Nightingale, the upcoming survival game from Improbable studio Inflexion, is a magical realm-hopping adventure full of bizarre fae creatures and worlds inspired by Victorian themes and fairytales. Just how many mysterious worlds will players get to explore in Nightingale? Inflexion isn't telling, but in an interview for IGN Fan Fest, art and audio director Neil Thompson suggests they will be at least "seemingly endless."

Thompson joined CEO Aaryn Flynn at Fan Fest to talk about the different worlds of Nightingale, which Thompson says Inflexion thinks of as parallel universes inhabited by creatures, monsters, and wildlife. Players travel between the worlds via portals, Flynn says, which appear after they have explored a particular realm sufficiently. Once a portal is found, players can decide whether they want to move on or remain where they are. Flynn adds that while they aren't discussing the details yet, there will be some checks in place to ensure players have the correct gear and other resources to be able to survive what's on the other side.

The creatures and worlds connected via the portals come from a number of different inspirations, including Susanna Clark's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Dutch and other classical art, and of course, the Victorian era which Thompson calls "incredibly visually evocative." And it's all deeply rooted in myth.

"From a creature perspective we wanted to delve into this idea of folklore and fairytale," he says. "The Bandersnatch, in our world, is a pretty vicious cross between a raptor and a batlike creature. They're pretty lively in the realms, not necessarily something you'd want to meet on a dark night, that's for sure."

He's more coy when asked if we might run across a Jabberwocky, but is willing to spill some details on other creatures. Thompson goes on to detail The Bound, a faction created by the adversarial Fae as a "mimicry of humanity" to combat the player RealmWalkers. The Bound come in many forms, including minion creatures, long-range attackers, magic users, tank-like creatures, and a bruiser seen in the trailer with a wheel for a head, "just cuz it was kind of cool," according to Thompson.

He also details the Harpies, flying creatures that can steal things from the player's encampment and even disguise themselves as old women wrapped in cloaks to lure players into a false sense of security until they can get close.

We spoke earlier this year with Flynn about the BioWare roots of Nightingale and more about how it will handle things like player choice and worldbuilding, as well as its optimistic tone. Nightingale is preparing for an early access beta sometime later this year.

Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.

Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga is the first time developer Traveller's Tales has portrayed every movie in the mainline Star Wars series. As such, there are plenty of classic creatures the studio had to adapt for the first time, including ones that have never been made by Lego as physical kits. To keep things as authentic as possible, the artists used parts from existing kits as reference for these new creatures, and ‘built’ them from a mixture of existing and original parts.

In a new developer diary debuted during IGN Fan Fest, Neil Crofts, Head of Character Art on Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, said: “What we would do is we’d look at the film reference, and we’d take existing Lego creatures and characters that are similar, and then what we end up with is something that is as accurate as we could make it.”

“Take the bantha, for example,” he said. “It’s really true to lego IP and it’s really true to the film IP.”

Concept art in the video also shows how the Rathar, the squid-like creatures from The Force Awakens, was designed using a mix of brand new parts and items from existing kits. The Rathar’s body is a new two-piece component, but it is based on the Lego GyroSphere from the Lego Jurassic World kit. Attached to this body are newly-designed tentacles, but also the Lego dragon kit’s tail and tusks. Finally, the Rathar’s mouth is made up from classic 3794 Lego pieces, perhaps better known as the flat plates with one stud on. This means a minifig character can be easily clipped onto the mouth for any eating scenes.

While other creatures may not use exact pieces from other kits, they’re closely modelled to match any close references in order to maintain authenticity.

For more from Lego Star Wars, check out what comes in each edition of The Skywalker Saga, and an overview of what you can expect from this noticeably different Lego game.

Matt Purslow is IGN's UK News and Entertainment Writer.

Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga is the first time developer Traveller's Tales has portrayed every movie in the mainline Star Wars series. As such, there are plenty of classic creatures the studio had to adapt for the first time, including ones that have never been made by Lego as physical kits. To keep things as authentic as possible, the artists used parts from existing kits as reference for these new creatures, and ‘built’ them from a mixture of existing and original parts.

In a new developer diary debuted during IGN Fan Fest, Neil Crofts, Head of Character Art on Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, said: “What we would do is we’d look at the film reference, and we’d take existing Lego creatures and characters that are similar, and then what we end up with is something that is as accurate as we could make it.”

“Take the bantha, for example,” he said. “It’s really true to lego IP and it’s really true to the film IP.”

Concept art in the video also shows how the Rathar, the squid-like creatures from The Force Awakens, was designed using a mix of brand new parts and items from existing kits. The Rathar’s body is a new two-piece component, but it is based on the Lego GyroSphere from the Lego Jurassic World kit. Attached to this body are newly-designed tentacles, but also the Lego dragon kit’s tail and tusks. Finally, the Rathar’s mouth is made up from classic 3794 Lego pieces, perhaps better known as the flat plates with one stud on. This means a minifig character can be easily clipped onto the mouth for any eating scenes.

