Nivalis Nights: Twenty Hours In

   I haven't been talking about it much but I'm still playing Nivalis Nights just about every day. I'm coming up on twenty hours played and it feels as though I'm still in the discovery phase. I'm enjoying it a lot and I'd recommend it highly... only who, exactly, would I recommend it to?

Just what sort of game is Nivalis Nights supposed to be? The more I play, the more I think labeling might be the game's biggest problem, at least in terms of getting the reviews it deserves and putting it in front of the audience best suited to appreciate it. 

Currently, the game is sitting on a middling 76 at Metacritic and an even less satisfactory 71 at OpenCritic. Those aren't terrible scores. Just mediocre. But it's not a mediocre game.

My impression, which is now well past first, is of a very strong RPG with a fascinating and well-conceived setting and a picaresque but wholly compelling plot. It also looks great but that's one thing on which the critics and I mostly agree. 

From the few reviews I've read and from some news items, too, my feeling is that a lot of people thought they'd bought a cyberpunk business sim. Which is how the game was frequently promoted before it launched, so fair enough, I guess. Others seemed to think they were getting some sort of cyberpunk Second Life. (Wasn't that the actual Second Life, though?) Only a small minority seemed to be expecting a sequel to the excellent Cloudpunk, described on Steam as "A neon-noir story in a rain-drenched cyberpunk metropolis."

Is it an RPG, then? A life sim? A business sim? All of them? More importantly, what do people think it is? And when I say "people" I mean reviewers, obviously.

To find out, I could have taken a couple of hours out of my Sunday to read a couple of dozen reviews, then another hour or two to precis it all for an introduction to the post... but this isn't the 1990s any more, much though many people seem to wish it could be. Rather than do all the leg-work myself, I thought I'd get Gemini to do it for me. Give me a summary of the gist of the issues reviewers are having with this game that maybe I'm not seeing.

Here's what I asked: 

 "Hi Gemini, Can you please give me an aggregate summary of the kind of reviews the video game "Nivalis Nights" has been getting, with a short list of the most common complaints (Other than optimization and performance) and a general impression of what sort (And genre) of game reviewers seem to believe it is?"

And here's what Gemini said: 

Genre and General Impression

Reviewers generally categorize "Nivalis Nights" (developed by ION LANDS) as a cyberpunk life simulation and business management game (with heavy narrative/side-quest elements often likened to a "Visual Novel Lite").

• The Core Premise: Players inherit a failing noodle stand (along with a pile of debt and a strict curfew) in a sprawling, multi-tiered voxel-aesthetic cyberpunk metropolis, balancing running food/drink businesses with navigating hundreds of character-driven side stories.

• The General Impression: Reviewers are deeply split. On one hand, the game is praised for its stunning, atmospheric world-building, brilliant sound design, and the genuine charm of exploring a living, vertical cyberpunk city. On the other hand, many feel the game suffers from a lack of depth in its core mechanics—turning what was expected to be a rich sandbox life-sim into an overwhelming, chore-heavy checklist of errands.

Most Common Complaints (Excluding Optimization & Performance)

Aside from technical and performance gripes, reviewers and players frequently point out these major pain points:

• Aggressive Time Constraints: The in-game clock moves very fast (e.g., 1 second equals 1 minute), creating a constant sense of frantic panic. Players feel rushed to sprint everywhere, conflicting directly with the game’s atmospheric tone that encourages you to slow down and soak in the environment.

• Shallow Management and Interaction Depth: While advertised as a business management and life-sim, these systems are often described as thin. Restaurant appliances function mostly as static objects with minimal interactive animation, staff and managers can behave erratically (e.g., over-ordering stock), and overall creative freedom in running businesses feels restricted.

• Quantity Over Quality in Quests & NPCs: The game throws an overwhelming number of side quests at the player. However, many NPCs feel disposable—once their specific quest chain concludes, they offer little to no ongoing dialogue or meaningful relationship-building, making the world feel surprisingly lifeless over time.

