The Good
- The idea is there
- Nice to have some life sim that is 3D
- Restaurant & Club managment was alright
The Bad
- The graphic styles aren't that great, one part is polished the other is pixel, could have worked with just one
- When you think life sim, you'd think more than managing restaurants & clubs, but there are no other paths
*Note that I got a free key from the developers
Nivalis Nights is from the same developer as Cloudpunk and with the help of 505 Games I would have hoped it was in a more cleaner state than what it is right now. Animations go through each other, the models are quite low quality and don’t really fit into the pixel game we know from Cloudpunk. I appreciate the effort, but it can become better.
You can get Nivalis nights on Steam here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1488490/Nivalis_Nights/
There is tons to do and explore though, the game has about 100+ quests, a big grind to buy all the restaurants, clubs and rent all apartments. You start off with the Ramen place of your own at the start that is gifted to you.
That includes the chef, but later on you do seem to pick up more of a consumer base and then you need to hire more workers; cooks, waiters and cleaners in particular, to keep your noodle bar running. In the meantime you can also take on the tasks of the business and cook, wait and clean yourself.
This is all fun, but it becomes a bit of tedious work with all the ingredients you have to buy in, especially when getting more and more recipes to your noodle bar. I haven’t gotten as far as to owning multiple establishments, but that would be quite a task to manage.
The world looks amazing, don’t get me wrong there, I have been loving the pixel/voxel style since Cloudpunk and wish it choose more of a definitive art style rather than mashing a couple together, you can especially see this in other cyberpunk related games as well, they do go with one art style rather than trying to mix it, and it works.
The relationships you can build and being able to decorate the places you manage and live in is for sure a welcome addition to the game making it a bit more life sim, but even there, it’s mostly left to your imagination. I have to say a lot of the items or furniture does really look good in that old style and really brings the places you manage up a lot. Next to that there is a full on night side of the city as there is a citywide curfew, you’ll be able to slip past the security in the city however to reach certain safe spots.
Overall, I managed to get some time into the game and it was okay. I am hoping that there will be a couple of content updates and/or improvements that will make it a bit more fun to play as this feels more as an Early Access release rather than a 1.0; which is fine, I’ll happily revisit it.
