This Is Planet Azeroth

World of Warcraft Forever goes live today. I'm curious to see how that goes, even if I don't have any immediate plans to play it myself. 

I'm a little vague on the exact point of WoWF, anyway. (We are all agreeing to call it WoWF, aren't we? Like a big dog gruffly greeting someone it knows, but not well, with an implied question mark at the end.) What is it for, exactly? And who? Sorry, whom?

About an hour ago, I checked on how the reviews were going. Or I tried to. I know it's not quite out yet but it was in beta for weeks so I don't imagine reviewers are going to wait for the servers to open before getting their opinions out there. There was no NDA, after all.

I looked at the Fantasy Critic League, where Wilhelm has picked WoWF, but so far it doesn't even have an Open Critic page. There is a link there to "GG", whatever that is, but it leads to a blank page. 

Browsing through the links on a Google search, though, I see all the big names have had their say on the beta: IGN, Polygon, PCGamer, GamesRadar... and they all seem to have loved their time in pseudo-old Azeroth.

Forever has nailed it

Pure magic

WoW: Forever has struck such a chord

Quotes pulled from the linked reviews, there. It looks like Wilhelm's picked a winner. As far as the League goes, it doesn't matter what the customers think, so long as the reviewers are happy.

But what is WoW Forever? I'm still not clear, even after reading those reviews. Is it a new game? A remaster? A Special Rules Server that got ideas above its station?

Fantasy Critic League tags every game with a specific label to indicate exactly what you're getting into when you pick one.

Cancelled Currently in Early Access Director's Cut Expansion Pack Free to Play New Game New Gaming Franchise Partial Remake Planned for Early Access Port Reimagining Released Internationally Remake Remaster Unannounced Game Virtual Reality Will Release Internationally First Yearly Installment 

WoWF has been tagged "Partial Remake". So what does that mean?

"There are several "remake" tags, and they go in this order, from "most remade" to "least remade":

Reimagining > Remake > Partial Remake > Remaster

There is also Director's Cut , which is somewhere around Partial Remake and Remaster  but it's hard to say for sure what order it goes in. "

So WoWF is on the less-extensively remodeled end of the scale, or so they think. Definitely not a new game. Not even a new version of an old one. Just a refurbishment. Same old house, just a new coat of paint and maybe a loft extension or a conservatory round the back.

It figures. From what I've heard from people who were in the beta, it's kind of like Classic but with some more modern, user-friendly adjustments. And, of course, some actual new content. There are those "Sky Elves", for a start, because every fantasy game needs more elves. Everyone loves elves, right?

There are four new zones, too: Zephras Isle, Riverglades, Shen’Dralas, and Mount Hyjal. One of those is the elf starting zone, two are mid-level and one is endgame. All fitting neatly into the map we already know.

It's a familiar phenomenon. A lot of aging MMORPGs somehow manage to find a few zones the cartographers missed. Usually around about when the thought of coming across yet another undiscovered continent is beginning to stretch credulity a little too far.

All of which cartographic conversation brings us neatly to the reason I thought of writing this post in the first place. It wasn't so much to commemorate WoWF's launch day as it was to express some surprise over Bill Bailey's career choices.

I have no idea how well-known Bill Bailey is outside the UK but evidently his profile was high enough to bring him to the attention of Blizzard's marketing dept. because he's been hired to present a series of spoof documentaries, lightly parodying David Attenborough's Planet Earth under the name Planet Azeroth.

I would have remained happily ignorant of these were it not for a news item at NME.

I guess it's not the most unlikely of sources. Bill Bailey, as well as being a comedian, is also kind of a musician. He's put himself forward to represent the UK at Eurovision at least twice, with no success, and he's made a heavy metal album. Alright, a parody heavy metal album but he did still play all the songs on it. 

He's a gamer, too, although I can't confirm whether he plays WoW.  He played No Man's Sky, for whose promotional round he was also booked, so it's not that unlikely. Plus he looks like he comes from either Azeroth or Middle Earth...