• Clunky UI and Navigation Issues: Navigating the sprawling, vertical multi-level districts can be confusing due to a lack of proper mapping or mini-maps. Furthermore, the user interface (such as the oversized, non-resizable quest log) and the lack of grid-snapping for furniture placement make basic base-building and organization frustrating.

 

I've left the links in because god knows what would happen if I took them out. You should see the HTML... I checked they all went where they said and not to some other game entirely but I haven't read them in detail. That would kind of undermine the whole point of using an AI to get a summary in the first place, now wouldn't it?

 

I found Gemini's conclusions very revealing, although to what extent it has actually looked at more than just the handful of sources it quotes is very uncertain. I get the feeling that, as a research assistant, Gemini likes to operate at the "Do the minimum to keep the boss happy" end of the scale. Still, it gives me what I need to work with, namely some bullet points I can expand on, agree with or refute. 

 

Which I shall now do. You'll have to refer back to Gemini's summary to see what I'm refuting or agreeing with, though. Or get an AI assistant to summarize both sides of the debate. In fact, why not let's your AI and my AI just talk it out together? We don't really need to be here...

 

Genre and General Impression - It'd be nice if Nivalis Nights was a "cyberpunk life simulation" but if it was that, you wouldn't be rail-roaded into running a noodle bar in the very first quest, would you? The simulation of the environment is excellent but the life you can live in it is limited to a) running a restaurant and maybe expanding that to running more restaurants and b) living the exact same life as every adventurer in every quest-driven game ever. 

 

If it's not a life sim, it's also not, in my now quite significant experience, a "business management game", either. I have no interest in running a chain of restaurants, so I don't. And the game doesn't seem to care. It took me three or four sessions, maybe the first three or four hours, to get enough staff and a manager installed to run the one noodle bar I started with and now, a month and fifteen more hours play later, that's where I still am. 

 

And it's fine. The game really doesn't seem to care. The noodle bar is solvent. It makes a small profit, in fact. Reviews are good, the staff seem happy and it all required very little effort from me. Occasionally I have to put in an appearance to solve some problem or other but that's really questing, not business management. The place pretty much runs itself now and I hardly even think about it most sessions.  

 

My Verdict: NN is neither a life sim, nor a business sim. It's not any kind of sim. It's an RPG. So yes, it could easily be described as having a narrative and side quests or as being a "Visual Novel Lite." Although, with the sheer number of quests, I'm not sure I'd bother adding "Lite."  

 

 

 

Core Premise -  As I've said, I think where you pivot to reach that balance is pretty much up to you. You could concentrate on building up your noodle empire or you could play Littlest Cyberhobo like you've been doing in every RPG since whatever your first RPG might have been. Talk to everyone, do whatever they want, repeat. That's my game.  

 

My Verdict: Pretty accurate. No real complaints with that summary.  

 

General Impression - I agree with the first part and disagree fundementally with the rest. It's one hell of a city for an explorer or an aesthete. It's huge, sprawling and superbly designed. It richly rewards exploration for exploration's sake.

  

As for "lack of depth" in the "core mechanics", sure, if you bought into the marketing hype. Nivalis Nights has great depth as an RPG, which is not what how it was mostly advertised, unfortunately. As any kind of sim, be it life or business, then yes, it probably does lack depth, although even there it's deep enough to suit me. But then I don't much like sim games. The shallower the better, really.

 

My Verdict:  NN has been badly mis-marketed. I'm not surprised people are pissed off that they've been sold a different game to the one they thought they were buying. It should have been marketed to the Disco Elysium/Esoteric Ebb crowd, not the people who want to play The Sims 2077: Masterchef Edition.

 

 

 

On to the complaints.   

