The first thing I noticed when waking up in the city of Nivalis for the first time is that it’s gorgeous. My top-floor apartment there overlooks a neon-illuminated cyberpunk metropolis, and the way the rain inches down my windows and reflects the neon’s multicolored glow just looks stunning. I quickly learned that things aren’t as charming outside, though—there’s a killer on the loose, a malicious megacorp controlling everything, a mandatory curfew enforced by security bots, the looming burden of debt, and, best of all, an NPC who threatened to give me the recipe for “Go Fuck Yourself Pie.”
I was immediately excited by all of this when I launched Nivalis Nights, a cyberpunk restaurant management and life sim that’s also ION LANDS’ follow-up to Cloudpunk. I put a few hours into it this week, and I was really looking forward to finally playing a management sim with a grittier edge. Unfortunately, its ambition feels awkwardly compressed, leading to a game whose first few hours have felt incredibly overwhelming and a tad undercooked.
The second thing I noticed after I woke up was Ava, who quickly became my nemesis. Ava is an automaton who lacks a physical presence and is instead apparently baked into my brain, existing somewhere in there in order to deliver tutorials and chat with me. (I honestly forgot how she explained her own existence. That’s because I didn’t want to listen to her at all!)
The problem with Ava being basically part of me is that she interrupts everything. Instead of being an NPC who texts me on an in-game phone or even just telepathically communicates via little popups, Ava’s dialogue takes over my entire screen at random, blocking me from movement until she’s done talking to me. It’s pretty jarring to be walking to the market, intent on restocking my restaurant’s ingredients, only to be stopped dead in my tracks without warning by Ava again.
That being said, I’m a little glad that Ava only exists in my brain because I just can’t get myself to jive with this game’s character models. Despite almost everything else in the world of Nivalis being impressively built out of voxels, its characters (and their outfits, some of which seem deeply uncool) are 3D modeled in a Fortnite-y style that’s not nearly as stylish as the world that surrounds them. Like, here’s Nivalis:
And then here’s just Some Guy:
These character models matter a lot more than expected, too. Despite mostly being marketed as a restaurant sim, so far Nivalis Nights has turned out to be more of a visual novel packed with fetch quests, so you’re staring at these characters a lot. There is a romance system here, but I…think I’ll stay single for a while. It’s a shame that I feel this way about these characters because their pixel art portraits, which pop up occasionally but not nearly enough, are excellent!
Thankfully, the restaurant management part of Nivalis is nice. I was shocked by just how many ingredients are available, and there are an adequate number of recipes to throw them into, too. However, I found myself missing a few mechanics that seem like staples in most modern restaurant sims. Dave the Diver and KuloNiku: Bowl Up! keeps things exciting with lots of minigames, for example—meanwhile, Nivalis just makes me stare at the same food processor animation over and over and over again whenever I jump in to help my employees out.
I still enjoyed the restaurant grind, though, and it felt especially rewarding to unlock new recipes and upgrades as I progressed. But just as soon as I had begun getting into the groove of running my own restaurant, my assistant let me know that it was time to purchase a second one. I was genuinely shocked—my first restaurant was barely even turning a profit yet, my customers were still rating their meals three stars, I literally owned two tables, and not even three full in-game days had passed yet! The main story of Nivalis, which players have said is about 20 hours long, boasts 14 businesses to own, so I can’t imagine that players might get any time to settle into the rest of these other locales, either.
The rest of my time with Nivalis felt equally unfocused. I was constantly whisked away into new quests despite already being in the middle of several others, which left me with an ever-expanding, unorganizable quest log that devoured a chunk of my HUD. Almost immediately after I unlocked the greenhouse, I unlocked a boat, which seem like two pretty major features that should be given a bit of time to marinate. Instead, they both went by so quickly that I never even had a chance to be excited about these new unlocks. I felt like a kid shredding open all of their gifts at once on Christmas morning, giving so little thought to each one that they finish and then say, “that’s it?”
Nivalis Nights clearly has some good bones: it’s gorgeous, it has a really intriguing premise, a lot of the voice acting is solid, and it’s incredibly ambitious. But I couldn’t help but feel like the devs could have given this one a bit more time in the oven food processor, mostly to adjust the game’s breakneck pacing and let its ideas simmer for a bit (or just chop some entirely).
While writing this, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about how one of my restaurant’s first customers in Nivalis Nights walked in with a chunky mask on and proceeded to sit down, order food, and attempt to eat it, all without removing the mask. It was just a slightly silly animation oversight, but I also felt exactly like him while playing through the game’s first few hours. Really, we were in the same boat: I’m sure there was a good meal in front of me, but I never got the chance to taste it.