I'm not really up to speed on Bill's talents, mostly because a friend of mine used to hate him so much it was unwise even to mention the name "Bill Bailey" in his presence. It made him so angry, in fact, I was never able to ask him what the problem was. I can take Bill Bailey or leave him, myself, although for a while I got put off him by osmosis. 

I took him this morning. In three smallish doses. I watched the first two Planet Azeroth videos on the Official World Of Warcraft YouTube channel, which until today I didn't know existed, although obviously there had to be one. The third I watched on  IGN's channel, the only place it seems to be showing. Maybe they have an exclusive.

As entertainment, I found them inconsistent. Some bits were so funny I laughed out loud. Others bordered on the cringe-worthy. A lot of Bill's commentary felt very in-jokey indeed, which leads me to believe Bill is either extremely professional (He is, in fact.) or a long-time player himself. (He might be.)

My favorite part comes early in the first video, where the wolf is walking next to a fence and Bill casts aspersions on both its ferociousness and its height. The best thing about the whole series might be the way it offers a lengthy and relaxed opportunity to study the mobs in detail. That's something I always mean to do in games but rarely do. The artists' work on most of the creatures we end up killing largely goes unseen because it's hard to take in the finer details when you're fighting for your life.

Anyway, in case you're going to be playing WoWF later today and you'd missed these little vignettes of what life there could be like, I thought I'd share. I'm looking forward to hearing all the stories. Maybe I'll join in a little later, when all the fuss has died down...

In The Palace Of The Odd

Too many games seems like such an entitled complaint but really, who can keep up? While everyone else is focused on World of Warcraft Forever or Grand Theft Auto VI or even the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake, all launching this month, I thought I had a clear run through December and January, with just the EverQuest II expansion (No date yet but it'll be December.) and Ananta arriving on January 15 2027. 

Only now I learn there's another game I'm curious about that's launching in December. And another that doesn't, as yet, have release date but which looks like it will, when it comes, shoulder everything else aside.

The one that's definitely coming soon is Silver Palace. I was already vaguely aware of it - I wrote about it in September when, apparently, I also pre-registered. Much good that did me. I'd heard not a word from anyone about the game since then, not until I read about the launch date on MMOBomb yesterday

After that, I went to the official website and watched the rest of the videos. They seem a bit generic but I guess I'm going to be giving it a go all the same.

The game, which is releasing globally on December 14, is described on the Epic Store as an "open-world action adventure RPG centred around detective mysteries". I checked Epic because, annoyingly, the game isn't on Steam, or not as yet, anyway. 

MMOBomb has variously labeled it a "Victorian-themed anime action game" and a "Victorian noir-style action RPG." It is, of course, a gacha game, too, but then all the good ones are, these days.

From the videos, I'd call it a mash-up. It looks like they threw a bunch of genres into a blender, then stirred in a gaggle of tropes after that. They seem to have everything in there, from knights in the age of chivalry to fin de siecle grandeur to the roaring twenties, all mushed together with no consideration for reason or logic.

It looks great! I'd play it. I'm going to play it. At least for long enough to find out if it's really just a horrible mess or whether that blender has churned out something smooth and delicious.

I just hope the gameplay doesn't lean too heavily into playing the detective. As I was saying the other day, I always think I'm going to like detective games more than I actually do. I don't imagine there'll be too many of those super-annoying whiteboards covered with bits of string, anyway. That's more of a 'nineties/noughties trope. From the videos, it looks like it's further down towards the sword-sticks and brass knuckles end of the cliche. More Holmes and Raffles than CSI Fantasyland. (I bloody hate Raffles, as it happens...)

I like flamethrowers, though. Well, in games, that is. And I do like the look of some of the characters, particularly the way they seem to be quite chaotic and accident-prone. That looks like it might be a laugh. For once, I might even play the male character. The top-hat and tails look is very fetching.

That's Silver Palace, then. I could write more about it but since I don't know anything more, that wouldn't take long. I will just mention that the developer behind it, Elementa Games, is based in Singapore. Whether that's going to bring a different feel or aesthetic to the familiar mix will be interesting to see.

On to the next one. And it's a good one. 

It's called Ordinary Oddness, which is a pretty fine thing to be called. I don't know a lot about this one either but there's a twenty-two minute "Reveal Trailer" on YouTube. Watch that and you'll know as much about it as I do. 

