Night And The City - The Cloudpunk Review

Last night I finished Cloudpunk. According to Steam it took me a little over eleven hours, which feels about right. It's one of the best games I've played in a long while and I'd recommend it highly to anyone with even a passing interest in either cyberpunk settings or strong storytelling.

There's really not a lot I can say about the main storyline that isn't going to stray into spoiler territory. In fact, even confirming there is a central plot might be giving away too much. I'd probably been playing for a couple of hours before I even began to suspect there was one and honestly the game would work perfectly well without, as the purely episodic collection of short stories I originally thought it was going to be.

That said, the plot, when it develops, is excellent; coherent, intriguing, exciting and eventually satisfying. It's so complete in itself that I'm somewhat put off buying the DLC that carries on from where the base game finishes. It's one of those problems of success you very occasionally hear about. Things finished so well, I'm not sure I want to hear about a whole new set of problems threatening to spoil the happy ending.

Let me see what I can safely say about the story and the characters without giving too much away. 

The set-up is that Rania, a youngish woman from the Eastern Peninsula, has arrived in the vast, sprawling city of Nivalis, where she knows absolutely no-one. Rania is an outsider in the city, which allows for your own ignorance as a player, but she's also a cultural outsider. She wears a head-covering and her background is clearly rural and possibly also ethnically diverse, although what the ethnic norm in Nivalis might be is anyone's guess. Just being human gives her privilege.

She's on the run from a debt collection agency with exhaustive and terrifying powers. What she owes, to whom and what the penalties might be for not repaying the debt is never specified but we meet other people in similar situations to whom very bad things have been done, so her sense of endangerment is patently justified. 

To pay the rent on her one-room apartment, she's taken a job as a delivery driver for a borderline-illegal company called Cloudpunk. It's never entirely clear how much of their operation is tolerated by the authorities but it's certainly not all of it. 

This gives her the use of a HOVA, a flying car, but she has to pay for the fuel and repairs out of her earnings. The game begins with the start of her first shift. It's a night-shift, naturally.

And that would be enough for a game, in my opinion. I was quite happy, picking up the deliveries, flying around the incredibly detailed and complex city, discovering new areas, meeting new people and hearing snatches of their stories. Particularly since I was doing it in the company of Camus.

There are a lot of good things about Cyberpunk but the best might be Camus, the "s" in whose name is sibilated, not silent like the existentialist for whom he may or may not be named. 

Camus is a dog except when he's not. He's an Automata, which from context I believe is some specific kind of AI. There are AIs, Automata, Androids and Humans in the city but at least one Automata we meet used to be Human and the term AI doesn't always seem to mean exactly the same thing.

This ambiguity, of course, plays directly into my own, personal preferences when it comes to science fiction. Having grown up on, and having had my core intellectual conceptions shaped by, the work of Philip K Dick, any discussion of machine consciousness presses all my engagement buttons. There's a lot of that in Cloudpunk and it's done with considerable subtlety and nuance. If you want a game to make you think, this one will do it.

Camus's situation is a prime example. He's an Automata with self-awareness, who used to be housed in the body of a dog, presumably an android dog, although I'm not sure if that's ever explicitly confirmed, as neither is what he may have been before he was a dog. 

When Rania fled the Eastern Peninsula she brought Camus with her on some kind of hard drive and when she acquires the HOVA she installs him as its resident persona, replacing the generic one that comes with the car. He's her pet, her friend, her companion and in some indefinable way, her conscience.

Most of the time, Camus is in charge of communications and systems in the HOVA but occasionally the original, generic persona is re-instated and once Camus even ends up back in the hard drive for a while. 

At times, Camus muses at some length on his existential situation, conversations I found fascinating and could happily have heard much more of. He also asks some very searching philosophical questions, not least whether he can still be considered a dog now he's a car. People who meet him in the city for the first time naturally believe he's the HOVA. They have no idea he is or even was ever a dog. We do, though. He's a constant, affable, occasionally questioning presence and I just couldn't get enough of him.

When he speaks, he's represented by an icon that looks like the head of a border collie and his naive, innocent way of expressing himself somehow manages to make him sound like a dog, but also like a machine intelligence, or more properly what we might imagine either of those things to be like, could we hear them. It's exceptionally convincing, in equal part due to the quality of the writing and the perfectly-pitched voice acting.

The writing throughout is of that same, high standard and it's all the work of a single person, Thomas Welsh. The voice acting, which is handled by literally dozens of actors, is more variable. 

Most of it is really excellent. Andrea Petrille, who  voices Rania, gives one of the best performances I've heard in any game, pretty much note-perfect throughout. The other voice actors are almost all on top of their game too, so it's jarring when you very occasionally run into one who isn't. The two gang members I talked to a couple of times and Rania's co-worker, Baz, I found less than convincing but they were the exceptions and even they only stood out in contrast to the rest of the cast. In most games their performances would have been just fine.