 

Aggressive Time Constraints - This is a slightly odd one. It's objectively true that the in-game clock runs at a rate of "1 second equals 1 minute" but whether this creates "a constant sense of frantic panic" is entirely subjective. I literally didn't notice until last night that that was the ratio. What's more, I never even thought the time was going particularly quickly, not compared to other games. It seemed pretty standard to me.  

 

As for feeling "rushed to sprint everywhere", er...what? I think I might have sprinted two or three times, maybe? For a few seconds. Just to see how it worked, mostly. The default movement speed seems wholly adequate. Why would you want to run?   

 

Here's the thing. The really important thing. After almost twenty hours, I have yet to run into any timer in the game that actually means anything. Quest-wise, that is. NPC after NPC tells you something has to be done now or immediately or right away but it never, ever does. Every quest just sits there in your journal until you get round to it, even if it takes days or weeks. I can't say there are no quests in the game that  have hidden timers that induce fail conditions but if there are, I haven't run into one yet.    

 

What I do, instead of rushing around frantically, is just wander around the city, gawping like a tourist, taking photos and following quest markers. If I see any NPCs with "!" or "..." over their heads, I talk to them as I spot them. I frequently get side-tracked. I jump the tracks from one quest to another all the time. It never matters. The first one is always still there, waiting for me, whenever I remember it.    

 

As for the noodle bar, once I got the manager in place, I forgot all about any supposed timers there. I pay her to sort that for me and she does. Occasionally some official or criminal tries to threaten me with closure if I don't do something immediately but they always go away after a while. I was a bit worried at the start but now I just treat them like all the other quests. Which is what they are.

My Verdict: Any sense of panic (Or indeed lack thereof...) induced by the in-game clock says a lot more about the personality of the player than the game. It's as chill or as stressful as you choose to make it.

 

Shallow Management and Interaction Depth - I think I've covered this quite extensively already. I'm one hundred per cent certain the business part is several orders of magnitude deeper than I'm seeing, but I'm happy to accept that, even then, as a business sim, Nivalis Nights is still shallow by the standards of those who like that sort of thing.    

 

That said, you can micromanage the whole damn noodle bar yourself if you want to. You can set the menu, grow the food, go shopping... even do the cleaning and wait tables if you want. Why you would want beats me but it's there.  As for the erratic nature of the staff, that was true at launch, or so I read, but it got patched up before I even had any staff to worry about. It's all good now.

 

My Verdict: These elements are indeed shallow for a simulation game but they're more than deep enough for an RPG. Which is what this game is.   

 

 

 

Quantity Over Quality in Quests & NPCs - Hmm. Well, it's true there are a lot of "side quests", although I'd only call them that if if I considered the business sim part to be the "main quest". Which I do not. So I'd just call them quests. 

 

Are there too many? Hell, no. The more there are , the more I like it. Is the sheer number overwhelming? Not if, like me, you're the kind of player who routinely picks up every quest you find until the game tells you you can't take any more. I still have room in my journal for more so I'm fine.

 

Is it quantity over quality, then? God, no! The quality is excellent. The quests are engaging, amusing, intriguing and informative. If Nivalis Nights is in any way a "life sim" it's in the way talking to so many of the people who in the city lets you build up a picture of what life might be like there. And it really does.

 

What about the "no ongoing dialogue or meaningful relationship" part, then? Well, what kind of ongoing dialogue do you expect, ffs? Do quest NPCs in other games have anything to say to you after you've sorted out their problems? Do they hell. Okay, sometimes they'll still acknowledge you and remember who you are, and I'm not saying that wouldn't be a nice touch, but it's hardly worth complaining about, when they don't. I guess when I've done all the quests in the game, it will feel kinda quiet, but then that'll mean the game is over.

 

As for a meaningful relationship, I think that's the "sim" part coming up again, isn't it? That, I guess, would be the part in games like My Time At Portia/Sandrock, where you take NPCs out to dinner and give them flowers and basically pretend you're "in a relationship" with them. Which creeps me out, if I'm honest. I'm very glad that doesn't happen in Nivalis. And I sure wouldn't want any of these people moving into my apartment like they do in Neverness To Everness, either. It's barely big enough for one!