And I do recommend watching it, too. Preferably in full screen. It'll be twenty minutes well-spent, trust me.

I just watched it all the way through again. It is, frankly, stunning. It seems to be a segment stripped straight out of the main storyline and even without knowing any of the characters or backstory, it's compulsive viewing. It makes the Silver Palace videos look trite by comparison and I thought those were pretty decent.

I'm willing to entertain the explanation that these kinds of games are playing directly to my personal preferences but even allowing for that, why is the quality so high now? Free-to-play games were never like this before Genshin Impact, were they? Now they all are. (This one, as usual, is coming from a division of TenCent called Cosmipup Studios. It's based in Hangzhou, like they often seem to be. Must be a fun place...)

As for what genre Ordinary Oddness is supposed to be, the Steam Store page (This one is on Steam, I'm happy to say.) calls it a "Nothing-Stays-Oddinary Open-World RPG." Yes, they do spell that "Oddinary" I can't tell if it's a typo or a pun. 

QuintLyn Bowers, writing for MMOBomb, unhelpfully, for me anyway, describes it as "Paprika if it were a game."  I'd never heard of Paprika because I'm an anime ignoramus. Alright, an anime ingenue. That's less hurtful. 

Fortunately, I know how to look stuff up.

Wikipedia tells me Paprika was "a 2006 Japanese animated surrealist science fiction psychological thriller" that might have been the inspiration for Christopher Nolan's Inception, another movie I've never seen and know next to nothing about. 

I don't need any of those reference points, though. I know exactly what Ordinary Oddness is referencing and I can date that influence back a decade or so before Paprika, too. Ordinary Madness is Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol, if it was a game, not a comic.

I don't actually like Grant Morrison. Or not for a long time. I sat in an auditorium at a comic convention in the 'nineties and watched him instigate what looked disturbingly like a sixties love-in on stage. There were bean-bags, ffs! I walked out after a few minutes and went to the bar instead. I don't believe I've read anything he's written since. 

Before that, though, I read all his Doom Patrols and loved them. That was why I was waiting to hear him talk in the first place. Never meet your heroes. It's such great advice. 

At the time, Doom Patrol was nothing like I'd seen in comics before. I imagine it was like something someone had seen. Very little is ever original. But it certainly was the first dadaist/surrealist super-hero title from a mainstream American publisher I'd read. 

Not, obviously, the last. That influence is all over Ordinary Madness like fingerprints although Morrison's pernicious influence is so pervasive in the culture now, there's absolutely no reason to believe anyone involved with the game has ever even heard of the Doom Patrol. It's like fucking Tolkein now, the stuff Alan Moore and Grant Morrison piped into the air ducts back then.

If you've been waiting thirty years for a chance to walk abut in that world, well now's your chance. I can't wait, personally. Ordinary Madness is above Ananta on my want-to-play list now.

Of course, by the time it arrives, there'll probably be something better out there, coming down the production line. Apparently it is possible to have too much of a good thing after all.  

Four Shows, Five Seasons. Okay, Four-and-a-Half...

It's got to be about time for a TV catch-up, hasn't it? I have actually watched some shows now...

Here in the UK, from late Spring until early Autumn, we had the longest spell of really good weather I can remember since, well, possibly ever. I've always had some difficulty staying indoors when the sun shines so my gaming fell right off but you wouldn't have thought it would have affected my TV watching so much, given I do most of it after it gets dark.

What really killed my late-night TV habit was Suno, the AI music app. Through most of last year, making songs took over the late-night TV slot but I thought I was done with Suno by New Year, which was about when I ran out of things I'd written in the 90s I could milk for lyrics. 

That was premature thinking, as it turned out. What was supposed to be an end point became no more than a three month break. I got the itch again at the end of March, which was how I found I'd been utterly wrong about just how ruthlessly I could strip-mine my past creativity for new inspiration. I've completed about a hundred and fifty more songs since then and I haven't run the well dry quite yet.

As far as TV went, though, for much of 2026 all I managed most evenings was one half-hour show, if even that. Usually it was an episode of Dr. Who. There are more than enough of those to keep me going at that pace for years. 