While other creatures may not use exact pieces from other kits, they’re closely modelled to match any close references in order to maintain authenticity.

For more from Lego Star Wars, check out what comes in each edition of The Skywalker Saga, and an overview of what you can expect from this noticeably different Lego game.

Matt Purslow is IGN's UK News and Entertainment Writer.

The upcoming Halo TV show will not take place in the timeline of the video games, and instead uses a newly formed “Silver Timeline”. Despite this, the show is still “rooted in canon” and will feature everything you’d expect from the story of Master Chief’s fight against the Covenant. It just comes from a “different perspective”.

As part of IGN Fan Fest 2022, Halo’s executive producer and 343 Industries’ Studio Head of Transmedia, Kiki Wolfkill, said: “The Halo Silver Timeline is about giving the show and the core canon room to grow, evolve, and be what they need to be. Really think of the Halo Silver Timeline as being rooted in canon, so events and characters and certainly all of the things you see in canon are all part of the show, but sometimes you will see those events from a different perspective.”

“There are times and places where we’ve had to pull events closer together than they may be in the [original] chronology, and that’s a good example of where the context will maybe shift a little bit, but it should feel very Halo,” she elaborated. “At the end of the day the core of Halo are those pillars of heroism and humanity and the wonder of sci-fi and hope. All of those things are core to what we’re doing. It’s a case of when people watch the show it will feel Halo and there will be a lot that they recognise verbatim, and a lot that will feel a little bit different just so the narrative has a chance to go where it needs to go without colliding with some of the core canon.”

One of the things that will diverge from the game’s original canon is that we will actually see Master Chief’s face. In the games, the SPARTAN never publicly removes his helmet.

While the Silver Timeline means the Halo TV show is free to take its own approach for some aspects, plenty of nods to the games will be included.

“There are a lot of Easter eggs in there, and it was a lot of fun putting them in,” said director Otto Bathurst. “We had an incredible team, particularly in production design and the graphic designer, who has absolutely taken it to the n-th level. So I’m going to put my neck on the line and challenge you to freeze frame and zoom in.”

The Halo TV show will premiere on March 24, 2022 on Paramount+ in the US. For more, check out our extensive trailer breakdown and the entire cast revealed so far.

Matt Purslow is IGN's UK News and Entertainment Writer.

The upcoming Halo TV show will not take place in the timeline of the video games, and instead uses a newly formed “Silver Timeline”. Despite this, the show is still “rooted in canon” and will feature everything you’d expect from the story of Master Chief’s fight against the Covenant. It just comes from a “different perspective”.

As part of IGN Fan Fest 2022, Halo’s executive producer and 343 Industries’ Studio Head of Transmedia, Kiki Wolfkill, said: “The Halo Silver Timeline is about giving the show and the core canon room to grow, evolve, and be what they need to be. Really think of the Halo Silver Timeline as being rooted in canon, so events and characters and certainly all of the things you see in canon are all part of the show, but sometimes you will see those events from a different perspective.”

“There are times and places where we’ve had to pull events closer together than they may be in the [original] chronology, and that’s a good example of where the context will maybe shift a little bit, but it should feel very Halo,” she elaborated. “At the end of the day the core of Halo are those pillars of heroism and humanity and the wonder of sci-fi and hope. All of those things are core to what we’re doing. It’s a case of when people watch the show it will feel Halo and there will be a lot that they recognise verbatim, and a lot that will feel a little bit different just so the narrative has a chance to go where it needs to go without colliding with some of the core canon.”

One of the things that will diverge from the game’s original canon is that we will actually see Master Chief’s face. In the games, the SPARTAN never publicly removes his helmet.

While the Silver Timeline means the Halo TV show is free to take its own approach for some aspects, plenty of nods to the games will be included.

“There are a lot of Easter eggs in there, and it was a lot of fun putting them in,” said director Otto Bathurst. “We had an incredible team, particularly in production design and the graphic designer, who has absolutely taken it to the n-th level. So I’m going to put my neck on the line and challenge you to freeze frame and zoom in.”

The Halo TV show will premiere on March 24, 2022 on Paramount+ in the US. For more, check out our extensive trailer breakdown and the entire cast revealed so far.

Matt Purslow is IGN's UK News and Entertainment Writer.

The upcoming Halo TV show will reveal Master Chief’s face for the first time in the history of the franchise.

Talking to Ryan McCaffrey as part of IGN Fan Fest, Halo’s executive producer and 343 Industries’ Studio Head of Transmedia, Kiki Wolfkill, said that showing the Chief’s face was important for the story the show will tell.

