
People who adore tweaking a frontierland estate will find much to optimise here. Amongst other things, you can place facilities such as campfires and worktables near one another to unlock ambient bonuses, and the holographic building tool is fairly easy to use. It lets you plot out a series of structures to see what they look like, before you commit the materials.
People who love this kind of thing may also feel, however, that the UI in general needs work. The all-important hotbar at the bottom is stuffed with often-interchangeable icons, power numbers for gear, status effects and ability hotkeys, which often led to me grabbing a weapon from my arsenal at random during more chaotic fights. There’s a bit too much faff when looting - open a treasure chest, and you’re presented with a wheel of interaction options. I found some menus hard to read: I could never quite work out whether I’d successfully crafted something, for example, or had fallen short for want of materials. Practice makes perfect, and I don’t think there’s anything altogether broken here, butEnshroudeddoes a better job of communicating the essentials.
Building a base is the start of your Nightingale adventure. From there, you’ll make contact with various factions, including other groups of human refugees, and embark on quests to ancient temples and so forth to acquire the cards for more distant realms that progress the overarching plot. The dungeons I tackled were quite straightforward: in one, I had to descend through the inside of a ruin to a bossfight in the catacombs, where the biggest difficulty was being unable to see my opponent. But during ourco-opsession with Flynn, we were able to sample a few endgame “raid”-style events that seem worth grinding for.
In one, you have to explore a sandy sunken temple consisting of a series of “find the glyph"puzzlerooms and wave defence encounters. In another quest, we also took on a giant, poison-belching bat ogre, albeit with the benefit of endgame equipment that made said poison-belching bat ogre a pushover. In the absence of artificial playtester advantages, I can well imagine these climactic battles stretching past 10 minutes as players experiment with debuffs, search for weakpoints, and contend with waves of summonable minions. The weapon selection starts you off with crude knives and bowguns, with most fights coming down to managing your stamina. Later, there are hammers with a healing aura alt-fire, shotguns you can load up with elemental ammo, and pistols that can be wielded while gliding with your umbrella.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Inflexion Games
If you’re thirsty for more, we also havea group interview with Inflexion boss Aaryn Flynn, carried out during the aforementioned co-op session. Pullquote: “Norman is a fabulous name for a bear.”