 

My Verdict:  This is where I think the reviews have it completely wrong, except the one or two that, rightly, reference the likes of Disco Elysium. Nivalis Nights is a telling a story but you have to listen. It's a pretty good story, too. And the characters who get to tell it are wild! 

 

 

 

Clunky UI and Navigation Issues - And finally, another complaint that seems to be rooted in a misunderstanding of what the game is trying to do and be. The city is supposed to be confusing! That's a big part of the fun. Well, for me, anyway.

 

Last night I got to Mountain Town for the first time. Mountain Town is just insanely confusing. As Ava pointed out, when we arrived, most of the buildings probably aren't up to code. That'll be because it's a giant shanty-town built out of spare parts culled from other buildings, all connected by an ad hoc agglomeration of boardwalks and ramps. It's like a hundred Kelethins all piled on top of one another. And unlike Elftown, I loved it!

 

All the zones are at least a little like that - chaotic, organic, unplanned. Nivalis is an old city that just grew. As for mapping it... there's a whole quest featuring a guy whose job for the last two decades has been to walk around the city with a shoulder cam, like some human version of a Google Maps car, transmitting data about the street layout to a central mapping company. That's the only way they can keep the maps up-to-date and even that real-time cartography isn't enough. 

 

Why should we, the players, get better maps than the citizens? To expect it is missing the point. But that said, the in-game map we do get is perfectly fine. The quest markers on the HUD work extremely well, there are plenty of signs and directions in the gameworld if you can be bothered to look and everything is very well-documented. There's both excellent instant travel by map and good public transport by rail and HOVA. And I have a boat! I have no problems getting to where I want to go.

 

As for walking around the city, movement by foot is possibly the best I've ever seen in a game of this kind. Nothing ever gets in your way, collision is handled superbly, even the most awkward-looking spiral staircases are simple to climb... absolutely can't fault it in any way.

 

My Verdict: I'll concede the quest log is a bit big but once you figure out how to hide it it's fine. Other than that, I have no complaints about either the aesthetics or the functionality of the UI. It may be funky but it ain't clunky!

 

And that concludes my rebuttal of the case for the prosecution, your honor. In summation, I'd like to say that I believe Nivalis Nights to be a truly excellent RPG. It's just a shame that's not how it was sold.

Tunes? We Don' Need No Stinkin' Tunes!

Well, it had to end sometime. For once, I didn't forget. I just had too many other posts to write. But here we are again, a week late and, for wonder, no more to cull than ever. A couple of dozen in the bank. About half of them won't make it. Place your bets now.

I don't really like this part much. It's like... no it's not. Let's not get over-dramatic. It's like being offered a tray of cakes and only being allowed to choose one. Or in this case, a dozen. But who can eat a dozen cakes?

The real problem isn't the culling, it's that the longer I leave this each time, the harder it is to remember the tunes. This is supposed to be all about what I've been listening to - it's in the label ffs - but if I was going to be true to that brief, every post for the last eighteen months would have been ninety per cent of my own making. My own songs are almost all I listen to most days and most days I listen to plenty of them. I mean, I have enough now for at least twenty albums...

But no-one wants to hear that and my appetite for discovery is undiminished. I spend as much time as ever hunting down new tunes. It's more that, where I used to come to these posts with a folder of songs I'd heard at least two or three times, often more, now it's mostly only once, the time I found it and bookmarked it. 

My process now (Don't you just curl up inside and wither, any time you hear someone start to lay out their "process"?) is 

• look in the folder
• pick something 
• play it again on YouTube long enough to remember it 
• select or reject 
• repeat until empty.

Also programming, of course. Programming is always fun.  

It's a different process to how it used to be and maybe not as organic. Let me give a full disclosure notice: of this batch of twenty-three I can remember eight with some clarity. Of those seven, I can remember the actual tunes (The chorus, usually. Sometimes a riff.) of just three. 