“I think we set out to tell a character story and a personal story,” she explained. “And once we really got into what that story was, it became clear that you really needed to see the person in the armour and under the helmet.”

“You will see his face,” she confirmed. “For some people, it’s been a moment 20 years in the making, and for other people it is something that feels very hard to imagine. We absolutely respect both sides of that fence, those who really want to see Chief’s face and those who really don’t. But for the nature of this story, it felt really important to connect with the Master Chief in a different way, and that meant showing the face.”

Halo will premiere on March 24, 2022 on Paramount+ in the US. It features actor Pablo Schreiber as Master Chief wearing a game-accurate replica of his famous SPARTAN MJOLNIR armour, complete with its yellow opaque visor.

While this has always meant we’ve never seen Chief’s face in the game (aside from very short glimpses of the back of his head or his eyes in cutscenes), it looks like we’ll finally be seeing a Schreiber-shaped face beneath that helmet.

Matt Purslow is IGN's UK News and Entertainment Writer.

The upcoming Halo TV show will reveal Master Chief’s face for the first time in the history of the franchise.

Talking to Ryan McCaffrey as part of IGN Fan Fest, Halo’s executive producer and 343 Industries’ Studio Head of Transmedia, Kiki Wolfkill, said that showing the Chief’s face was important for the story the show will tell.

“I think we set out to tell a character story and a personal story,” she explained. “And once we really got into what that story was, it became clear that you really needed to see the person in the armour and under the helmet.”

“You will see his face,” she confirmed. “For some people, it’s been a moment 20 years in the making, and for other people it is something that feels very hard to imagine. We absolutely respect both sides of that fence, those who really want to see Chief’s face and those who really don’t. But for the nature of this story, it felt really important to connect with the Master Chief in a different way, and that meant showing the face.”

Halo will premiere on March 24, 2022 on Paramount+ in the US. It features actor Pablo Schreiber as Master Chief wearing a game-accurate replica of his famous SPARTAN MJOLNIR armour, complete with its yellow opaque visor.

While this has always meant we’ve never seen Chief’s face in the game (aside from very short glimpses of the back of his head or his eyes in cutscenes), it looks like we’ll finally be seeing a Schreiber-shaped face beneath that helmet.

Matt Purslow is IGN's UK News and Entertainment Writer.

IGN can exclusively reveal a new image from the Halo TV series, showing off the key cast members.

From left to right, the image shows Quan Ah (Yerin Ha), Catherine Halsey (Natascha McElhone), Soren-066 (Bokeem Woodbine), Master Chief (Pablo Schreiber), Kai-125 (Kate Kennedy), Riz-028 (Natasha Culzac), and Vannak-134 (Bentley Kalu):

Revealed during IGN Fan Fest, the image also shows off a Warthog vehicle and an encampment that looks similar to the one we see being destroyed in the recent trailer for the upcoming show.

We broke down that trailer in extreme detail, revealing what it was showing us not just of the characters, but its similarities and differences to the games' huge amount of lore and sci-fi detail.

After shifting to Paramount+ last year, the show will be released on March 24. Paramount is clearly pleased with what it has, as the show has already been renewed for a second season.

You'll be able to check out a panel with the cast and crew of Halo during IGN Fan Fest today – not to mention a whole lot more besides.

Joe Skrebels is IGN's Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.

IGN can exclusively reveal a new image from the Halo TV series, showing off the key cast members.

From left to right, the image shows Quan Ah (Yerin Ha), Catherine Halsey (Natascha McElhone), Soren-066 (Bokeem Woodbine), Master Chief (Pablo Schreiber), Kai-125 (Kate Kennedy), Riz-028 (Natasha Culzac), and Vannak-134 (Bentley Kalu):

Revealed during IGN Fan Fest, the image also shows off a Warthog vehicle and an encampment that looks similar to the one we see being destroyed in the recent trailer for the upcoming show.

We broke down that trailer in extreme detail, revealing what it was showing us not just of the characters, but its similarities and differences to the games' huge amount of lore and sci-fi detail.

After shifting to Paramount+ last year, the show will be released on March 24. Paramount is clearly pleased with what it has, as the show has already been renewed for a second season.

You'll be able to check out a panel with the cast and crew of Halo during IGN Fan Fest today – not to mention a whole lot more besides.

Joe Skrebels is IGN's Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.

Stepping into the cozy virtual gallery of Please, Touch the Artwork, there’s something instantly familiar about the paintings in front of me, even if I can’t recall the name of the art, the artist, or any facts about what I’m looking at. But I know I’ve seen the blocks, the lines, the use of primary colors laid out in front of me before. Maybe in an art book in school, or in passing on a museum field trip.

