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Nightingale’s great hope is the city hidden at its foggy heartInflexion share plans for the urban side of their survival sim
Inflexion share plans for the urban side of their survival sim
Image credit:Inflexion Games
Image credit:Inflexion Games
Sometimes I wonder whether every genre fantasyRPGor RPG-inflected game is essentially a journey towards the Big City. Most such games start you off on the periphery of the world, out in the sleepy and/or brutish hamlets of FirstActShire, Chosen One County, and send you on a loose quest towards the cosmopolitan centre, where you’ll typically learn about the ultimate villain of the piece, gain access to the juiciest concentration of shops, crafting facilities and quest-givers, and glean some hint at the location of the endgame dungeon. Sometimes the quest takes days of playtime, as inBaldur’s Gate 3. Sometimes it takes less than an hour, as in the original Destiny. It’s a common-enough device that when an RPG starts you offinthe Big City, likeDragon Age 2, or creatively “provincialises” the Big City, likeRoadwarden, I feel slightly unnerved.
Image credit:Inflexion Games
While it’s possible to raise towns of your own in the wider Fae Realms, the whole game is about returning to this city in the mists, and using its knowledge and resources to identify the cause of the Pale. But that’s the in-game narrative, of course: the development story is that Nightingale doesn’t exist yet. Inflexion are still bolting it together, which creates a gentle dramatic irony: for players, the city of Nightingale is a lost past they are trying to recover, whereas for Inflexion, it’s the future, the painstakingly crafted jewel in the crown of the game’s early access career, whichhasn’t gotten off to an amazing start.
“In bringing out Nightingale as a city, we want to do two things with it,” Flynn explained in conversation with me before the early access launch. “One is to expand the social hub idea from the Watch, grow that and give you places to go explore, places to go learn things. But really then it becomes, what are the quests and adventures you can go on, because these various factions are setting you up to go up to new Realms, and which do you align with? Or do you go with all of them? Are you just basically a Realmwalker for the highest bidder, right? Oh, you’ve got a recipe for a spell that I want? Well then I’m going to do your dirty work. Or you’ve got a noble cause I that I agree with, I’m going to help you. So it creates that storytelling opportunity for us, and then gives people a social space.”
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Inflexion Games
Generally speaking, I’m keen to play games in which cities aren’t gilded “hubs” that draw in the budding adventurer and then punt you boldly outward towards the final act. I’m probably making this up, but I feel like videogame cities today are slipping away from the old European daydream of the city as the height of civilisation, representing human life at its richest, most structured and most possible. Today’s videogame-villes are being crafted in the face of climate change, economic precarity, the on-going undeath of postmodernism, and the sense that industrial capitalism generally is a busted flush. As such, they have become fantastical and elusive and broken, more like cities desperately dreaming themselves - a little bit Fae, in Nightingale’s terms.
I’m thinking principally of the outbreak of “nomad city” management games, featuring settlements that canflyorwalkor eventravel between planets- cities that have effectively given up their vaunted “world hub” status, perhaps to save themselves from an encroaching disaster. I would love a bigger-budget RPG or survival game, and especially one that takes hefty inspiration from the fickleness of fairy stories, to do something similar. I’m not sure what it would look like - that’s kind of the appeal. But it’d be wonderful to reach the centre of Nightingale and discover a city that is even wilder and less settled than anything you’ll meet in the woods.