Then again, to be scrupulously fair, quite a lot of them don't really have tunes, as you'll soon hear. Tunes seem to be increasingly optional in popular music. As does popularity. Or music...

Does all of this invalidate the feature? Not really. It's a discomfiting fact that all through the time I've been putting up these posts, I rarely could remember even a third of the tunes without reminding myself with a re-listen. If I leaf through my my back pages, as I quite often do, most of the music posts are filled with names I barely recognize, let alone the songs. 

But then, it's not about longevity, is it? And certainly not familiarity. Or not mostly. It's about excitement, discovery and novelty. The posts where my percentage recognition skyrockets are the ones stuffed with old faithfuls. I can remember the tunes of the Lanas and Sunday 1994s and Olivias and the rest of the regulars alright (I'd put Blondshell in there but as we all know, Sabrina doesn't really do tunes.) but it would be a sad old feature if I just went around and around my favorites twice a month. Wouldn't it?  

Anyway, enough about my process. Let's have some tunes. We can all discover them together.

JUST MONIKA: A DDLC song
[by Random Encounters] (feat. OR3O & Adriana Figueroa)

OMG! Thank you astryuuna! 

Provenance: Astryuuna posted a fourteen second clip of herself, under the title PSA, in which she appears out of the dark to ask "Hey! it's 10pm. Do you know where your children are?". She also linked to a four second clip of her in near-darkness, saying something indecipherable in Spanish. She was clearly in cosplay as someone, as she almost always is, and for once I thought it might be someone I'd seen but since I have no visual memory I couldn't work out who.

Luckily, everyone else in the comments could. Plus she'd typed JUST MONIKA three hundred and eighty-four times in the description. (Yes, I counted them.). So I typed JUST MONIKA into YouTube and this video came up.

Forty-seven million views it's got. In eight years. So much out there. It's been in my head ever since. Now it can be in yours. 

I might post the astryuuna videos for Halloween. Oh, wait... that's tomorrow! Well then, I guess this is my Halloween gift to you, a day early. 

And since it's Halloween...

 Halo Jelly - R. Missing

Every R. Missing song is Halloween-appropriate. She really knocks them out, too. I only post maybe one in five, if that. They all sound the same and none of them have tunes. Don't you love that? 

I love that.

 Dogs - Land of Talk

We had a cat so balance requires some dogs next. Not a cover of the Who classic, sadly. That one has a tune. 

Hey, I'm really leaning into the whole "no tunes" thing now, aren't I? It's like listening to the new music show on Radio 6!

 this will be the last time - if i was a pony

So, how did I find this lot? Well, they have "pony" in their name, which is one of my big signifiers, so I might well have stumbled across them organically but in fact I was following a breadcrumb trail that started with...

D'you know, I actually have already forgotten where it started. That is so awkward. I'm going to give credit to Chasing Fridays, which is where I read the article on laptop twee but I don't think that was where I first came across the name of this new sub-genre. Of course, now I'm primed to notice it, I'm seeing "laptop twee" all over the place.

Laptop twee itself isn't new. It's been around long enough to have a Wikipedia page. According to that, apparently I've been listening to it for a while without knowing: Feeble Little Horse, the Femcels, Bassvictim... all familiar names around here. 

Trending Raps, the Instagram page that Chasing Fridays piece links to for authority, calls laptop twee a "crossover between indie and electronic music". A fuller gloss goes "Blending the sweetness of twee pop and 2000s indie with glitchy electronic production, laptop twee brings together intimate vocals, homemade recordings, acoustic textures and digital experimentation." Sounds like a lot of stuff I've already been listening to, only I didn't know it had a name.

From those sources, I got a few examples, quite a few of them already known to me, but instead of link-hopping I went to YouTube and just typed in "laptop twee". Didn't get me as much as I expected but it got me the Laptop Twee Starter Pack, so I'm good for now. 

