Zarf Updates

Nivalis is one of the great cities of the gaming multiverse. I love the place. It snuck up on me. Ever since Cloudpunk, I've just wanted to walk the streets and chat people up and get hot noodles from Food Mood.

Like I said back then, this makes no sense. Nivalis is an unvarnished corporate dystopia. The streets are strewn with trash, the water is contaminated, the sky is roiling filth. Everybody who lives there is strung out on debt and drugs and (for the lucky ones) dehumanizing makework jobs. It rains, usually acid.

But I love it. Everybody lives there! The streets are crowded with cheerful people in sweet neon threads, going about their business. Hustling it up. Fixing a vending machine, expostulating at a friend, leaning on a railing looking out out the lights. Eating noodles. Or crashed out rough in a cardboard box; but we're all in this together, right?

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Nivalis Nights kicks off with a surprise job offer. (Makework? Or not?) Your friend Thaddeus is skipping town. He wants to foist his noodle stand off on you before he goes. Not to mention his startup debt. You shall not refuse. Happily, his old counter-guy Banor is willing to stay on and show you the noodly ropes.

So at core, you're in a job simulator. Set the menu; buy ingredients at the market; sell some folks a hot meal. Repeat for a profit. And if that's what you want to do, you can do a lot of it. More seats. Hire more staff. Grow your own food. Open more locations. The game systems let you scale up to a full-city restaurant empire.

But you don't have to! Mostly. Nivalis Nights is an open-world job simulator. Explore the city? Find a boat and explore the seas? Rent a nicer apartment? Decorate? Package-hunt? Meet people? You can meet lots of people.

I say you can mostly ignore the business sim. You need a little bit of money, so you can't let the noodle bar completely flame out. You need to find an equilibrium that makes a hundred Lims a day or so, unattended.

I got there pretty easily. (Once I hired a manager and a couple more waiters and a cleaner. The greenhouse helps a lot if you're willing to make a daily delivery run, so, okay, not entirely unattended. But low-effort.)

Then, the first time I got a thousand-Lim windfall, I decide to put down three more tables and ten more chairs and double my daily profit. Right? Wrong. Finances immediately crashed. I was broke and not making payroll.

Why? Let me tell you, the restaurant simulator has absurd detail. People wandering around the city get hungry and steer themselves to local eateries. A waiter navigates to their table to take an order. Customers leave reviews that affect the place's rep. Menu items have a popularity level. Ingredients have a market price that varies by day and location. Unused food goes bad and then you can compost it. You can fiddle with the temperature and humidity of your greenhouses to optimize yield of different species of... are you getting the idea? All sorts of charts and graphs and lines and circles and arrows and mean nasty things you can tweak while running Thaddeus's restaurant.

Me, I just yanked out those extra tables, sold them for scrap, and went back to being slightly profitable and wandering the streets.

(In retrospect, I probably didn't have enough waitstaff to cover the rush shifts. So customers ordered food and then left before eating or paying for it. One star.)

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Everybody's game arc will be different, because open world. But let me describe mine.

I wanted nothing more than to talk to every person in every corner of Nivalis. You're initially confined to a few neon-streaked slums and street markets. You need XP to unlock higher districts. XP comes easy (explore, talk to people, try a new restaurant!) but progression takes time. So I scoured those initial street-level zones and, man, I loved it. People everywhere, hustling and asking favors. Named characters around every corner. You can't talk to every named character right away, but you know that you will talk to them when time and storylines align. You'll get to know everybody.

I found the boat. I visited some new districts. I had so many quests open that my HUD compass was a blur.

All of these people are awesome. (Some are androids or vacuum cleaners, but people.) Each one is trying to get through the day, just like you. Some of them are jerks, some of them are slumming yuppies, some of them are on CorpSec's leash and doing its dirty work. I love each one anyway. Do they have a choice? Do you? The game's core dilemma (Thaddeus tells you up front): give someone a helping hand up, or climb over them to reach the top? I feel like Nivalis (the game and the city) is biased towards community and solidarity -- but I also feel sure that I'm projecting my own bias. You can play any way you like.

(Can you even be sure which side you're helping? Or what the sides are? Many of the game's storylines are built on this point: there is not always a right answer, and not even the wise know all ends.)

As I advanced, I reached the higher, tonier districts of Nivalis. ("Tonier" like where my cousin Toni -- never mind.) At this point I had settled into a quest-chasing routine. Wake up; deliver the day's greenhouse produce; screen the district map for open quests. Tag a person, read their dialogue, open up the next quest point. Repeat until curfew.

It was more efficient. It was less fun, somehow. The upper reaches of the city are more orderly and therefore less interesting. By the time you reach the Spaceport and the Spire, it's downright sterile. You're still walking through crowds, but the quests and named characters seem fewer and farther between. Or was it just that I had started treating all these lovingly-written denizens as mere quest markers?

I was also, by definition, neglecting the storylines that don't appear as HUD quest markers. There are a couple of these; they're definitely optional, meant to reward keeping your eyes peeled and observing as you traverse Nivalis. I wasn't so much doing that any more.

As I reached the end of the core storyline (non-spoiler: Thaddeus left town for a reason), I started to run out of side quests. At that point I was accumulating Stuff for a few final long-term goals. And waiting for delayed Happenings to happen. Which meant -- guess what? -- wandering the streets. For no better reason than to kill time. Looking around, seeing what people were doing in the corners.

And the world became fun again! I blew off the upper fancy districts and went back to the industrial stews. The districts built of graffiti and shipping containers and randomly-laid planks. The awesome parts of town.

It would have been very easy for Nivalis Nights to make its slums genuinely threatening. In story terms, I should have been mugged a dozen times over. Or just shoved off a platform for being nosy. But the game isn't interested in those sorts of mean streets. Trouble is what other people are in; you get to decide what to do about it. The only real danger is corporate surveillance if you cut loose after curfew, and I mostly avoided such hijinks.

Once I completed the core story, I felt that I was done with Nivalis Nights. Of course there's plenty of stuff I never did. I haven't come close to paying off my starting debt. I never even opened a second restaurant! But, like I said, I was never interested in optimizing the business. I was there for the people, and I spent my time with them.

(Note: there's actually a second through-line story, having to do with your AI companion Ava, which I never completed. I think I ran into a bug partway and the quest sequence got stuck. According to this week's patch notes, the bug is fixed, so I could go back in and finish that out. I might. Or I might decide that done is done. Not everything needs to be 100-percented.)

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Upgrading Cloudpunk's courier-cab structure to a full open world is an obvious step. It's mad hubris, to be sure. Many a game has stumbled and crumbled while pursuing the open-world dream. But damn if Nivalis Nights doesn't pull it off. It took a few years, a few missed deadlines, and some legal wrangling (they had to change the name, I dunno what). But the result is the kind of immersive city-world which murders my free time and makes me grateful for it.

Also, I have played the hell out of Harry Critchley's soundtrack. Seriously, I might never have given Cloudpunk a second thought without it.