TheRetroArcade
Veteran
Posts: 11,807
Joined: Feb 2026
Joined: Feb 2026
A just-enough shop sim that's elevated by a beautiful city design populated with over a hundred fascinating and tragic weirdos.
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Nivalis Nights is overwhelming. Intentionally, I suspect, to give me the immersive experience of living in a hyper-capitalist megacity hellscape. It has no map because Nivalis is canonically unmappable, only a HUD compass where my 20+ active quest markers all scuttle over each other, nearly as crowded as the alleyways of its layered, neon city where hundreds of citizens amble between giant apartments and fusion food joints.
What is it?: A quest-heavy cyberpunk shop simulation in a city obsessed with debt.Release date: September 29, 2026Expect to pay: $25 / £22Developer: Ion LandsPublisher: 505 GamesReviewed on: Intel Core Ultra 7 265, RTX 5070 Ti, 32GB RAMMultiplayer: NoSteam Deck: UnspecifiedLink: Steam
One of those joints is mine. Ramen Noir is a floundering noodle bar left to me by a friend named Thaddeus who flees the city for mysterious reasons, saddling me with its complementary insurmountable debt of 50,000 Lims.
Thaddeus also left me a greenhouse. A salty lad named Crabface bequeaths me a boat. Some lady named Ma Gomba wants me to grow her enoki mushrooms. Danny Danetti wants my opinion on his donut recipes. A sentient vacuum needs my help fleeing the human wife of his deceased former consciousness. CorpSec Agent Teleshko suggests, nay, demands that I expand my operation by buying additional businesses. Oh, right, and there's a serial killer at large who's taking out people with massive amounts of debt. You know, like me.
Folks, I am just trying to scrape out a profit serving chicken noodle soup and beer while I hoof it back and forth from the market buying nearly-expired ingredients on the cheap until I can afford to hire a general manager who will free me up to pursue even one of these quests.
Nivalis Nights calls itself a "slice-of-life" sim, which is a enough description of what you get when you borrow life sim decorating, shop sim management, open-ish world exploration, farm sim produce production, and bungee cord them all together with a surprisingly story-heavy quest structure.
In the first five-ish hours, I worried that the genre soup of Nivalis Nights was going to ultimately disappoint me. Everything I found to praise about it came with a caveat.
Seems great
BUT
Exploration
The city is beautiful to look at and the layered, extremely vertical level design makes the possibility of exploring it seem fascinating.
There isn't much drive to explore aside from finding more silent vendors, sitting to eat similar meals at rival restaurants, and a scavenger hunt for broken fuse boxes.
Management
Shop management has some neat layers like customizing recipes with different ingredients and optimizing efficiency of kitchen layout and work shifts.
Babysitting my shops by actively participating feels a little dull with very repetitive customer appearances and awkward first-person cooking animations.
Decorating
Renovating restaurants with new cabinet styles or decorations seems like catnip for a build mode fiend like me, especially with free, non-grid placement.
Placing furniture and cabinets in first person without snapping to walls is actually really finicky and being strapped for cash means I don't really get to indulge in beautification.
Romance
Completing quests with certain characters can also lead to pursuing romances with them.
The payoff on the couple I've tried is a date with a shortish conversation and no further acknowledgement of being in a relationship.
What I found after several hours and a couple in-game weeks in Nivalis is that the characters are the star feature. I'll allow myself a heavy-handed food metaphor, given the context: The characters and setting are...Read more: Full article on www.pcgamer.com
What do you think about this?
PC Gamer's got your back
Our experienced team dedicates many hours to every review, to really get to the heart of what matters most to you. Find out more about how we evaluate games and hardware.
Nivalis Nights is overwhelming. Intentionally, I suspect, to give me the immersive experience of living in a hyper-capitalist megacity hellscape. It has no map because Nivalis is canonically unmappable, only a HUD compass where my 20+ active quest markers all scuttle over each other, nearly as crowded as the alleyways of its layered, neon city where hundreds of citizens amble between giant apartments and fusion food joints.
What is it?: A quest-heavy cyberpunk shop simulation in a city obsessed with debt.Release date: September 29, 2026Expect to pay: $25 / £22Developer: Ion LandsPublisher: 505 GamesReviewed on: Intel Core Ultra 7 265, RTX 5070 Ti, 32GB RAMMultiplayer: NoSteam Deck: UnspecifiedLink: Steam
One of those joints is mine. Ramen Noir is a floundering noodle bar left to me by a friend named Thaddeus who flees the city for mysterious reasons, saddling me with its complementary insurmountable debt of 50,000 Lims.
Thaddeus also left me a greenhouse. A salty lad named Crabface bequeaths me a boat. Some lady named Ma Gomba wants me to grow her enoki mushrooms. Danny Danetti wants my opinion on his donut recipes. A sentient vacuum needs my help fleeing the human wife of his deceased former consciousness. CorpSec Agent Teleshko suggests, nay, demands that I expand my operation by buying additional businesses. Oh, right, and there's a serial killer at large who's taking out people with massive amounts of debt. You know, like me.
Folks, I am just trying to scrape out a profit serving chicken noodle soup and beer while I hoof it back and forth from the market buying nearly-expired ingredients on the cheap until I can afford to hire a general manager who will free me up to pursue even one of these quests.
Nivalis Nights calls itself a "slice-of-life" sim, which is a enough description of what you get when you borrow life sim decorating, shop sim management, open-ish world exploration, farm sim produce production, and bungee cord them all together with a surprisingly story-heavy quest structure.
In the first five-ish hours, I worried that the genre soup of Nivalis Nights was going to ultimately disappoint me. Everything I found to praise about it came with a caveat.
Seems great
BUT
Exploration
The city is beautiful to look at and the layered, extremely vertical level design makes the possibility of exploring it seem fascinating.
There isn't much drive to explore aside from finding more silent vendors, sitting to eat similar meals at rival restaurants, and a scavenger hunt for broken fuse boxes.
Management
Shop management has some neat layers like customizing recipes with different ingredients and optimizing efficiency of kitchen layout and work shifts.
Babysitting my shops by actively participating feels a little dull with very repetitive customer appearances and awkward first-person cooking animations.
Decorating
Renovating restaurants with new cabinet styles or decorations seems like catnip for a build mode fiend like me, especially with free, non-grid placement.
Placing furniture and cabinets in first person without snapping to walls is actually really finicky and being strapped for cash means I don't really get to indulge in beautification.
Romance
Completing quests with certain characters can also lead to pursuing romances with them.
The payoff on the couple I've tried is a date with a shortish conversation and no further acknowledgement of being in a relationship.
What I found after several hours and a couple in-game weeks in Nivalis is that the characters are the star feature. I'll allow myself a heavy-handed food metaphor, given the context: The characters and setting are...Read more: Full article on www.pcgamer.com
What do you think about this?