Busy Doing Nothing Very Much - Life In Hethereau Goes On

 A lot has happened in Neverness To Everness since I posted about the game last Wednesday and yet nothing has really happened at all. Nothing by way of story or character progression, anyway, those being the twin pillars of the form, supposedly. 

No, everything that happened was decidedly, shall we say, horizontal. Or perhaps it was alternative. One of those ancillary lines of progress that keeps people busy without moving them up the difficulty ladder, anyway. 

Ah, yes. Difficulty. I've been playing, pretty regularly, since launch, we're just coming up to the six-month anniversary and I still have no clear idea how the vertical progression system works.

There seem to be three types of level: Character, Hunter and Appraisal. The level caps are 60 for Hunter, 7 for Appraisal and, as far as I can tell, 80 for character. Flora is currently Character Level 50, Hunter Level 46 and Appraisal Level 5. 

I think that's pretty far behind par for hours played but she was Character Level 40 until I went into the game to check some details for this post and remembered you have to do the leveling up for Character yourself by pressing a button. And she's effectively Appraiser Level 4, too. You can set it to one level lower if you want.  It makes mobs weaker (And rewards inferior...) I did it as soon as she was first allowed to, back at Appraiser Level 3 and the setting carries over every time she levels up, unless I switch it back.

See how confusing it is already? Well, it's way more confusing than that. Every last little thing has to be leveled up or Ascended or some such twaddle. I gave up thinking about it months ago, when it became obvious that none of it mattered. 

If you've been following my posts about the game, you'll have noticed I haven't been complaining much about the fights. Mostly I don't even mention them and when I do it's usually to say there weren't many or that they were quite easy. That is true. Mostly.

It's not always true. There are occasionally fights that I, theoretically, need to win just to work my way up some ladder or other and a couple have been too hard for me. I'm stuck at Tycoon Level 20 because of one of those. 

Oh yes, Tycoon Level... that's another ladder and quite an important one, at least in terms of the rewards it gives. Although I guess it's horizontal, even though it's a ladder, because it doesn't have anything specifically to do with making your character better at killing things. And that's all that really counts, right?

I had just been thinking how I probably ought to do something about getting past that speed-bump, when Hotta, out of the blue, added a direct alternative to Tycoon in the form of the Puka Membership Program. Like Tycoon, there are 45 levels and you can switch tracks between the two options at will but you can only progress one at a time.

I immediately swapped over to the PMP and now I'm Level 3 in that one. Apparently the rewards are very comparable. I imagine most people will have finished Tycoon anyway and be glad to have another 45 rungs to climb. My plan is to stick with Puka until I hit some barrier I can't clamber over and then decide which of the two is going to best reward some actual effort. If any.

While I was fiddling around, trying to figure all of this out, I spotted a few other progression systems I'd been ignoring, some of which I have literally forgotten again already, just a few hours later. I do remember one... 

I had what looked like a few dozen decorative items that I hadn't "Collected" because I'd forgotten you needed to. That had progress bars and rewards because of course it did. I collected them, filled a few bars with whatever weird xp variant it gave and got a bunch of stuff back as rewards that I probably need for some other progression mechanic. 

Also now, presumably, I have a load of furniture I can use. I'll have to go back to my house - one of my houses - or my cafe - one of my cafes - and check how that works.

Speaking of cafes, I figured out how to play the "Serving Customers Yourself" mini-game. I'd been ignoring it because if I find the idea of managing a coffee shop unappealing, you can imagine what I think about serving in one. In the end, though, I wanted the Fons and having read up on all the options it looked like the least-worst.

Sidebar: Given my active antipathy to games where you pretend to be a shopkeeper or a cook or a waiter or any kind of retailer or hospitality functionary or business person at all, really, I find it highly ironic I've ended up doing it it two games at once. At least it's mostly notional in NTE and not that important. In Nivalis it's a lot more work although I believe once you get past a certain stage your businesses mostly run themselves. In both games the part I liked best about running an eatery was going out each day to buy the supplies. It's doing anything with them afterwards that annoys me.

