After a few hours, Nightingale feels like one of the weirder Elder Scrolls RPGs

The major thing Inflexion's fantasy survival sim Nightingale gets right is that it makes procedural generation feel like sorcery. "Procgen" has become a ubiquitous concept in game design and especially survival game design, and I fear we've all lost sight of how magical it is to summon a landscape full of idiosyncratic flourishes from a hidden dataset. It's partly, in fairness, that many semi-randomised settings feel indistinct, smooshed together with little of the character you'd get from a "hand-made" environment and setting. Nightingale slices through the ennui in a couple of ways.

One is that this is a relatively storied and text-driven survival experience, with a self-summoning fairy narrator, Puck, who immediately buries you in Shakespearean turns of phrase as he weaves the history of a multiple-dimensional universe of "Fae" realms, roamed by creatures of Irish, English and Scottish myth and legend. I'm not sure Puck will be everybody's cup of tea as principal quest-giver and narrator - according to Inflexion boss Aaryn Flynn, some early players have struggled to make head or tail of his dialogue. But he helps conjure up an eldritch mood that sets Nightingale apart from most genre fantasies, including the Dragon Age titles Flynn once worked on at BioWare.

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