Ironically, the one time I did spend some time watching TV was the height of the summer, when the weather was at its hottest. It might not have been too hot for me but it was for Beryl. There were a couple of weeks in high summer, when I spent the afternoons in the back room, where the TV is. It's the coolest room in the house. Doesn't get the sun until late evening. 

I wanted Beryl to stay in there for her safety, dogs being very vulnerable to heat exhaustion at temperatures above 25 celsius, but she always wants to be where one of us is, so I ended up watching The Boroughs and most of the second season of Deadloch in the afternoons just so she'd stay in the relative cool. Then the temperature dropped a bit and that was the end of that. I must finish watching Deadloch, come to think of it...

Now its Autumn. It's still pretty dry but there's a lot of fog and cloud and it's eight degrees Celsius outside as I write this. It'll be dark by teatime. I'm playing a lot more games. I'm still working on songs but that's slowing down, so my TV-watching's on the up, to the point where I've managed to finish four whole seasons of three different shows! And half of another that's taking me forever...

And now, in increasing order of dubiousness... 

Beyond Here Lie Spoilers! 

Haunted Hotel - Season Two 
(15 - suicide, crude humor, violence, injury detail, threat, horror)

I was planning to review this for Halloween but then I totally forgot. Never mind. I'm doing it now. 

I loved this. The first season was great and this was at least as good, if not better. IMDB says better, anyway. Season One has an average rating of 7.6. Season Two rates an 8.2.

Haunted Hotel is pretty much exactly what I want from a traditional, Western animated cartoon. It's sharp, funny, well-drawn, well-animated, well-written, well-acted and it has a cast of characters I can easily remember. 

It's not just the central family, Nathan, Katherine, Ben, Esther and Abaddon, who carry it, either. (Okay, to be strictly accurate, Abaddon is actually an ancient demon, trapped in the body of a boy from the eighteenth century, but that doesn't mean he's not family...)

There are also the many, many ghosts who live (Or unlive, I guess...) in the hotel and its extensive grounds - Anabelle, Stabby Paul, Candlehead, Randy and the rest. New ghosts every episode but the old ones remain, at least until whatever unfulfilled condition that keeps them there gets satisfied and they turn into sparkles and vanish forever. 

Esther's friend Heather and Katherine's would-be boyfriend Joel are both back from Season One and Season Two sees the addition of an actual employee, the hotel's first. That's Shayna, who was technically in Season One, too, but only as a mysterious ghost haunting the attic. 

In the first episode of the second season we find out she's not a ghost at all but a live woman, pretending to be a ghost so as to have a roof over her head and also because her grandfather told her there always needed to be someone of their bloodline in the hotel or else an eldritch god by the unlikely name of Pete would wake up and... do whatever it is eldritch gods do. It's never good.

I could have done with more of Shayna. I could have done with more of a lot of the supporting characters. They're all so strong. That's the trouble with having a large, well-delineated cast and only twenty-five minutes an episode to make use of them all. 

I could also have done with more episodes. Not in the general sense of always wanting more of something I like but in the very specific sense of two more, like there were in Season One. It always annoys me when shows come back but with shorter runs. I mean, it's a lot better than them not coming back at all but still...

Luckily, there's no need to read anything too terrible into the reduced episode count. Haunted Hotel is already renewed by Netflix for Season Three next year.

Nobody Wants This - Season Three
(15 - Language, sex references)

The Kristen Bell romcom about an "agnostic podcaster" and a rabbi returns for a third season. I liked the first two, but then I'll watch anything with Kristen Bell in it. 

When I reviewed Season Two, I ended with "I do kind of hope that the series finale, when it eventually comes, sees them go their own separate ways. I think the prospects of them having a long and happy marriage are vanishingly small." Well, they got married at the end of the last episode of Season Three so I guess we'll see how that prediction pans out.

Or not. Season Four hasn't been confirmed. Apparently this latest season went down better with both critics and viewers than Season Two, though, so it's probably more likely than not.

Do I want a fourth season? Hmm. That's a hard one. I thought Season Four was funnier than the first two. I enjoyed each episode - as a sitcom. As far as the dramatic plot went, though, I had some serious reservations. 