And guess what? Serving customers in my cafe on Moomin Street is actually fun. (It'd be even more fun if we could all dress up like Moomins. Now there's a collab waiting to happen...)

Well, it is now I can do it reliably, anyway. Not so much before I knew what I was meant to be doing. I read a few guides, upgraded the social skills of some of the characters I have working for me (Another form of progression, there.) and practiced for a bit until now I can spend all my City Stamina in about ten minutes. That gets you a million or so Fons and you only have to do it once a week so it's fine. 

At this point I think it's probably becoming obvious that the line between vertical and horizontal progression in NTE is blurred almost beyond recognition. I tend to mark everything that makes combat easier (Or harder for that matter.) as "Vertical" because that's how it used to work in the olden days but I'm not sure it makes sense any more.

For a start, I can't quite see why you need to get any better at fighting at all, now the main story quest has barely any fights and the few it does have are easy. The hard fights I've encountered all seem to have been in content required for progress in some other system, which then filters back to give non-combat rewards. 

For example, if I was able to beat the mob I can't currently manage for Tycoon Level 21, my reward would be access to Personalized License Plates for my vehicles. Since I ride a bicycle now, that's not even anything I want but even if it was, it certainly wouldn't help me kill faster. 

And, in fact, I don't really have any sense in this game that killing mobs is that important anyway. I go hours and hours without killing anything and even when I do it's purely by choice. Combat seems almost like an optional mini-game now.

What I've mostly been doing for the last few sessions is trying to win enough Puka Stars on the sideshows to buy first a boat and then a glider. At least, that's what I was doing until Hotta dumped a whole, new progression system into the game, based around doing everything there is to do in Pukaland and made it give retrospective credit. 

I'd already made enough under my own efforts to buy the boat but just claiming all the new rewards I'd  earned by doing it gave me more than enough Stars for the glider. (It's fricken' huge, by the way!) After that, I went through all the various tick-boxes in the new event and crossed off as many as I could, without actually putting myself out, of course, and that was most of them, so I have even more Stars now.

It reminds me of 999 Nights except it's much faster. Where completion there took me a couple of weeks, Pukaland looks like it might take less than half as long. There are a few pesky "S-Class" wins on some of the sideshows that could be problematic but I'm not sure I'll bother trying to finish the whole thing just for the sake of it. If those don't happen naturally I'll just forget about them.

And now, because I like lists, I'm going to run through all the sideshows and attractions and give my reviews of them, with comments on how easy it is to earn Stars. There are videos all over YouTube doing that but none of the ones I've seen did I find very helpful so I can't do much worse.

It's going to make this post very long if I just go straight into it, though, so I'm going to make it into a post of it's own. It's only fair - that is what I sat down to write about in the first place! 

I might do it right away or I might leave it till tomorrow. 

A cliffhanger ending! How about that?

We'll Always Be Middle Class, We’ll Always Be Floating

Two weeks, two weeks since the last time...

Hmm. That reminds me of a song. What the heck is it? Oh, I know! It's one of mine!

Moving swiftly on...

I seem to have bookmarked more than two dozen songs since last time, most of them new, a few of them covers, one or two older ones I happened upon, one way or another. I'm kind of thinking I might ought to structure these things a little better. Do some themed posts or something. 

Ah, what the hell!

Shall we start with some very justified anger? Why not?

 Heavy Metal - THICK

Yeah, that's not heavy metal. This is. But then you don't generally put the genre in the title, do you? Unless you're Ottowan. 

The lyrics are clear enough but I didn't really hear them the first time. I spent half the video trying to read what was written on one of the tee-shirts. Do people ever think about how distracting something like that is? Or even how distracting videos are? 

No wonder I can never remember the words to anything. It was easier before MTV, when all we had to look at was the record sleeve. Or Disco 45. 

 Lobotomize Me - The Rat Utopia Experiment

But then, you can always put the words in the video. Not that either of these songs need subtitles to get their messages across. They're both admirably annunciated. 

