Aaryn Flynn's Nightingale

So- what else have ya got?

Whatever you're doing is only as important as what you've done when we come to the prickly and ever-revolving world of entertainment. Anyone who wants to be anyone needs to have an entire train of back catalogues behind them so that whenever a new project is announced, that heavy, heaving bibliography can be slammed on the table to do all the talking so that you don't have to. It is for this reason that when hearing about this new game coming from new studio Inflexion games, all anyone seems able to talk about is Aaryn Flynn's decorated video game history for his former employers at Bioware. Don't get me wrong, his record is sharp, featuring work on KOTOR, Mass Effect 1 and... well, he worked on Andromeda as well but we're all only human, we can't constantly hit home runs. (Andromeda wasn't a total disaster, anyway.) But I'm of a mind that the only thing which can sell me on how good a project is, will be that project in itself. Everything else is just flavour food. So divorcing the man from his past, how does Aaryn Flynn's Nightingale shape up after it's reveal?

The Game Awards isn't always blessed with so many world premieres as it was for the last packed year, and for a game to hit it's debut at such an event certainly speaks of the amount of investment the development team are willing to put in. Buying a spot in the award show ad line-ups speaks of a confidence in marketing matched only by the hairbrained decision to spend 500 million on world-wide marketing, like what Bungie did. (Okay, I'm sure they spent, like, 5 bucks of that towards development as well. Something has to explain why the base game of Destiny only had a weekend's worth of content.) I'm laying this precedent before you to say that someone, somewhere, in this company has a lot of faith in what this game can achieve and is willing to spend the bucks to ensure it, although after seeing the trailer I'm struggling to summon something even remotely similar. In fact, I didn't really like Nightingale's reveal at all.

Now of course we're talking about a reveal right now, and a teaser at that; so it's not wise to make any snap judgements on the entire project from this early stage when all we can ascertain is the vibe and the world it's set in. But on that note I can say that neither landed with me. My first bit of jarring disconnect came alongside the very visual aesthetic; you've got magical lands of Fae populated by monsters of lore (which we haven't seen too much of so far, but current offerings rate 'decent' on the creativity scale) braved by the protagonist explorers, who all seem to be Victorian aristocracy? I- I don't get it. The billowing dresses, masquerade masks, and a few more tactically sound suits thrown in there, all of it just seems to clash with the world presented. I'm not sure if the team are going for a 'colonial' direction with the art here, but the divide between character and environment is instantly off-putting to me, and not in an intentionally atmospheric way either. It stops the visuals from becoming part of the world and locks them in the realm of 'stylistic for the sake of style'.

But I can get over a little bit of weird visualisation, that's all a matter of subjectivity, but the second problem I saw stuck me a lot deeper and made me audibly recoil and and just say "Ew". It's a survival game. Now I know, the gaming populace have found themselves on a bit of a forgiveness tour with survival games of late, what with the recent transcendence of Valheim. But I never played that Viking Village game. I still bear the scars of the dark ages, when every game was a resource bar management simulator, and indie game design was in a spiralling race to the bottom to see who could create the most insular, frustrating, hardcore survival game experience. And in the end none of them had to bother, the Skyrim modding scene had them far beaten in most extremes from the start. Even associating this game with that accursed lot lands this title in my 'wary' list, deserving or not, because boy does it feel like we don't need anymore of those kinds of games right now!

None of which is to say that Nightingale doesn't look good- because it does. The game's character models bare a mild resemblance to deformed mutants cooked up in vats from a secret lab under the tower of London for the soul purpose of spreading misery and bad dreams across the Atlantic ocean- but the graphics of the world space look great. Warm colours with natural greens that flirt with vibrancy whilst remaining staunchly grounded and real, it sings an easy picturesque hue. And seeing colourful forest greens spotted with burgundy tufts in one scene, and achingly wide quilts of orange sand in another scene, snuggles up to those 'adventure' diodes in my brain which instantly makes me happy. But something about the rest of the package doesn't sit right with me. I suppose this just highlights another way I think this game's visual eye is all sorts of confused, and honestly I might be seeing more of the imperfections than I normally would just because of my natural dislike of these sorts of games, but once that eye has been opened it's hard to shut out these glaring apparent faults.

I recognise that were I sort of person who could bring themselves to play this game, there is quite a lot of promised diversity here in potential building environments alone. There's impressive looking sandstone temples to build alongside clothing-era appropriate wood-structure town houses, and just as with the 'Conan: Exiles' game and '7 Days to Die', Nightingale seems to be using these building mechanics to form a competent, modular building destruction framework in-game which will probably work to make all the world feel like a toybox to play around with. Seeing giants crush populace settlements beneath their toes is no doubt going to be heartbreaking to those who spent their time on it, but it will be heck of an impressive stand-out playthrough moment too. Although, as I highlighted, this isn't really something you can't already find with other survival building games currently on the market, this one just has a slightly better environment rendering engine in the hood and significantly worse player models.

God help me but I even like the narrative premise behind it all, with you being some lost explorer trying to track their way back to the last remnants of humanity holed up in a place called Nightingale. Although I wonder what all this talk about desperate last chances for a dying species and nightmarish magical horror-shows feasting on our dreams in the night has to do with the lightly fairy-tale fantasy monsters we've seen so far. I mean sure, the Sphinx thing with the mouth in it's neck is sort of off-putting as well as the thing which serves the customary 'big monster that screams impressively at the end of the trailer whilst the players watch on in formation to highlight it's impressive size/design' role for this formulaic trailer, totally didn't obviously steal it's scream sound effect from a Jurassic Park movie; but those are about the most 'scary' and 'impressive' looking monster the trailer teases, and neither carry too much of a lasting impact to them. They're not exactly the guys so iconic you can slap them on the box to start shifting units, and neither are the other things we've seen so far. Giants? Fee Fi Fo- those guys look practically jolly. Sentient tree men? The great Deku tree is stretching his legs out for a bit, nothing to freak out about. Even the humanoid enemy mobs aren't the body-horror tribals of The Forest, or bloody resurrected corpses of '7 Days to Die', they appear to just be slightly taller storybook goblins. (Wow, really going to lose my lunch and sleep over those guys!) Unless these are secretly Japanese goblins, in which case they will probably try to diddle us in our sleep and thus are absolutely as scary as the game seems to insist. But otherwise I'm feeling a disconnect from the world I'm seeing and the world I'm told I'm seeing, and it really stands out.

This entire game is a curious case for me, because other than being a survival game with hideous character models, the rest of this game should stand up on it's own merits. The environments looks diverse in their biomes and some stills look downright gorgeous, the building crafting system is modular and allows for enemies to dynamically tear through walls in order to tear you apart, and the story teases this exciting mix of dark fantasy and free-narrative openness. And yet none of the glue that supposed to clump all of this together seems to be sticking. It feels like if someone threw together a Fable game, with all the elements you would expect from that world, but then suddenly decided it was going to be serious in tone, slightly scary and a survival game. You'd probably be thinking: 'these elements don't feel like they work together to make the Fable game this project could have been', and maybe that's the whiff I'm picking up off of Nightingale right now. Again, this is a reveal and so this could all totally just be a case of 'marketing mishap', but so far: this little birdie ain't chirping for me.