There are few better ways I can imagine to get you hyped for Nightingale than describing an interaction that took place toward the end of a hands-off demo shown today at Gamescom 2023.

Four players, all dressed in Victorian era garb, surround a giant sun god, perhaps 20 feet tall. They craft lofty structures out of prefab building parts, preparing to use them as sniper nests, or makeshift defensive barriers. The fight kicks off, and the giant human begins firing blasts of magic from an amulet hanging around their neck, tantalizingly glowing to indicate its weak point status.

The players' towers are quickly demolished, so they use their umbrellas to glide down to the ground and attempt to rebuild, throwing magic blasts and gunshots in rapid succession, fending off automatons and keeping themselves alive as best they can, as they try to topple the titan before them.

Nightingale is a survival crafting game that aims to put exploration in your hands as a player. Set in an alternate reality, the human world intersects with that of the Fae, with their magic allowing for traversal between realms. Humans have worked out how to harness this power to hop between worlds at will, even controlling the outcome of their jumps by using cards that determine attributes of the player’s destination.

Worlds in Nightingale are procedurally generated based on player card selections, which can impact the types of biomes the player will encounter, enemy types that will be prevalent, or even more abstract attributes such as entering a world of eternal night, for example.

The core gameplay loop of Nightingale is your traditional survival crafting fare, with food and resources to gather, bases to build, and hunger meters to manage. Where it differs, aside from the novel world hopping card mechanic, is the ways in which crafting is designed to be freeform, and provide interesting, thoughtful bonuses for intelligent construction.

A simple example: players can pop a bed down anywhere in the world and get a bonus if they sleep in it. If they build a basic wooden structure to protect themselves from the elements, and place the bed inside, their bed will get a bonus to the stats it grants when it is used. These sort of synergies encourage deliberate design, while the ability to build anywhere, even if it would cause a structure to clip into a wall or tree, allows for complete creative freedom when it comes to your setup. Reality is not a concern here.

Crafting overall seems incredibly streamlined and simple, with a lot of options for building presets allowing for quick creation of structures, and basic crafting being able to be done at any time without a crafting bench. This makes messing around with crafting mechanics look inviting, with minimal barrier to getting stuck into the fun.

Nightingale’s polished core survival crafting gameplay loop, a great sense of visual style, and the addition of huge titanic enemies to fight in multiplayer really helps bring it a step up. It’s rare that a game does this many things at once and feels focused, but this looks to be achieving it.

You can find Nightingale on the Epic Games Store, it releases into early access on Feb. 22, 2024.