There's a theory, common with people of a certain age, that goes "Once a punk, always a punk". Not that I want bragging rights (Of course I want bragging rights. Everyone wants bragging rights.) but I was a punk when, if you wanted straight jeans, you had to find a store that sold workmen's clothing. Everywhere else was flares. My first pair of straights had a 2x12" pocket down the side for carrying a metal ruler. 

And short hair... don't get me started.

Sorry... where was I? Oh yes. So, as a punk from back in the day, as we didn't say then, I'm always dubious about the whole "Once a punk..." thing. I don't recall anyone extending that kind of respect for tradition and commitment to the bit to the Teds. We just thought they were reactionary throwbacks.

I was a punk from about the summer of '76 to the autumn of '77, after which I was probably post-punk for a while, before slipping off the punk spectrum altogether. You can't be "a post-punk", can you? Not like you can be a Mod or a New Romantic or a Goth. 

I am not a punk any more and haven't been since I swapped my straights for white denim Oxford bags, which is what I wore on stage, mostly to annoy the audience. More than once. 

It did, too. Annoyed the audience. I got taken to task about it a couple of times. Then again, I guess setting out to annoy the audience you're supposed to be entertaining is pretty punk at that. So is dressing how the hell you want, which was a lot more of a tenet of belief at the time than you'd ever know from the historical record. People wore what they wanted to wear for a while, until the media decided everyone ought to have a uniform.

That determination to go your own way is the true punk sensibility, something I do believe in and which can be life-long. It also has fuck all do with the 1970s, or the 1980s, if you want to get all hardcore about it, or even the 1960s, if you're writing one of those supercilious histories of popular music, except that those were the decades that put a name to it. 

Whatever it is and whenever it started, it's still around and always will be. This lot have it. And I like it, particularly like the way Phia Lane almost runs out of breath but just keeps going anyway.

 Underground - Mogwai (Feat. Iggy pop)

If we're talking bragging rights, Iggy has all of them.

Back in the late '90s, when I worked for the online side of the business I'm just about to retire from and we could play music at work, all day, every day, I got introduced to a number of artists I otherwise would never have listened to. God Speed You, Black Emperor was one. Mogwai was another. (Also Coldplay but best gloss over that one.) 

Post-rock was big in that building for a while and I liked it well enough as background but it's mostly instrumentals and instrumentals tend not to stick hard in the memory. I always liked the sound of Mogwai but never enough to pay all that much attention to what they were doing after people stopped putting them on the CD player. I wouldn't have listened to this if it hadn't had Iggy's name attached. 

And there he is, doing his thing. He just keeps doing it, doesn't he? If you had a thing like Iggy's, you'd keep doing it, too, I bet.

 Love Song - Knifeplay

I've been watching My Dress-Up Darling on Netflix (Don't ask...) and there's an episode where Kitagana explains to Gojo what a "slice-of-life" manga is. This is a slice-of-life video and those are my favorite kind.

Knifeplay are allegedly a shoegaze band although they sound shoegaze-emo to me, if that's even a thing. Eli Ennis at Chasing Fridays has a review up of this track in the latest issue and he seems to think they're on the edge of the genre now, after a decade at the heart of the scene. Whatever you want to call it, it's gorgeous.

Louisiana Song - Jess Kerber

If this had a video, it'd be slice-of-life, too. I borrowed a couplet for the title of this post. I think it's over-optimistic, to be honest, but the sentiment goes both ways.

Phoebe - Audrey Hobert

Phoebe is my favorite girl's name. Probably. It might be Rachel. Neither of those preferences comes from Friends, although I do love Friends. The Phoebe in this song is the Phoebe from Friends. Or, as Audrey says, "A Phoebe". It's funny how that happens. But we all know what she means.

So much for the introspection. Let's dance.

07XXXXXXXXX - Lifeloose

That's mesmeric. 

It kind of made me think of CoCo and Clair Clair but someone in the comments called it Slayyytercore which I really hope is going to be a thing now. 

Speaking of which...

 i think he's got a girl - Slayyyter

Oh boy. First time I heard this I thought well, it's a bit slow, isn't it? Then I read Tom Breihan at Stereogum saying "it's so fucking good". I respect Tom's opinion so I listened to it again and he's right. It's so fucking good. 

