Nightingale Has Fun Survival Crafting Gameplay at a Fair Price

Making an always-online, open-world survival-crafting game is a bold choice these days, but Inflexion Games believes it can pull it off with Nightingale. We got an early look at this upcoming game and had a chat with Inflexion's Neil Thompson and Leah Summers about their designs for this new adventure.

Nightingale charges you with traveling through portals and exploring the mysterious Fae Realms. Whether you're going it alone or playing with friends, you'll have to struggle to survive environmental hazards, deadly wildlife, and otherworldly monsters alike. Read on to learn more about the world of Nightingale!

Stepping Through the Portals of Nightingale

Your first steps into the world of Nightingale will be familiar to any fan of survival games. You have nothing of value aside from the clothes on your back, a terrifying world before you, and the will to survive it.

My colleague Isaac Todd and I both played a version of the game that is about a month older than the upcoming Early Access release version. Still, the experience was plenty polished: Nightingale has a carefully crafted gameplay loop and gorgeous scenery to explore.

You're guided through the first three biomes of the game -- Forest, Desert, and Swamp -- with the assistance of a floating Fae going by the name of Puck. It's a straightforward tutorial as well as a wine tasting of sorts for the environments you'll experience in your adventures.

Aside from deadly wildlife and mysterious, zombie-like foes called "the Bound," you'll also have to contend with the weather. Fail to build a sturdy shelter and you could suffer stat penalties from the intense desert heat or be pummeled to death by a hailstorm in a forest.

The end of these first few portal trips will lead to an "Abeyance Realm" -- a permanent home location where you can build a proper house, store your goods, and recuperate from your travels in other realms. Once you've settled in, your adventure can truly begin.

A Magnificent Mix of Mechanics

There is no massive overworld in Nightingale. Instead, you'll travel through portals to small realms that fit one of these biome themes. Your destination biome is decided by a "biome card," and you can further modify your experience by upping the difficulty or changing the rules of the world -- even altering gravity itself.

These three simple choices provide you with a surprising amount of versatility with the handful of biomes that will be available for the Early Access launch of Nightingale. Critically, they also provide an easy-to-understand framework for introducing new challenges or new ways to play later on down the line.

Some of these realms can be quite large, but you won't have to run everywhere; climbing picks and an umbrella (which serves as a glider) give you a few more options for moving across the land -- and these are just the start.

"There will be plenty of ways to speed up traversal around realms."

"We've certainly thought about mounts, that's something that we'll be investigating during the Early Access Period," said Neil Thompson, Director of Art and Head of Audio at Inflexion Games. "There [are] also spells that you can cast to increase your basic traversal speed as well; we've been messing around with that, too.

"You can do [pretty] cool low-level gliding in most of the realms now," he added. "If you just take off even on the smallest hill and glide, you can, like, skim across the ground pretty gracefully. You can get around pretty swiftly."

Naturally, you'll find all of the other mainstays of survival crafting games: Crafting, building, hunting, and cooking are all important parts of the arsenal that will keep you alive in your adventures.

Weaving a World Together

Many open-world survival-crafting games have some form of multiplayer, but these are usually restricted to a handful of people in co-op or private servers rented by one of the players. Nightingale stands out from the crowd by providing an always-online experience.

You'll be able to set any realms you visit to "public" after you complete the tutorial. This will give you an organic way to meet people out in the field during normal gameplay, though this isn't the only option.

"Once you reach The Watch -- it's our 30-person social hub -- there [will] be quite a few more players," Inflexion Games' Head of Publishing Leah Summers explained. "You can jump into the vaults together. But at any time, you can add people into your party from the party menu, whether you've opened up a realm and had it be a public realm or you've met them in The Watch."

That's not to say that you can't be a lone wolf, mind -- it's entirely possible to stick to private realms and largely avoid other players, save for your visits to the Watch. The world of Nightingale is as wide as you want it to be.

That same level of control extends to your home Abeyance Realm; you can craft one-time use cards to allow someone else to open up a portal and allow them to visit. You must be cautious, though -- building and crafting is cooperative, and inviting a random that you don't quite trust is about as wise as opening up your Minecraft server to the general public.

Respecting Your Wallet

My short time with Nightingale revealed a fairly solid foundation that has plenty of room for expansion. What's particularly impressive, though, is Nightingale's intended price point of $29.99 at its Early Access launch and a promise of no microtransactions.

"We're really working on the paradigm that we want to offer as much value for money to players as possible," Thompson said. "So we think $29.99 is an extraordinarily reasonable price for the amount of game that you're getting with Nightingale. There's a lot in there."

"We're not in this to gouge players."

As an always-online game, though, there's the question of server costs. The wildly popular creature-catching survival game Palworld, for example, spent nearly half a million dollars keeping its servers online in just one month, and this is a concern that Inflexion Games is certainly aware of.

"We're going to absorb those server costs in that price," Thompson continued. "Don't expect that to change. We intend to do free content updates, as well, during Early Access."

Considering some of the recent high-profile failures of always-online games, it's certainly reassuring to see that Inflexion Games has dedicated itself to providing a robust experience to its players at a reasonable price. It's a refreshing attitude when compared to some of the AAA studios that Inflexion's developers hailed from.

As always, the first few months of Early Access will show us whether their design philosophy (and their server infrastructure) can survive contact with the real world. You can find out for yourself when Nightingale launches in Steam Early Access on Feb. 20, 2024.

Nightingale was previewed on PC with a key provided by Inflexion Games over the course of 4 hours of gameplay before the Early Access Launch. All screenshots were taken by the previewer during gameplay.

With contributions from Isaac Todd.