1. Features
  2. Survival
  3. Nightingale
Player stands in a vast, ornate palace with light beams shining down.
(Image credit: Inflexion Games)

Every survival game needs a good crafting system, and for us none have felt so much like a mystical version of a late 19th-century artisanal workshop than that of Nightingale, the upcoming base-builder by Inflexion Games. We've been checking out the game's in-depth crafting mechanics as well as the kind of intricate architecture designs the game has to offer. 

From period weapons, to intricately ruffled clothing items, and all the way up to vast and extravagant fortresses to house your countless workbenches, along with all their addons.

Traversing the Fae Realms in order to save humanity is no easy task. You're going to need to arm yourself and clothe yourself with some gorgeous Victorian ruffles. Nightingale has just the solution for the would-be Realmwalkers among us in the form of workbenches.

Just as you'd expect from a game that prides itself on crafting, Nightingale boasts a slew of workbenches for you to build and tetris into your little shack until it eventually becomes a glorious palace - more on that in a second. We're talking Sewing Benches, Masonry Benches, Tanning Stations, and even Alchemical Boilers—a much more thematic addition to a fae-borne factory with Victorian sensibilities.

Alongside the various workshop furniture needed to undertake certain kinds of work, the game has a plethora of augmentations to improve their effectiveness.

Bung a hat stand onto your Sewing Bench and any tailoring done there will benefit from significant boons. There's plenty more where that came from, as well.Similarly to other crafting games like Valheim, the placement of such workbenches matters. Perhaps a little more, actually. In Nightingale, you have to not only consider that working outside in the elements isn't conducive to artistic prowess, but also that the surface you're working on will affect the efficiency of each workbench.

As players familiar with the genre will understand, you tend to end up being assigned a job when playing in a large group of friends. It's a good way to keep the settlement working effectively, just as it has been in real life. So to prevent the jack of all trades, master of nothing issue cropping up Nightingale excitingly allows you to assign yourself a specialist profession, so you are more effective at crafting certain things.

And once you've collected enough resources and blueprints across the vast network of worlds at your disposal, you can turn that run down shack into a row of Tudor homes, Viking lodges, Pagodas or even a grand and exotic palace in which you and your friends might take afternoon tea. 

Check it out if you want to see the kind of architectural styles you're working with in Nightingale, but we can at least say there's a good variety. If all this sounds like your idea of fun, Nightingale is available on PC now. You can download it from Steam today. 

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Screw sports, Katie would rather watch Intel, AMD and Nvidia go at it. Having been obsessed with computers and graphics for three long decades, she took Game Art and Design up to Masters level at uni, and has been demystifying tech and science—rather sarcastically—for three years since. She can be found admiring AI advancements, scrambling for scintillating Raspberry Pi projects, preaching cybersecurity awareness, sighing over semiconductors, and gawping at the latest GPU upgrades. She's been heading the PCG Steam Deck content hike, while waiting patiently for her chance to upload her consciousness into the cloud.