Nightingale is the right game for this survival crafting renaissance

The survival crafting game genre is in the middle of a renaissance. Players have been drawn to mainstays like Minecraft and Terreria for well over a decade at this point, but the last couple of months have seen plenty of new contenders enter the market. Lego Fortnite, Palworld, and Enshrouded all recently launched and became some of the biggest surprise hits in the industry in recent months. Now, Nightingale is launching and aims to ride this genre popularity wave to success.

This fantasy survival crafting game from former Bioware developer Aaryn Flynn has been in development for nearly five and a half years at Inflexion Games. It evolved over time, initially being a cloud-based game before Inflexion split from its former parent company, Improbable, and was acquired by Tencent. Now, it’s finally entering early access for the wider public to play — and couldn’t be doing so at a more perfect time.

I recently went hands-on with a pre-launch build of Nightingale and found a survival crafting game that has the potential to be the genre’s next big hit. It doesn’t rock the boat too much at first, but once players can dive deep into its lore, building, and innovative Realm Card system, exploring the Faelands looks like an entertaining experience, especially in multiplayer.

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A full tank of gas

Flynn describes Nightingale as a “gaslamp fantasy” game. It’s set in an alternate history version of 1880s London where fictional characters like King Solomon’s Mines’ Allan Quatermain are real and where humanity’s development was interrupted by a magical race called the Fae. Humanity used that magic to create a vast network of portals that allowed people to travel to various Fae realms, with the nexus being a city called Nightingale. In 1889, a cataclysm called The Pale