I've got more of this stuff that's not in those links, too, but how much do we want? 

Well, we want this one...

 gold teeth - horse laugh

Is that laptop twee? I don't fucking know! I mean, it might as well be and it was in with the rest but I can't remember how I even found it. It has, like, 150 views on YouTube. But then, Worldpeace DMT, who are close to the best-known act in the genre as far as I can mark it, only get a few thousand. Maybe no-one who cares uses YouTube any more. Is YouTube for old people now?

 

 Ivy - Worldpeace DMT

Genres are weird, anyway. I quite like Worldpeace DMT, as it goes, but I mean, this is just folk music, isn't it? And Ivy is singer-songwriter with occasional distortion. Great videos, though.

I seem to have screwed myself over with all this laptop twee musing. I knew it should have been a post all its own. Let's see if I can wrangle this pony back into the paddock.

 CATWOMAN - Doechii

I can see that one's gonna blow up...

Also, is that Al Pacino she's doing there?

 Where Is Gone? (with Rosalia) - Fontaines DC

Talking of songs with no tunes, that's the whole of the new Fontaines DC album, if you believe the internet. This is on it. Does it have a tune? Judge for yourself.

My friend has been plugging Rosalia to me for a while now. And to Mrs. Bhagpuss, who now has the latest album on her wishlist, I notice. I don't know what it is about female singers with just one name that begins with R but somehow I have an internal resistance to them. Rihanna, Rosalia, Robyn...

Oh, but look who's here!

 Popstar/Punkrocker - Robyn

Just need something by Rihanna now. Maybe next time.

I prefer that mashup to either of the originals, too. That lack of affect just does me. And that's a prime example of a super-catchy tune that isn't really a tune at all. It's damn near all on one note...

 Valery (Please don't be mad at me)

Caroline Rose

Absolutely the best title of the week.  As you'd expect from someone who names their album "Gentling the Horse at the Walt Whitman Mall". Giving me strong Brenda Kahn vibes with a side order of Angel Corpus Christie. I just wishlisted the CD.

Hystérique  - yeule

Apparently this is yeule going mainstream. Well, pop, at least. Or so I read...

I'd bookmarked the official audio but as I was grabbing the YouTube link I saw someone had done a lyric video so that's what we got. It's a whole other song when you know what she's singing about. Although whether those are the right words is anyone's guess. I still can't pick them out past all that processing.

Two more for a Halloween Thirteen and I'm out.

 don't tell me we've grown apart - Grolth

Is this laptop twee? I thought we were done with that for today but, I mean, if it isn't, it might as well be. I can't remember how I found it now, anyway. 

Good though, isn't it?

 Ghost Rider - PARTY DOZEN

We've had PARTY DOZEN before I think. Pretty sure, actually. It's not like there are a lot of drums/sax duos out there and I've definitely posted at least one already. I had their new one bookmarked but this is a lot more seasonally appropriate.

And with that I shall leave you. Don't, as they say, have nightmares. 

 

The Glitched Call Is Coming From Inside The Game

 

The latest "Special Program" for Neverness To Everness's next big update is out. It's fifty-three minutes long although the first ten minutes of that is just a timer ticking down, so call it three-quarters of an hour. It's still a long watch, either way.

And for the first time I watched it all. Usually I just skim through to see the highlights or read a summary if I can find one but now I'm retired I have the time. 

I was hoping to find it informative. I wasn't expecting it to be entertaining too. But it was.

After those first ten minutes of counting down, which I did skip because I'm not that desperate for entertainment, the host comes on to introduce the two people joining him in the discussion. They're two designers going by the names Baggie and Naomi. 

At this point, I still had the video running as an embed on the MMO Bomb page where I'd heard about the update. I wasn't paying that much attention, waiting for the whole thing to get started, but I perked up at the thought of getting some insights from the team behind the game. I was a little surprised they both had Westernized nicknames but then I figured they'd have been cherry-picked for the English-language version for a reason.

