Ion Lands’ upcoming game, Nivalis, is a revisitation of the setting of its first game, Cloudpunk, and it brings the cyberpunk city to life as a slice-of-life narrative sim. Nivalis is designed to be a low-stakes, go-at-your-own-pace game with an immersive voxel art aesthetic that captured my attention. After playing it for the first time at GDC last week, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
The game begins with you waking up on your first day in your apartment. From there, you take a cab to your destination. Unlike Cloudpunk, you can’t drive the cab, but it serves as a pleasing visual backdrop between locations. Your first task is to claim a restaurant from a retiring worker and set up shop to welcome your first customers. Everything is simulated in real-time, so guests will be coming from all over Nivalis. After that, the game becomes self-directed, and you can choose what you want to do next. You can travel to the docks to pilot a boat and go fishing, or set up a greenhouse to start harvesting supplies for your restaurant.
Nivalis has a management sim aspect that allows you to own housing, restaurants, and later on, bars and nightclubs, giving you a sense of ownership of the world. You can rent various housing locations and customize them to your liking. The game offers plenty of options to rearrange the furniture and decorate the space.
Throughout the game, you’ll encounter many characters that offer fully voiced dialogue options. Selecting one response over another will impact your relationship with them, changing from a friendly to an enemy reputation. This was an interesting feature, as Ion Lands promises long-term storytelling progression with its lived-in characters in addition to the main story campaign.
The gameplay is mainly free-form until the 2 am curfew. There’s a serial killer at large that serves as a mystery narrative pillar for Nivalis. The constant day and night cycle and weather patterns become the rhythm of the game. Resting at your apartment starts the next day, and you can read the news to summarize your influences on the world so far.
Playing Nivalis was a pleasant surprise in its life sim approach. The lighting and voxel art invite a cozy atmosphere that I could easily find myself spending hours in. Nivalis aims for a PC release this year, and I’ll be sure to continually follow for more updates.
