 Early last week a brand new survival game went into early access release on Steam. The game itself is the first release from a new indie development studio and it utilises all the power inherent to the most recent release of the Unreal Engine. None of that in and of itself is particularly unusual or noteworthy. Indie developers release into early access every week on Steam and survival games using ubiquitous engines like Unreal are not exactly rare these days either. What makes this particular release noteworthy however is that the developers at Inflection Games are refugees from the games industry luminary house of Bioware and the game in question has a fantasy pseudo Victorian England steampunk setting that also has a healthy mix of Stargate thrown in. I'm CMDR Buur and this is a first look at Nightingale. The elevator pitch for Nightingale must have been fascinating. Most of foremost it's a survival game. If you've ever played any of the many games that slot themselves into this particular genre of video game then you'll already know roughly what you're in for. Expect crafting, lots of crafting. Material gathering naturally sits alongside that you can also reasonably expect a hunger mechanic and therefore the required cooking and raw material gathering to service that mechanic. You're going to have a base or homestead that is one of the main drivers of all that material gathering and crafting and that base is going to be filled with a variety of task specific work benches and kitchen ranges to serve all that crafting and cooking as well as giving you somewhere safe that you can use to rest and sleep. Nightingale ticks all those boxes so far so survival game. Thereafter for your elevator pitch you need to talk about the setting and the environment you're surviving in however and it's here that Nightingale immediately begins to set itself apart. I mentioned at the top of this piece that the game has a pseudo Victorian England steampunk setting that setting is referred to by the developers as a gas lamp fantasy and the look and stylizing of that setting have been beautifully realized by those developers. The player crafted clothing, equipment and buildings of the Nightingale universe particularly in the later game are just stunning. Even some of the later game work benches are a thing of beauty and really reflect the slightly otherworldly mythical Victorian aesthetic the game pushes constantly. When it comes to the environments that you're surviving in the game really departs from what you may have become accustomed to in other games. You'll recall I mentioned Stargate. Very early on in Nightingale you're introduced to what for me personally is the games ace in the hole and that is the concept of the Faye realms and their associated portals. In Nightingale where you build your home base is not where you predominantly spend your time adventuring and exploring. In fact generally when you're out adventuring you're not even on the same world as your home base because the universe of Nightingale and I use the word universe quite deliberately is accessed via a network of trans dimensional portals literally gateways that can potentially take you to a completely new world with completely new wonders and threats every time you spin one up and venture through it. One of the many items you can craft as a resident of Nightingale are realm cards. These realm cards are magically infused cards that either define a biome such as a forest, desert or swamp or the traits of any given realm. Traits that will define what dangers you might face and what materials you can gather. When one of these cards is inserted into a realm portal mechanism and the gate activated it opens a portal to a semi procedurally generated world that is defined by the cards used. That world is a one time only deal specific to you and once the gate is reset and used again to generate another portal somewhere else that world is lost forever and a new one created. It's the mixing and matching of these various different cards that mean every time you fire up the gate and step through it to explore a new world you never really know what you're going to be facing or what else you're going to find. You can even use a third magical card once you arrive on an established world that then changes specific traits of that world on the fly attuning it to deliver more rocks when mining or making it always daylight for example. In the pseudo-magic science worlds of Nightingale you can expect to find otherworldly versions of creatures like wolves, deer and rabbits alongside Lovecraftian monsters, bog dwelling dinosaur like creatures or giants actual bonafide proper big giants. As you progress you'll be delving into mini dungeon style encounters searching for rare loot and battling huge apex tier creatures on distant worlds. Nightingale isn't without its issues of course, in the short time we've been playing here we have found the tutorial phase at the start to be somewhat overly dense as it stifled our desire to start exploring the tech tree whilst taking an overly fanciful path to introducing its already fairly familiar mechanics. The language used by the fey magical race in particular the guide a character called puck is very overly flowery and elaborate for my tastes undoubtedly in keeping with the characters origins and backstory but it still requires a level of hath thou thee and thus deciphering on occasions that quickly led me to the too long didn't read go get this here more warcraft style instructions that appear on the quest tracking interface instead. There are also some restrictions in place that limit the size of the base you can build currently and whilst this hasn't presented any problems to us personally it is currently an issue for those players that really gravitate towards the expansive base building portion of the game. Game loading and realm preparation times can be quite long currently so it's recommended to install the game to an SSD if you possibly can and as with any new PC game purchase I'd recommend taking a good look at the system specs before you commit your hard earned. The beautiful graphics do come at a cost but also the published system spec requirements on steam are definitely a long way off being bleeding edge and the game supports some of the more magic like upscaling rendering techniques such as Nvidia's DLSS and so that's important to be aware of when you come to investigate your graphics settings. The important thing to remember about early access games however are those words early access. You have access to a game whose state and condition are in a state of flux and so any or all of these things could be subject to change. The developers are extremely open to player feedback and in fact have been all through the games development process before it's early access launch already they've announced plans for an offline only mode, some new build pieces and a number of quality of life updates for example all based on player feedback. But these small quibbles aside thus far at least Nightingale has been the best 22 pounds I've spent on a video game in a very long time. We've heard tales of worlds with airships flying overhead or colossal stellar phenomena in the sky even our settled home realm has multiple planets in the sky that can only be seen at night. The exploration aspect of Nightingale's gameplay is a genuine original twist on the genre and we're looking forward to nipping in and out of lots of different worlds for some time to come. If the ascetics and setting of Nightingale intrigues you and you're in the market for a survival game then we'd highly recommend picking it up. Have you had a chance to play Nightingale in early access? If you have how do you think it compares to other games in the genre and what's been your favourite realm you've discovered so far? Let us know in the comments below. 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