Recent game art and graphics tech has boasted about upping the realism to deliver more authentic worlds and digital doubles. We've seen impressive things made in Unreal Engine 5, and the race to create hyperrealistic game worlds has always been a Holy Grail of the industry. But it's not always the best option; there's still room for games like Nightingale, adventures that take players deep into creative, stylised worlds.
"Game art direction can be a curious beast," says Neil Thompson teasingly. The Nightingale art director tells me the team at Inflexion Games purposefully bucked the current tech-focused trends to instead create a game that ditches hyperrealism in favour of a stylised 'fantasy gaslamp' aesthetic.
