Nightingale's great hope is the city hidden at its foggy heart

26.02.2024 - 19:44 / rockpapershotgun.com / Aaryn Flynn

Sometimes I wonder whether every genre fantasy RPG or RPG-inflected game is essentially a journey towards the Big City. Most such games start you off on the periphery of the world, out in the sleepy and/or brutish hamlets of FirstActShire, Chosen One County, and send you on a loose quest towards the cosmopolitan centre, where you'll typically learn about the ultimate villain of the piece, gain access to the juiciest concentration of shops, crafting facilities and quest-givers, and glean some hint at the location of the endgame dungeon. Sometimes the quest takes days of playtime, as in Baldur's Gate 3. Sometimes it takes less than an hour, as in the original Destiny. It's a common-enough device that when an RPG starts you off in the Big City, like Dragon Age 2, or creatively "provincialises" the Big City, like Roadwarden, I feel slightly unnerved.

It's intriguing to place the premise of a journey to the Big City against the production rhythms of, say, an early access game like Nightingale. The game is named for "one of - if not the - most magical cities in the world," according to Inflexion Games boss Aaryn Flynn. It's the site of great advances in the study of Fae magic and Realmwalking, and the seat of the game's squabbling major factions. As Nightingale begins, this huge, enchanted metropolis and all its wonders has been obscured by the Pale - a kind of interdimensional cosmic fog, which traps you and your fellow Realmwalkers in the overgrown and untamed dimensions at the edge of the multiverse.

While it's possible to raise towns of your own in the wider Fae Realms, the whole game is about returning to this city in the mists, and using its knowledge and resources to identify the cause of the Pale. But that's the in-game narrative, of course: the development story is that Nightingale doesn't exist yet. Inflexion are still bolting it together, which creates a gentle dramatic irony: for players, the city of Nightingale is a lost past they are trying to recover, whereas for Inflexion, it's the future, the painstakingly crafted jewel in the crown of the game's early access career, which hasn't gotten off to an amazing start.

"In bringing out Nightingale as a city, we want to do two things with it," Flynn explained in conversation with me before the early access launch. "One is to expand the social hub idea from the Watch, grow that and give you places to go explore, places to go learn things. But really then it becomes, what are the quests and adventures you can go on, because these various factions are setting you up to go up to new Realms, and which do you align with? Or do you go with all of them? Are you just basically a Realmwalker for the highest bidder, right? Oh, you've got a recipe for a