And it's a grower.

THE ALLIGATOR - Goldie Boutlier

Best thing she's done in a while, I think. Why the title is in ALL CAPS and her name is in regular I cannot explain. These pop stars and their wacky typography...

Want something a little less subtle? I got you.

 

 

c*ntry girl rock - horsegiirl, Dylan Brady

 

That's how it is on her channel so that's how I'm having it here. The pun only works in print. 

 

Horsegiirl is a German DJ. And Dylan Brady is from100 Gecs, of course. They've been quiet a while, now I come to think of it, 100 Gecs.

 

The thing about having a gimmick like horsegiirl has is it gets you attention when you're starting out but if you get somewhere then you're stuck with it, like Angus Young and his school uniform or Kiss and the make-up. 

 

A lot of DJs seem to wear masks, though. The advantage of having a horse's head as your identity is, even if you get to be as famous as Taylor Swift, you can still go to the corner shop for a pint of milk on a Sunday morning and no-one's going to recognize you. 

 

Not that I imagine Taylor Swift goes to the corner store for milk or anything else, not on a Sunday or any other day. Then again, Lana was caught working in that waffle house that one time... 

 

Dancing On Your Grave 

Madeon, MGNA Crrrta - (MGNA Crrrta remix)

 

Madeon is a French DJ. MGNA Crrrta are a duo from NYC. Hyperpop is universal. Obviously.

 

 ALL THE TIME - Femtanyl

 

Again with the typography! I'll stop mentioning it when I stop noticing it, which I hope will be very soon.

 

Another cross-border pairing, although this one's a fixture, not a feature. American-Canadian, which used to sound neighborly. Not so much any more, I guess.

 

Wikipedia says their music is "popular in online spaces, especially among the furry fandom.^" For some reason I find that highly incongruous, although now I think about it, I didn't have any particular pre-existing ideas about what furries would listen to.  

 

I just didn't think it would be that.

 

And finally...Hmm. I seem to have used up all the set closers already.

 

How about...

 

 "for you" - katie dey

 

Brings us full circle, doesn't it? Comes with an epilepsy trigger warning that katie seems quite concerned about so I'll mention it, although it seems to me just about every other damn video these days has some kind of strobing effect. I thought those things went out with the mirror balls and the dry ice machines but nothing ever really goes away, does it?

 

Except me, right now. 

 

Bye! 

Eight Steps On The Path To Sedition

 The pre-expansion event, Paths of Sedition, has started, over in EverQuest II. It turns out it was enough of a draw to bring me back to Norrath for the first time in quite a few weeks. 

EQII has had a rough go from me in the current expansion cycle. I got halfway through the storyline back when Rage of Cthurath came out at the end of 2025. I dropped it in the New Year for Baldur's Gate 3, then came back to finish it. After that I decided it had been too slow and grindy for me to want to take another character through it right away so I dropped it again.

Later in the year I was just starting to work on a plan for leveling another character to the cap, without it making me want to throw the monitor out the window, when my PC decided it hated playing games and began crashing after every session. With ChatGPT's assistance, I eventually got that fixed but by then I'd rediscovered GeForce Now and fallen in love with playing my games on someone else's machines. 

EQII, to no-one's surprise, I'm sure, isn't on GeForce Now so that put it at the back of the pack to begin with but worse than that, the second time I played again there was another crash on exit. That put me off. In any case, a bunch of newer, fancier, cooler games were jostling poor old EQII out of the way, so it wasn't likely it would have gotten much of a look in anyway, even if I hadn't been worried playing it would screw up my machine.

I do like to try and keep up with what's going on in Norrath, though, even if it isn't my main gaming home any more. And there have been a few pre-expansion "Preludes" worth playing. Not as many as there probably should have been but some. 

Creating Illustrations for Loading Screens - A Lost Art

I saw the write-up at EQ2 Traders and that got me interested but the tipping point was the mention of no fewer than eight new quests for adventurers. (There are also eight tradeskill quests but I was willing to bet at least half of those would just be standing at a crafting station, banging out hats and boots for some annoying NPC that could easily have done it themselves). 

