Bio Ware’s former boss embarks on a new journey, charting a Victoriana fantasy world unlike any other

BY JEREMY PEEL

This is Puck, a Fae character plucked from old English myth and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and here employed as your NPC guide to Nightingale’s Realms

As the former general manager at Bio Ware, Aaryn Flynn must have been asked a lot of difficult questions. The one that stopped him in his tracks, though, came from his wife: “If you want to do good in the world, why would you build games?”

It’s a toughie. The answer Flynn reached, with the assistance of his new Tencentfunded team in Edmonton, was a rejection of escapism, in favour of belonging. “Go read a book – that’s great,” he says. “But in the long term, I don’t think escapism is an aspirational goal. Why escape where you’re from? Fix those problems, right? Maybe go attack the root and deal with that. Help people where they are. Don’t give them opium. It didn’t connect with me as something that I wanted to say.”

Inflexion sees character customisation as a key element of selfexpression in Nightingale. It’s also encouragement to seek out co-op partners, since you won’t often see yourself

Game Nightingale Developer/publisher Inflexion Games Format PC Release 2023

It’s the philosophy of, to use an American term, a go-getter. But it also led Flynn and his colleagues at Inflexion Games to define their company philosophy. “Letting players be social and meet,” Flynn explains. “Letting the games that we build be a place where you can actually make real, meaningful connections and feel a deeper sense of relationship to each other, because you’re adventuring together.”

You might surmise that Inflexion’s debut is a co-op game, then, and you’d be right – one that currently supports up to six players, and may yet find room for more. But besides being a corporate buzzword, the kind of thing you might expect to hear in one of the preemptive Metaverse landgrabs that have proliferated in recent years, belonging is a theme that colours every part of Nightingale. The nascent survival game is steeped, like a cup of Earl Grey in the hand of one of its upper-class Victorian explorers, in a sense of home, both yearned and fought for.

You play as one of thousands of refugees cut off from the titular city where much of humanity once belonged. There, the citizens of Nightingale lived through a golden age of gaslamp fantasy, enabled by a “torrid love affair” between Elizabeth I and one of the Fae, a race of capricious magical beings that helped steer humanity toward a new renaissance. Portals were opened to Fae realms, and led to great advances in science and industry, not to mention enterprise, since even an alternate history of Earth isn’t entirely free from capitalism. “And then in 1889, the world comes to an end, because this magical miasma called the Pale comes out of the portals and begins to smother the Earth, and ultimately send it into a deep hibernation,” Flynn says. “Possibly even death, we don’t know.”

Escaping through a malfunctioning portal network, the survivors are ejected deep into the Fae realms – which is where you enter the story. Your goal, should you choose to bother with it rather than tinker with the game’s crafting tools in a quiet corner until the end of time, is to return to Nightingale. Either to resume your old way of life or, depending on what you find, to mourn it.

YOUR GOAL IS TO RETURN TO NIGHTINGALE, TO RESUME YOUR OLD WAY OF LIFE OR, DEPENDING ON WHAT YOU FIND THERE, TO MOURN IT