Nightingale, the upcoming open-world survival game by developer Inflexion Games, has a new extended trailer ahead of its early access release. The video showcases an overview of the main pillars of the experience, from a quite complex crafting system to Realm Cards, a neat mechanic to re-shape worlds with different alterations, affecting anything from biomes to weather.
Customization and base building will be at the heart of Nightingale. The workshop, where you’ll take care of all crafting-related activities, encompasses many aspects of these. Equipment and items are essential not just for looking stylish, but to endure the dangers outside your humble abode. For these, you’ll need to obtain a plethora of resources during your travels. Depending on the rarity of said resources, you’ll also obtain bonuses that can make you faster, more stealthy, and so on.
On top of crafting, there’s a station dedicated solely to enchantments, allowing for even deeper specialization. Enchantments are active skills–think of them like magic spells–that grant you new abilities, such as a ground slam or the ability to regrow trees to chop them again for resources. There are also charms and infusions, which are mostly passive effects like stamina regeneration or poison resistance, among dozens of other options.
If all of that doesn’t sound like enough choices to worry about, consider Realm Cards. The mechanic has you choose between three types of cards–biome, major, and minor cards—to create a new world with customizable conditions. For starters, you can create, say, a swamp with low gravity, or a forest with increased rewards that also has tougher enemies than usual. Specific combinations, however, will lead you to special enemy encounters and even characters of interest, such as Victor Frankenstein and Nellie Bly, which will grant you missions.
Realm Cards can either be crafted or found out in the wild. Inflexion has said there’ll be more variations added throughout the course of Nightingale’s early access period, which kicks off on February 20. Ahead of launch, the game’s survival aspects are familiar, but the customization of mechanics like Realm Cards holds promise.
