It all starts off like any old survival game: you sprint around a procedurally generated map, frantically swiping up rocks and twigs in your bare hands so you can set up some kind of basic shelter and a campfire to stave off the cold of the approaching night. But it soon becomes clear that there’s a little more magic at work in the upcoming steampunky survival gameNightingalethan in other games of the genre.
Early on, you’ll meet the‘Fae Spirit’ Puck, who guides you through your early hours, talking in strange poetries that help you get to grips with the game’s systems. One of these systems is Realms, which includes the cards that you use and craft in order to not only travel between realms, but to alter the very reality within them.
See, the premise of Nightingale — beyond that of crafting, survival, and building up a cool 19th-century-styled base with up to five of your friends — is that you’re traversing these mysterious realms to eventually reach the mysterious city of Nightingale itself. And in order to hop between these different realms, you’re going to need to use portals.
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Looks Like It’s Time For A Shake-Up
But using portals to travel between realms using the Major Realm Cards isn’t the groundbreaking part. What’s really interesting is that next to each portal you find in a given realm, there’s a Realm Card Machine, where you insert Realm Cards that will dictate what awaits on the other side of the portal.
The two cards you insert here will set the biome of your next realm, as well as its difficulty. At this point there are three biomes to choose from: desert, forest, and swamp, each of which has its own enemy types and environmental hazards to be wary of. You can combine these biome cards with cards that set the difficulty and size of the next Realm; so you may want to teleport yourself to a quaint forest ‘Abeyance’ Realm, where you can build a homestead without fear of it being trampled by roaming beasts, or you and your expeditionary pals may want to seek precious resources fromhigher-level creaturesout in the Desert, at which point you’ll want to combine the cards to send you to a Desert ‘Antiquarian’ Realm.
It’s a fun little way to empower players in a genre that can often feel disempowering until you break through at the far end of it. Each new realm you go to is procedurally generated too, so each feels like you’re going deeper and deeper into entirely uncharted territory.
Realm Cards are a really cool way of integrating what we’d normally call mutators or modifiers into the game’s lore.
Once you’re within a realm, you can use Major and Minor Realm Cards to further tinker with your experience. First you’ll need to find that realm’s Realmic Transmuter, into which you can insert Realm Cards to alter the nature of the realm you’re in. For instance, the Amphibious Card makes you a much stronger swimmer, but it will also make the sky in the realm permanently overcast. Thinned Veil, meanwhile, lets you jump higher and boosts your stamina, but at the cost of Durability, and a cool side-effect of it is that when you look to the sky, you’ll be able to see space seeping through the atmosphere. It’s a stunning effect, enhancing the already surreal feel of this unique world.
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Legitimately Practical Magic
Other realm cards will add boss encounters to the overworld. Some may increase a certain type of resource, while others still might cast darkness over the realm and embolden the Bound to attack you more aggressively. The idea is that you can tilt your Realm towards the kind of experience you’re looking for at that moment — whether it’s kicking back and resource-gathering, or seeking greater challenges for greater rewards.
You can find Realm Cards out in the world or craft your own at Enchanting Tables, so whenever you get the urge to shake things up, with just a little bit of legwork, the possibilities are there. It’s a really cool way of integrating what we’d normally call mutators or modifiers into the game’s lore, and speaks to anattention to worldbuildingthat you don’t often get with survival games.
It all makes me cautiously optimistic for when Nightingale lands February 20, because in an overpopulated genre where resources are scarce, a little magic is needed to stand out.
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