And then they started talking. Baggie sounded odd but Naomi... Naomi sounded exactly like she was one of the many helium-voiced characters in the game itself. That got my full attention. What the hell...?

I opened the window to full screen and the mystery was instantly revealed. Baggie is a cardboard box. Naomi and the host are chibi figures. The whole vodcast is metafictional. These aren't the designers who work in some office building in Suzhou, China. They're... 

 

Well, it's hard to pin down what they are. The NTE YouTube channel says "It's real. It's fiction" which doesn't really help a lot. 

They might be representations of actual designers but they also might be notional designers who live and work in another layer of reality that lies between ours and the game itself. Or they might be in the game-world. I'm not sure there's a clear explanation.

As a conceit, though, it's delicious. I never normally sit through these things but I was transfixed. The three of them chatted away in a far more entertaining and professional manner than any game designers I can remember seeing. The whole thing comes across as the kind of thing you might watch and listen to for fun, not just because you wanted to dig out the few nuggets of useful information buried in the awkward banter, uncomfortable pauses and lame in-jokes that are all too familiar from promos featuring the people who make the games.

It's a good thing the format and the presentation were strong because the content they're plugging is less so. It's not terrible but on a first look it doesn't seem to be up to the standards of the better previous releases. Then again, the last one was so good it was always going to be hard follow.

If you were hoping we'd get to explore some more of Hethereau, like that huge district across the river they've just re-designed, you're in for a disappointment. The story element this time revolves around ETD-6, the security unit for which Linko and Chaos work. 

ETD-6 is responsible for dealing with Anomaly crime and also with Meme Anomalies. We've run into some of the team already but never the two people supposedly in charge of the division, Lieutenant Elyms and Captain Exe. I thought Chaos was in charge so it shows what I know.

The update is called Once Upon A Glitched Call and the action takes place in "...a vast stretch of cyerspace that's a blend of nostalgia core, dreamcore, and poolcore. ...A flooded city floating in a digital ocean". Another Anomalous Realm, then, as opposed to any part of Hethereau or the physical space it occupies.

The set-up is that an "Invalid Number" is being propagated through Bagel. Once people hear about it, they can't stop thinking about it, although what actual harm it does, other than being the telephonic equivalent of an annoying earworm, isn't immediately clear. Anyway, ETD-6 has been tasked with putting a stop to it, presumably because the most likely explanation is some kind of Meme Anomaly.

I'm confident it will be an interesting and enjoyable story. They all have been so far. And it is at least an active Anomaly investigation, for once. The whole narrative arc of the game still feels nebulous and ill-defined, though, and this doesn't, on the face of it, takes us any further towards a sense of overall purpose. Maybe there just isn't one and the whole game will be episodic, always. 

Which is fine on paper. I don't have a problem with it, conceptually. But the open world rpg gacha game market is highly competitive right now. Games need a strong storyline to keep players interested or they'll just wander off . NTE only has one more update after this one to get us all firmly hooked before Ananta arrives on January 15, which is where I'll be going.

And sometime after that there's another game I just heard about that sounds even more intriguing. That one's called Ordinary Oddness and I'm already pre-registered with the game wishlisted on Steam. 

But let's not get distracted. That's for a separate post.

 

The point is, good as all these games can be, even with a six-week cadence and huge content drops every time, it's still not guaranteed they'll hold an audience. There's just too much choice. I have absolutely no complaints at all about Wuthering Waves, for example. It may be the best of all these titles. And yet since I fell off it for a few weeks, through no fault of the game's, I've never been able to climb back on.  

For now, I'm committed to NTE. I play it virtually every day and really enjoy it. One update that doesn't quite grab me, though, and that could turn into a few weeks when I'm not really feeling it and then some other, no doubt very similar, game will take its opportunity to suck me in and that may very well be that for Hethereau.

