Aaryn Flynn’s Inflexion Games is currently polishing its debut game, Nightingale, ahead of the planned February 22 release date on early access via Steam and Epic Games Store. Meanwhile, the Canadian studio is ramping up its marketing, as evidenced by a new 20-minute gameplay video published exclusively by IGN.
It’s clearly footage of the early portion of the game, with Fae member Puck explaining to players that they can build their home base in the fairly safe Abeyance Forest Realm. What we’re shown is standard fare for a survival game, but there’s more to Nightingale than this.
Inflexion Games was once called Improbable Canada, and they were planning to use SpatialOS technology to make an online roleplaying game as far back as October 2019. However, two years later, they changed their name as they left Improbable; they announced Nightingale as the name of their project and confirmed a shift towards the survival crafting genre.
A couple of months later, we interviewed former BioWare General Manager Aaryn Flynn to discuss the project. On that occasion, he explained:
We have a mantra at the studio, which is ‘a million realms, one universe’. What we mean by that is that we always want to give players the sense that they’re connected to one another. That the world exists beyond their experience within it. When Nightingale begins, survivors of the cataclysmic event have been scattered across the realms, and so we want to represent that through unifying the community in a way that feels present and meaningful to the player. Part of that is players intersecting with one another as they traverse the realms.
Over time, Inflexion unveiled its ace in the sleeve – the Realm Card system. Crafting these Realm Cards allows players to fine-tune exactly what kind of Realm types they’re interested in visiting instead of just being random. At the early access launch, Nightingale will support online play for up to six players and three biome types (forest, desert, and swamp). The developers are planning to keep the game in early access for nine to twelve months, adding new biomes, story missions, and eventually the titular city itself, supposedly the center of magic in the universe.
Pricing for the Unreal Engine 5-powered game hasn’t been disclosed yet, but it’s a fair bet that Inflexion will share that info in the near future. Stay tuned.
