Last week, I got a chance to play Nightingale, a new survival-crafting game with a heavy Victorian Gaslamp aesthetic and more than a few mythic curios. It comes from Inflexion Games, which includes some former Bioware staff who worked on Mass Effect and Dragon Age. The basic loop will be familiar to anyone who has brushed against the genre in recent years; build a base, craft tools, and explore. Where Nightingale aims to stand apart, though, is that this busywork is surrounded by a world full of wonder and a story that, quite literally, goes places.
Nightingale's aesthetic grabs me from the word go; thick wool suits, dandy umbrellas, and heaving mustaches. It's a perfect look for the 'frontier' type of exploration the survival game promises. Throw in a story about Fae creatures revealing themselves and changing the course of history itself and I'm sold. The Fae introduced magick (spelled with a 'k' so you know it's serious) to humans and spurred on an unprecedented era of technological advancement.
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