Glass City Games has announced Nights of Nil, a top-down action-strategy colony sim built around a single, running fight to reclaim a necromancer-held archipelago. The game is headed to Steam in Q1 2027, and a free demo is playable right now.

The setup casts players as agents of the King, sent to retake Nil, an archipelago the necromancer seized years earlier. Along the way you’ll manage a settlement, gather resources, and fend off escalating nightly monster attacks, a loop that will feel familiar to anyone who’s put time into Core Keeper, Kingdom Two Crowns, or Age of Mythology, the three touchstones Glass City Games itself points to. It’s a crowded lane right now, one that also includes bigger names like Manor Lords, so Nights of Nil is leaning hard on its recurring-villain hook to stand out.

An announcement trailer accompanied the reveal, showing off the switch between direct villager control and settlement management that sits at the core of the pitch.

Reclaiming Each Island

Players can jump into any villager at any moment, taking direct control of their individual abilities to gather resources or fight off goblins, slimes, barbarians, and undead. Alternatively, you can assign a villager to a job and let them work autonomously while you focus attention elsewhere, a flexibility that puts Nights of Nil in similar territory to other upcoming settlement-builders like Wild West Pioneers and Knights of Frontier Valley.

According to the game’s Steam listing, each island must be held for 10 nights, with progress resetting if villagers get driven out or the settlement’s well is overtaken. The arc per island is consistent: track down its remaining inhabitant, work through their quest chain to earn their trust, then use what they reveal to activate the island’s corrupted Nexus. Every night that passes cranks up the danger, with monsters raiding the well and growing stronger the longer you stall before facing the Nexus.

The necromancer himself isn’t a rotating cast of one-off bosses. He’s tracked across the entire campaign, showing up at each Nexus backed by fresh monstrosities and retreating to the next island once beaten rather than vanishing outright. Islands are procedurally generated, so layouts shift between runs, but surviving inhabitants, resources, and knowledge gathered earlier carry forward with you.

Nights of Nil is aiming for Steam in Q1 2027, and the free demo is live on the storefront today for anyone who wants a taste of the necromancer hunt before then.

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