These are, I am told, the paintings of Piet Mondrian, or interpretations of them. They’ve been compiled and turned into a puzzle game by Thomas Waterzooi, a solo developer with a background in engineering, artist parents, and credits at Larian Studios and IO Interactive. Waterzooi was let go from IO when it parted ways with Square Enix, after which he struck out on his own to make games that were very, very different from the narrative adventures of Divinity or the comedic puzzle boxes of Hitman. Specifically, he wanted to make “pacifistic” games that explored “the bigger picture” and “the human condition.” Something, he says, “cultural.”

Something, maybe, like a game where you solve visual puzzles by touching famous paintings.

In a process that Waterzooi describes as “exactly the opposite of what a game designer would do,” Please Touch the Artwork’s creation came as a bit of a delightful accident. At one point amidst his tinkering with different game ideas, Waterzooi was also reading a book called “What Are You Looking At” by Will Gompertz. It’s about the origins of modern art, and abstract and suprematist movements particularly fascinated while reading.

One night, when Waterzooi couldn’t sleep, he decided to make a “Mondrian generator” just for fun — a simple program that would generate a painting based on the ruleset Piet Mondrian applied to his own work, which he called “De Stijl” (“The Style”). So: three primary colors, three primary hues (black, white, and gray) and two primary directions (horizontal and vertical). It’s a familiar look, one ingrained in the cultural cognizance even of those who aren’t art experts.

Waterzooi successfully made his Mondrian generator and over time began to evolve it by adding interactive elements. By touching a square on the painting, for example, the colors of all the squares touching that one would change. Thus was born the main mechanic for the first of three games within Please Touch the Artwork. He evolved it further over the years as he took his first game to different festivals and shows, eventually adding two more games inside the game inspired by the Mondrian paintings Broadway Boogie Woogie, and New York City.

And he added story to all three, with New York City’s story inspired by his own experience in a long distance relationship while working for IO. De Stijl’s narrative gives his audience a little lesson in art history and a supposed rivalry between Mondrian and his friend and fellow artist Theo van Doesburg, with arguments between the two over how the paintings the player is puzzling through ought to be composed.

Though there’s certainly a layer of art history in Please Touch the Artwork, it would be wrong to think of this through the unfortunate lens many kids (myself included) grew up with, which is that art, art history, and museums are boring and dry by necessity. Please Touch the Artwork is a spirited game, with puzzles that reminded me of The Witness but without the intense frustration and lack of guidance. It’s calming and open-ended, but also jazzy and, importantly, very excited about the art it’s showing me.

That’s part of the goal, Waterzooi tells me. He firmly believes art should be accessible to everyone: widely available, understandable, and approachable. Even with the element of art history present in Please Touch the Artwork, Waterzooi says he made a point not to do so much research that he came off as pretentious or too complex.

“I wanted to dive just deep enough to approach art like an average person, without extensive art knowledge,” he says. “The joy is in approaching these paintings with just enough context and theory not to spoil it. Like a trailer for a movie. Play my game, then go to the museum if you like it.”

“...I wanted to express that art is much more accessible than the industry makes it feel like. You could take art, turn it around, mix it up, and make it your own. Don’t keep it in the high spheres. Bring it down. Bring it to everybody.”

He hopes Please Touch the Artwork will encourage its audience to become more interested in art culture. He suggests, for instance, that children will play it with their parents, or that people without easy access to galleries or museums might enjoy it. Or perhaps those who do have that access, but who haven’t taken advantage of museums near them, might feel inspired to do so.

Waterzooi also wants to express to his audience that art is messy and subject to interpretation, including the interpretations he’s offered in Please Touch the Artwork.

“You should be able to accept that some art is bullshit,” he says. “It’s true! Some people think art is always a positive word by itself, but actually it’s not true. There’s good art and there’s bad art…to say ‘This is art,” in the public opinion it does, but it shouldn’t, imply that it’s necessarily good. It’s just a work produced by an artist who wanted to express his opinion or his inner ideas or struggles with something. Whether that’s good or not, that’s purely subjective.”

With Please Touch the Artwork out in the world, Waterzooi is far from done with art-based video games. He wants to add an infinite zen mode that will generate procedural painting puzzles for players to solve as long as they want. And he’s working on a real-life art installation based on the game, featuring both versions of the De Stijl puzzles that can be played by touching an actual canvas, as well as other interactive elements that he cut from the game itself.

And he’s not stopping there. Waterzooi wants to make more games like this, with more painters. He already has a few in mind he’s thinking of exploring: Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and Kazimir Malevich come to mind. If those names aren’t familiar, don’t worry. Waterzooi wants to help fix that.

“I can only hope that other people want to join me in this, maybe collectively each tackle a different painting,” Waterzooi says. “Maybe smaller games, but just more games always with the common theme of being relaxing, skill-free, there can’t be any time pressure…It’s this upcoming thing, ‘wholesomeness’ it’s sometimes called…That’s my design philosophy.”

Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.