I've just never believed in the central relationship. In Seasons One and Two, that felt like a position strongly supported by both the scripts and the performances. I always felt the subtext was that these were two people who were doing their damndest to ignore all the very valid reasons why they shouldn't be in a relationship because they just wanted it to work. Deep down, though, they both knew it never could.

In Season Three that all changes. Kristen Bell's Joanne now seems almost entirely subsumed by her desire to be someone completely different, whereas before that desire was always in open conflict with who she actually is. I found the transformation unconvincing but also not very entertaining. It was a lot more fun to watch her trying to work around the very real issues in her situation so as to get what she wanted, rather than leaning into them and accepting them. 

Also, politically, it's quite disturbing to see her continually giving ground and being subsumed by Noah and his values. I'm not comfortable with the messaging there.

In fact, Joanne felt relatively peripheral to the plot of her own show this time around. She was certainly a lot less funny, not because of anything Kirsten Bell wasn't bringing to the role but because she just didn't get many good lines.  (Adam Brody's Noah has always felt somewhat peripheral and has never been all that funny, so no change there.)

There were plenty of laughs elsewhere, luckily, particularly from the excellent Jane Curtin as Joanne and her sister Morgan's mother, from Sarah Silverman, playing Noah's deputy rabbi and especially from Justin Lupe as Morgan and Timothy Simons as Noah's brother, Sasha. Honestly, much as I love Kirsten Bell, I'd rather watch a spin-off centered on Morgan, Sasha and Sasha's separated wife Esther (Jackie Tohn.) now. The three of them have such great chemistry together, which is something I'd be hard-put to say about the two leads.

That said, the writing for those three isn't consistently great, either. I found several twists in the plot less than convincing this time around but the way Sasha and Morgan are split up in the last three episodes I found absolutely infuriating. Partly that's because they both are extremely infuriating characters but mostly it was that it all felt very forced, as if the whole sub-plot only existed to create problems for the upcoming wedding between Joanne and Noah, which was bogging itself down in tedious, unfunny detail. Mostly, though, I was infuriated because I didn't feel the writing was up to the job of explaining why what was happening was happening.

I mean, I get it in broad terms - Morgan is terrified of real emotions and she has self-worth issues she's always covering up and Sasha is is deep in grief for the failure of the only close, romantic relationship he's ever known - but it all felt so rushed, the implications of each of their backstories barely sketched-in. 

Episode 7, where all this came to a head, left me feeling pissed off with the pair of them for more than twenty-four hours, which is very unusual behavior for me where any media is concerned. So, I guess kudos, to someone for that...

Overall, though, I enjoyed the season. I'd hate for it to stop there because it ended on all loose threads. There'd better be at least one more season coming, just to wrap it all up. More than that would, I think, be pushing it.

My Dress-Up Darling - Seasons One and Two
15 - Sexual violence references, injury detail

I started watching this because I knew the manga from work. Well, my old work, I guess I should say now. All my knowledge of manga, such as it is, comes from a decade and more of putting eight bays of titles in order and, of course, flipping through most of them at one time or another.

The premise is unusual to say the least. An introverted high-school student with no friends, living with his grandfather in a hina doll shop, somehow finds himself making cosplay costumes for a popular girl in his class. And if the set-up is odd, the execution is even odder.

Season One starts out as a kind of sex comedy. There's a lot of what would, in the Golden Age of Comics, have euphemistically been termed Good Girl Art. We call it Fan Service, now. 

As the episodes roll along, though, that element, which initially seems to be almost the point of the show, starts to recede and the focus begins to fall instead on two things - the potential romantic relationship between the two main characters, Wakana Gojo and Marin Kitagawa, and the idea of cosplay as a both a way of life and a philosophy.  

The first season is quite raunchy but by the second almost all of that has been replaced by a bittersweet, yearning romance. Kitagawa and Gojo (In that hard-to-get-used-to Japanese high school tradition that I only know from media like this, they only ever refer to each other by their last names, even in the most private and intimate of situations.) are both incredibly nice and obviously ideally suited for each other, but neither of them can express the feelings they're hiding.

