Storytelling in the world of gaming isn’t always an easy thing. In addition to just writing a cohesive narrative that enthralls the players and has a definite beginning, middle, and ending, you’ve also got to pick your subject matter carefully, crafting characters and choosing settings that gel with the tale you’re yearning to tell.
You could just go the safe route and choose something entirely relatable to your audience, or you could think outside the box and choose something a little more avant garde, like placing it in therealms of the fey– although that’s a risky move if you aren’t prepared to balance the real with the surreal.
I was recently invited to jump into a pre-release, press-only build ofNightingale, the recently released survival crafting game from Inflexion Games. Set in the fey wilds, it’s an experience that chooses to walk that line, and it does it well.
Nightingale’s Big Boss Fight With Humbaba Is One Of The Best I’ve Played In A Long Time
Giving serious Shadow of the Colossus vibes over here.
Much Respect To The Writers Of Fairy Tales
In addition to a nearly four-decade-long love affair with video games (man, I’m getting old), I also like to dabble in tabletop RPGs. I even ran my own homebrewed World of Darkness campaign for a few friends of mine some years back. I was well-equipped to write and act out lines for modern-day vampires and werewolves, but my biggest regret was introducing my players to a changeling NPC, because, of course, that meant they’d be clamoring for me to write a story involving the fair folk. And let me tell you,the fey are hard to write for.
They’ve got so many chaotic-seeming rules and eccentricities, and their fascination with certain aspects of human life is… you know what? I’m getting a headache just reflecting back on that time. Suffice to say it ended up as an absolute train wreck that somehow involved Hollywood being controlled by the fey and the players having to fight Darth Maul for some reason even though my campaign was set in the ‘80s and he hadn’t been invented yet. It’s absolutely the worst improv work I’ve ever done, and I’m not proud of it.
So, I’ve got a lot of respect for any writer who can successfully pull off a fey-centric story and setting, and I’m enamored with the subtle nuances and little details that Infelxion Games put into Nightingale to make it feel like a familiar experience while also sprinkling in surreal fey moments here and there. A weathered stone statue missing its head. A modern-day toilet, sink, and bathtub standing alone in the middle of a grassy clearing. An ornately decorated pirate ship oddly abandoned as far away from water as the large island I was on would allow.
In the first realm I could really call my own, I stumbled across all of these, most often the pirate ship, which became a familiar landmark, as it was in the path of least resistance between my homestead and the only other humans I’d found in my realm. While keeping watch for white wolves and aggressive boars on my usual trek, I grew pretty fond of that ship; in my mind, it became a beacon of hope, reassuring me that I’d already made it about halfway to where I was going.
Why Nightingale Uses Real People as Characters
Nicki Minaj in Call of Duty. Mr. Beast in Fortnite. Lyndon B. Johnson in Metal Gear Solid. Why do games use real people? Let’s talk about it.
Not Everything Is As It Seems
So imagine my surprise when, after finally managing to slay a massive knight and its hovering robot pals atop an upside-down pyramid, a new objective marker popped up on the map right around the location of my friendly little ship. Wait, had that glowing blue gateway on the side of the ship always been there?
I’m pretty sure it hadn’t, but the thought threw me for a loop. Clearly, the game wanted me to pass through the mysterious gate, and the thought filled me with a sense of dread and betrayal from my trusty, out–of-place haven. Had I just unlocked a new dungeon? And if so, what does that mean for the toilet?
Accepting that, in the realm of the fey, things are not always what they appear to be, I mustered what courage I could find and passed through.
Nightingale Offers The Solution To My Obsessive Item Hoarding
Freeing up precious backpack space for other useless junk.
What Lurks Beneath The Grassy Sea?
With this new dungeoncame new enemies. As I traveled down the cramped and eerily lit stone-walled tunnel, I came to a more open-aired chamber, and waiting there among the usual host of fiends was one that was tied to a post and appeared to be screaming and flailing (or flailing as much as one can when one is tied to a post). It clearly posed no threat melee-wise, but were its thrashing wails an indicator that some horrible magic was about to be unleashed? Can’t honestly tell you, since fear drove me to rush past the other little devils and hack it to bits before it could do whatever it might do.
This happened a couple times, and I settled into a comfort zone, knowing that I’d be descending from relatively safe tunnel to big, scary chamber until I reached whatever awful thing was waiting for me at the bottom.
And then Nightingale decided to throw me for another loop, as the next tunnel I encountered didn’t have a few easily-dispatched impish creatures, but one tall, broad warrior-like being with a hammer befitting its massive frame. This was an uncomfortably close-quarters fight I wasn’t anticipating and, well, let’s just say my NPC companion and I resolved to come a little better prepared the next time we ventured deep below decks.
Sadly, my time in the preview of Nightingale ran out before I was able to reach the bottom, which means I’m more than likely locked out of that particular realm. The worlds of Nightingale are procedurally generated (and flawlessly so, from my experience), making no two worlds the same, so I can’t tell you if that pirate ship is going to pop up in your game too.
What I have come to expect, though, is to not know what to expect. And in the end, that’s how you write a proper fey story.
