In Nightingale, you travel through portals to numerous Victorian fantasy worlds and let your creativity run wild as you build bases.
This week, Epic Games is giving away a game that is currently still in early access and has faced plenty of criticism in the past. Fans of survival games should still give Nightingale a chance—after all, it’s currently free.
Free on Epic: Nightingale
Genre: Open-world survival game – Developer: Inflexion Games – Release (Early Access): February 2024
In Nightingale, you become a so-called world changer. You can travel through the crossroads portals to other worlds and visit forests, swamps, jungles, and deserts.
What’s special: You can create world maps and change what awaits you on the other side of a portal. Some maps affect gravity, others change the enemies or resources you’ll encounter there.
As in any survival game, gathering, building, and crafting are among the most important game mechanics. So you gather plants, chop down trees, and mine ore. You use the raw materials to make tools, clothing, and weapons, and with special additives, you can even give them magical properties.
You can build yourself a home in the worlds using building parts, workshops, and decorations. These range from small huts to huge Victorian-style estates.
But you don’t have to gather all the resources on your own. You can recruit NPCs for support. Nightingale can be played entirely on your own, even offline, but you can also play cooperatively with other players.
But that’s not all: the worlds of the game are connected by a shared world mechanic. This means that you can also meet other players on the other side of a portal. However, there is no PvP.
Of course, there is also combat. You’ll face wildlife, corrupted Fae creatures, powerful bosses, and even entire dungeons.
steampowered.com/app/1928980/Nightingale/“ data-icon=”external”>On Steam, Nightingale has a user rating of just 67 percent positive, and in our Early Access test, we found that the game still lacks variety and its own identity.
Since its early access launch, Nightingale has already received numerous free updates that improve the game in many ways. If you want to see for yourself, you have one week, until October 9, 2025, at 5 p.m., to get the survival game for free in the Epic Games Store.