Yeah, Hotta will be really gutted to lose the no money I was giving them, I bet So many great, free games, so many cheap, stingy players...

Even though the Special Program puts the story update front and center, the trailer doesn't make it look all that interesting. Or exciting. It's a lot of hanging telephones and shots of the digital city, and even there a warning along the bottom of the screen makes clear this isn't necessarily how the place might look in the game itself.

So, yeah, I was underwhelmed. What else is there? Quite a lot and none of it all that thrilling either, I'd say. 

The two banner characters are, of course, Elyms and Exe, who appear as pulls in that order. Having never met either of them, my interest, going in, is about as low as it could be and nothing I heard about them in the Program made me feel any more enthusiastic. Elyms is yet another bubbly, outgoing young woman, of whom I already have more than enough on my team. Exe sounds like a dull introvert with no social skills, which seems to be going too far in the other direction. 

 His name, by the way, is weirdly pronounced by all three presenters as if it were three separate letters, E-X-E, as opposed to the much more natural X. That also did not endear him to me.

Coming back, as the characters you can try for again if you missed them last time, are Shinku and Chaos. I opted out of pulling for both of them first time around and I can't imagine I'll feel any differently this time but at the moment I'd rather roll for either of them than Exe or Elyms.

There are two new vehicles, both of which are nuts. One's a toy lion. The other's a tank. The lion has the dubious USP of requiring Fons to go into overdrive, which is not what I'd call a winning feature. The tank, though, comes with a working cannon you can use when fighting anomalies and bandits on the streets of Hethereau and it also features in a new World of Tanksesque arena mode, where four players try to blow each other off the map. That does look like it might be fun.

Another major addition is a whole new business enterprise. You move from making your own deliveries to managing a team of drivers who'll make them for you. It's a full sub-game along the lines of the existing Cafe Origen one, with its own progression and rewards. You'll be able to meet job-seeking NPCs on the streets of Hethereau and choose which you want to hire. There are different vehicles and skins for them and all of that stuff.

 I am not interested in so many ways but also interested, too. I don't do deliveries because driving in NTE is not much fun, so in theory this would play to my weakness. But then, I also don't like business management games, so it might just be swapping one mode I don't enjoy for another. I do like talking to NPCs, though, and apparently the delivery business will open up some "factions" in Hethereau to interact with, including the criminal underground. That does intrigue me.

I'll probably at least try it but it's not really my kind of thing. Neither is combat and yet I paid full attention to the huge section of the program that goes into just how effective Exe and Elyms can be in a fight. It's not that I want to use them but it's interesting in how it really showcases just how complex combat in the game is, while making me wonder how that can somehow still matter so little that although I'm really, really bad at it and don't take any trouble to get any better, I can get through the fights just fine. 

Another addition I will not be bothering with is a new board game from the in-world company that gave us 999 Nights. Sadly, this isn't another RPG but some kind of city sim where you place businesses to try and get the maximum footfall. There's a long explanation in the video that bored the fekkin' backside off me in seconds. It was the only part I fast-forwarded. Hard pass on that.

 There are, of course, the usual new outfits, all of which are horrible. Seriously, who designs the male clothing for this game and why are they still in work? And why does everything have to be silver and black? The women deck themselves out like explosions in a paint factory and the men look like they've just walked off the set of Fritz Lang's Metropolis.

The only good news about costumes is that some of the existing ones can now be worn by more than one character. I haven't got any of those though so...

There are a few tweaks and changes to some of the existing features and word of a visual upgrade for players on mobile and that, I think, is about it. I did all this from memory so I probably missed something important. Oh, yeah, there will be overflow storage for Stamina and Pixels, which would have been handy for me if it had come in months ago. Not so much now.

The update arrives on November 11. There's a five minute video with just the highlights if you need it. 

I'm looking forward to it all about as much as you can look forward to anything you're not much looking forward to, I guess. Let's hope I'm back here on the 12th to eat my words.