Watch on YouTube<\/a><\/p>\nBut you barely have a minute to admire the way the hazy neon light cuts through the smog on your first day in Nivalis before your automata Ava summons you to the city’s culinary centre, Meridian Market. A short taxi ride later, amid the endless bustle and colour, you’re the somewhat begrudging new owner of a noodle bar, its previous manager saddling you with all of its debt as a parting gift too. This run-down food stand with its solely al fresco dining set-up is now your problem, but you’ve at least inherited its cook. And so, across Nivalis Nights’ first few days, a crash course in entrepreneurship begins.<\/p>\n
That starts with a trip to the furniture shop for a couple of new dining tables and chairs. More space means more customers; more customers means more cash. But more customers also means dwindling ingredients, so it’s off to the market you go. Meanwhile, your cook is splitting duties between the kitchen and front-of-house; taking orders, making orders, serving them up. But unfettered business growth is mandatory in this corporate-governed hellhole, and before long, you’ll be bolstering your menu, upgrading your decor, and hiring new staff – better cooks, more waiters, cleaners, even managers to look after the day-to-day tasks – so that customers stay happy and the cash continues to flow. Soon, you’ll be thinking about wages, schedules and staff morale; you’ll inherit a downtown greenhouse where you can grow crops, make cheese, manufacture meat substitutes, and cut out the marketstall middle men. Perhaps you’ll start a second business; maybe even open a nightclub too.<\/p>\n
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For all its cyberpunk ambience, Nivalis Nights’ loop of expansion is a pretty familiar one. Yet while the money does seem to flow a little faster if I’m at the noodle bar pitching in, it’s surprising how little time I’m apparently expected to be hands-on with the business stuff. Take a taxi to Lowtown, a skytrain to Eastern Residential, or even a boat to the Stacks, and Ion Lands seems determined to distract. Down at the docks, there’s a sudden leftfield lurch into vaguely Dave the Diver territory once some grizzled sailorbot hands over his rusty old trawler, leaving me free to chart the city’s churning waters in search of exotic fish or ancient plunder. Which, if you’re wondering, is how I stumble upon that separatist oil rig.<\/p>\n
And I certainly wasn’t expecting to see so much story seeded throughout Nivalis. Early on, I meet an old woman convinced her dead husband’s personality has been uploaded into a hooverbot, which begins a new side quest. I chase him down, and get to decide whether to keep his secret or rat him out. Several hours later, I’ve got a hacker on speeddial, a burgeoning friendship with Danny Danetti at his doughnut shop (although my new CorpSec agent “pal” wants me to put an end to that), and I’ve somehow agreed to train Spartacus Doom in the art of bare metal boxing. And that serial killer thing? I suspect our paths will soon cross.<\/p>\n
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At this point, I’ve amassed a veritable shopping list of side quests – so much so I’ve barely even contemplated a carrot in hours – all accompanied by fully voiced dialogue you can subtly nudge in different directions, stoking romance perhaps, or an air of general disdain. And I’ve not even mentioned the nighttime swerves into stealth if you choose to break curfew and embark on a more nefarious path. To, say, rob your competitors blind while they sleep.<\/p>\n
Truthfully, I haven’t really figured out how all these disparate bits fit together, and how Nivalis Nights will evolve as the tutorials die down and it settles into its more regular rhythm. Or even if it’ll manage to remain compelling as noodle bar ownership makes way for the more extravagant demands of a full-on business empire – which appears to be the end goal. And there are some niggling issues: that untameable framerate for one, some odd bugs, and a UI that’s a touch too fiddly, a touch tempermental, with overbearing overlays and waypoint markers that aren’t exactly helpful. But even so, it’s enormously refreshing to sink into a life sim that doesn’t try and suffocate me with tweeness, and that doesn’t leave me dreaming deliriously of turnips.<\/p>\n
Yesterday, when I woke up for another day of entrepreneurial toil, storm clouds had gathered and the rain was ASMRing gently against my apartment window. Far below, crowds milled beneath translucent umbrellas and the rain-drenched streets had all but vanished in the mirrored neon glow. And as I splashed toward a flying taxi, Vangelis synths beginning to swell, I thought: for now at least, this weird little dystopia feels like home.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As I throw open the windows on my first day in Nivalis, breathing in the city’s neon-streaked air…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":791779,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[59,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-791778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-gb","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791778","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=791778"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791778\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/791779"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=791778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=791778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=791778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}