It could be frustrating but it's not. It's just achingly sweet, in a way no adolescent romance most likely ever was, outside of imagination and fantasy. Even the romance, though, has to take second place to an astonishingly detailed examination of the role of cosplay in Japanese society and the precise and specific detail of how the impressive costumes and make-up are achieved.

Honestly, it was like watching a cross between a documentary and a make-up tutorial at times. There's also a lot of stuff about how absolutely acceptable it is for people of different sizes, shapes and genders to cosplay characters that aren't a physical match and several characters have backstories in which they met prejudice for their tastes or choices and overcame them. For a show that starts off leaning into some very dodgy areas indeed, it turns out to have some very right-on politics.

I really enjoyed it, especially the second season. It's frequently beautiful to look at, too. The animation and the drawing is excellent. It ends a little abruptly, although the way it finishes could be interpreted as a suitably poignant place to leave the two would-be lovers, still on the very cusp of an emotional breakthrough. A third season is apparently in production but there's no release date fixed yet.

The manga, though, carries on much further, ending with a sequence in which it's revealed that Marin and Wakana get married. I guess that means they can finally call each other by their first names. 

A few years ago, I wouldn't have been able to get through even a couple of episodes of a show like this, let alone a couple of seasons. All the sudden, stylistic jumps from realism to exaggerated cartooning, often  in the same scene, all the hyper-exaggerated double-takes, all the histrionic YELLING!!! Now, though, all of that just rolls over me if the show's any good.

Chainsmoker Cat - Season One, First Half
15 - Sex, nudity, sex references, drug use

None of which explains how I can watch this, let alone why. I have neither excuse nor explanation, except to say I began watching in morbid curiosity and continued in horrified fascination.

What even is this? There's no plot. Every episode is a string of unconnected scenes - you can't even call them sketches - in which a catgirl smokes a lot of cigarettes. That's both the title and the entire storyline.

The catgirl's name is Yani. She's probably about twenty, although with beastfolk, who fucking knows? I really need a primer. Every show I watch just makes me more confused about how the whole animal/human society thing works. Are there any established rules, like for vampires? 

Yani lives in utter squalor in a run-down, quasi-brutalist, concrete apartment block that looks like a converted car park. It's managed by an obese pervert, who has sex with a blow-up doll in the shape of a foxgirl (Or foxboy - who can tell?). 

Yani always seems to be either unemployed or doing some sort of unskilled, casual work. At one point she does some modeling for a manga artist working in the porn industry. In the last episode I watched she was somehow waitressing for the local crime-lord, who looks about eighty. It turns out he has a longstanding affection for her that might be paternalistic or might be perverse but knowing this show is probably both. 

Things like that happen to her a lot but mostly she just lounges about, smoking endless cigarettes, drinking to excess and taking any drugs she can get her paws on. It mostly seems like literally the only thing she cares about is where her next cigarette is coming from. To watch this show, you'd believe nicotine was the most addictive drug in the world. (It actually is. Ed. ) 

In one particularly extreme example of her astonishing, overwhelming addiction, she sits on the river-bank, smoking, as she watches a young boy drift by. He's clearly drowning, crying out for her to help him. She does, eventually, but only after she's cursed him for interrupting her smoking session and not until she's finished her cigarette. 

In the same scene, she also, very weirdly, turns for a moment into an actual cat as she dives beneath the surface of the river. It's the sort of thing that makes me think I must be missing some vital subtext that would explain it all. And then it all just carries on as before and the thought vanishes in a cloud of cigarette smoke. 

Chainsmoker Cat is scatalogical, sexual and frequently genuinely obscene. Also revolting. Often revolting. Can't fault the accuracy of the title, though.

After half a season there's just starting to be some faint glimmer of continuity. A few vaguely familiar characters recur, including a couple of Yani's friends and her younger sister, who's almost her exact opposite, clean, tidy, well-spoken, a non-smoker... No wonder she seems almost as disgusted by Yani's lifestyle as I am.

I cannot explain why I'm still watching this. 

Even less, why I just bought a T-Shirt with Yani's face on.

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.