The story, dialog and acting would be more than enough to recommend the game on their own but the visuals are also wonderful. Nivalis is immense and overwhelming. Like every cyberpunk city ever, it owes an immense debt to Ridley Scott's vision in Blade Runner, but unlike many it takes that as a starting point and carries on from there to become something original.

There's a vertiginous complexity to the cityscape, made up as it is of skyscrapers rising above the clouds, criss-crossed by highways and transected by tunnels. Piazzas and boulevards are separated by chasms, the only access being by flying car, pater-noster or the blue-screen portals that somehow flick pedestrians from one side to the other.

It's a wild and dangerous environment, where vehicles careen at speed, appearing to follow no rules, not even which side of the stream to fly on. Drug pushers and gang members pace the walkways in direct sight of sinister Corpsec police. Preachers rant about the endtimes and confused veterans panhandle for lims. Anyone you meet could be a threat or an opportunity or most likely both.

One of the very best things about Cloudpunk is that when the game ends, it doesn't end. Again, no spoilers, but when the credits have rolled and you've beaten the game, Nivalis just carries on and you can carry on with it, if you want. 

That apartment Rania's renting is a lot nicer than she'll admit and nicer still when you help her decorate, something you can do - if you have the money. It has a balcony, even, and a fish tank, now she's paid for one. There are other things more special and meaningful, too, but I can't tell you or even show you a picture or it would spoil the surprise when you play the game, which you really should.

About the only thing I haven't mentioned is the gameplay itself. It's pretty good, too. I think it would class as great if you're more adept at flying your HOVA than I was. 

From a reddit AMA with the writer that I read after I'd finished playing last night, I gather the main thrust and thrill of the game is supposed to be the driving itself but I never got good enough at it to relax and enjoy myself. I was too concerned about crashing into oncoming traffic and more than once I managed to steer myself into tight spaces I couldn't get out of, which was stressful, especially that time I had a ticking bomb in the car with me.

I suspect the whole thing would be easier with a controller. If I get the DLC I might try it that way. Even so, and with all the ineptitude I brought to the game, I enjoyed the traveling. Which was just as well because there's a lot of it. 

Fortunately, the HOVA is easy to control, for the most part, and very forgiving of damage. There are garages everywhere and repairs aren't too expensive. Nor is fuel. I also found out that you can't destroy the car or run completely out of fuel but I didn't discover that until I'd finished the game. Might have taken the stress down a notch if I'd known.

Instead, out of caution, the longer I played, the slower I took things and the better it felt. There are quite a few modifications you can make to your vehicle but I only bought the ones that decreased the damage it took, never any that made it go faster. Go faster was the last thing I wanted it to do.

In the overall design of the game, there were only a handful of things I felt might have been done differently and even those were more an aesthetic issue than anything. For example, I did find it strange how you could quite easily make more money just wandering around the city, picking up discarded objects to sell to vendors, than you'd make in a night's work delivering packages for Cloudpunk. It made me wonder why she'd bothered getting the job in the first place.

Then again, if Rania didn't work for Cloudpunk, she wouldn't have a vehicle and she wouldn't be able to zoom around picking up salvage from here there and everywhere. There's only so much valuable litter to find on a single block. 

Then there was the parking paradox: since no-one ever seemed to do anything in Nivalis without getting paid for it, and since the authorities were militaristic goons, it seemed unlikely all the parking in the city would be free. It's not like I wanted to be made to pay for it but it felt like an oversight that I wasn't. 

These are just tiny cavils but they do occasionally remind you you're playing a game. I prefer to avoid that whenever possible. Slightly more annoying was the over-zealous reaction of the game engine at certain crucial moments, when it would decide that, since I was standing right next to an interactable object, any key-press must mean I wanted to use it. That made getting in and out of my apartment more of a mini-game than it needed to be and left me driving a different vehicle to the one I meant to choose, when I was given an upgrade.

The worst thing was when Rania ended up making a choice she hadn't intended because she was in the exact spot the game expected her to be when the time came to make it and I foolishly tried to move her somewhere else so I could think about it. The game revolves around morally challenging dilemmas but a couple of my more dubious decisions weren't actually my choices at all, just mis-clicks.

None of that detracts in any way from the overall experience, which was engrossing, involving, moving and not infrequently thrilling. I loved my time in Nivalis, which is why I was extremely happy to discover the same team that made it has spent the last four years working on a sequel, all about the city itself.

The new game, called simply "Nivalis", takes the form of an entrepreneurial sim, possibly one of my least-favorite genres, in which you start with a noodle bar and work your way up to a chain of restaurants. Not my thing at all but I'll take it as a way in to a full-on simulation of this amazing city.

There are three trailers for the game, which is in the late stages of development now and has a release date of "2025". If the trailers are remotely representative of the game itself, it's going to be absolutely stunning. I've wishlisted it and for once I might even pay full price for it as soon as it goes live.

Before that happens, though, I should probably buy the DLC, City of Ghosts. I'll get to that just as soon as I've finished up all the side quests I missed in the base game. And finished decorating Rania's apartment. And when I've explored the rest of the city...