The landscapes of Nightingale themselves are pretty dreamy.

The forest was the first biome Inflexion created for Nightingale, and it feels like the game’s soul.

How’s that for traversal,Destiny 2?

Key art from Inflexion Games' shared-world survival game Nightingale showing a person in a red hat and dress holding a smoking revolver

The worlds owe plentiful debts to Narnia, Alice In Wonderland and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

At its strangest and most elusive, Nightingale reminds me of Bethesda’s Elder ScrollsRPGspre-Oblivion.

These are worlds that hold mysteries, as hard as the quest logs and waypoints attempt to spoil everything.

The character creation screen in Nightingale, showing a close-up of a woman’s face with a slider controlling how much her face resembles her parents

Until an over-zealous NPC lumberjack dropped a trunk on me, anyway.

You’ll also construct crafting tables of one kind or another, from tanning racks to sewing stations.

People who adore tweaking a frontierland estate will find much to optimise here.

A dialogue with Fae spirit Puck in Nightingale. The player is being invited to imagine a world for the pair to travel to.

Building a base is the start of your Nightingale adventure.

Nightingale stands apart from the current survival game competition better than I was expecting.

By contrast, one crucial trait of a good fairy story is that it’s fleeting.

A forest scene in Nightingale, with a huge rusty machine lying among bushes and trees in the near ground

Pullquote: “Norman is a fabulous name for a bear.”

A group of Nightingale players gliding over a desert using their umbrellas

A view through the circular window of a player-created stone house in Nightingale, with trees and sunny hills visible in the distance

A screen of the Nightingale building tools menu, showing options to auto-insert materials into a structure template

A big fight in Nightingale against scurrying goblin creatures in a sandy temple environment