What we've been playing

1st March 2024

Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we’ve been playing over the past few days. This week: faewilds, tins, and liars.

If you fancy catching up on some of the older editions of What We’ve Been Playing, here’s our archive.

Nightingale, PC

I’ve been playing Nightingale for a couple of days fairly intensely now, and I’m not entirely sure what to make of it. It starts off really brightly, really full of, apparently, interesting new ideas. A Victorian setting, a faerie realm story idea, where everyone is scattered across these pocket realms, trying to find their way home. There’s a semblance of story here, a whiff of RPG to go with the survival crafting core, and a clever card-based mechanic for generating your own realms and then messing with them. And yet, two days later, I’m still waiting for the game to hit its stride.

I’m under the impression it gets better, and that when you get into the mid-game and beyond, it comes into its own. But it’s – as Matt wrote in his preview – getting to the mid-game that’s the issue. It’s a real trudge up to that point. It’s the endless ‘go craft something else’ treadmill of survival that keeps slowing everything down.

For instance: at one point you’ll have to up your gear score, as in a game like Destiny, and to do so, you’ll need to collect essences from killing enemies. They don’t always drop, though. It’s 40 essences to upgrade one item, so you begin to see the laboriousness involved.

There’s a lot more I’ll talk about in a fuller piece, but like I say: many bright ideas. I’m just not sure if I’m actually having fun.

Tinderblox, tabletop

Tinderblox is a little game that comes in a tin. The tin’s stuffed with pieces and cards and a pair of plastic tweezers. I’ve been after a game I can just carry around with me for a while, and Tinderblox is almost that game. I just think the tin is slightly too big.