I didn't think it would require a great time commitment. Naomi Denmother described both questlines as "short". From experience, I can only speak to the adventure option. I guess is short, if you consider it as something that's going to be with us for a couple of months. On the other hand, it took me about an hour and a half, which isn't as short as all that for a story quest. 

I guess what matters is whether it's fun, not how long it takes. And yes, I'd say it's fun. It kept me engaged and interested throughout, at least. And it had two genuine "Whoa!" moments, which is two more than most quests can manage.

I won't precis the storyline in any detail. Anyone reading this who plays EQII is going to do it anyway, if they haven't already, and they won't thank me for spoilers. Everyone else really isn't going to care.

This is one of the big differences between MMORPGs and almost every other kind of RPGish, narrative-driven game I write about. I find it very easy to write, entertainingly I hope, about the kind of storylines that crop up in Wuthering Waves or Neverness To Everness or Nivalis Nights because they tend to be novelistic or cinematic. Granted I might not always make a great job of it but as a journalistic exercise, a retelling of the story of a quest in one of those games ought to be at least as interesting to a general audience as if it were a movie or a TV show.

Who indeed? And more importantly, who cares?

That is very much not the case with MMORPGs. No-one who doesn't already know the politics of Norrath is likely to give a damn whether some troll shaman is claiming to be the new Grozmok or that Neriak has ambitions on Freeport.  And even all of that politics is more accessible than the usual litany of unpronounceable gods and demons and their world-threatening yet somehow still incredibly petty squabbles.

It's not just the subject matter that makes MMORPG quests hard to retell, either. The way they're written too often makes them seem stiff and awkward when taken out of context. It's not that they're badly written, necessarily. Mostly they're solid enough but many, probably most, follow conventions proper only to the games in which they appear. 

When you play those games regularly, you get so used to the way the quests are written, you hardly notice it but they all have a kind of local dialect or accent that's impossible to mistake. WOW, EQII, SW:tOR, ESO, LotRO, GW2, New World, FFXIV... the writing in all of them follows predictable patterns that seem to supercede individual authorship. 

In most, it also leans strongly towards literary tropes and speech patterns usually found mainly in either fantasy or historical, rather than contemporary, fiction. I think about the only MMORPG I can remember that wasn't written this way was The Secret World. It may well have been one of the reasons it was praised so highly for its writing at the time.

Must have the same scriptwriter as Theresa May

Of course, the writing in every game has a tone and a style of its own but for some reason it seems to be much more pronounced in MMORPGs. Or perhaps that's not it at all or at least not all of it. It occurs to me, looking at the list in the previous paragraph, that all of the games except TSW have some kind of fantasy or science-fantasy setting that doesn't much resemble the world in which we live - or any likely extrapolation of it. 

The Secret World, though, is set in this world, our world, with fantastical elements layered over the top. NTE and Nivalis Nights are both closer in conception to TSW than they are to any of the others except, perhaps, SW:tOR. Even Wuthering Waves, which is arguably more fantasy-oriented, is peopled with regular folk doing ordinary jobs in a quasi-contemporary setting. Perhaps it's the familiarity of the characters and the lives they lead that make retelling their stories seem likely to be more accessible to someone who doesn't play the games.

All of which could have been the biggest sidebar in this blog's history. To return to the original topic, there are eight quests in the pre-expansion event for adventurers and I had a good time with all of them. There's a fair amount of running around but for an All Access subscriber, fast map travel makes much of that trivial. 

Most of the quests take place in "new" instances, all of which are rather well-judged. These days, EQII players expect to see repurposed assets from earlier in the game whenever temporary content like this appears but in this case the choice of what to re-use has clearly been made with some thought.

Neck tattoos are in this year. Also, even a dwarf isn't short enough to walk under a pony.

It's always been a puzzlement, why the best-looking zones in the original game, back in 2004, were the catacombs and sewers under the two big cities. It was very noticeable at the time that once you pulled up a grating in the street to descend below Qeynos or Freeport, the fidelity of the graphics went up a notch. The textures always seemed to be more detailed and there'd clearly been a lot of work put into the decoration.

I vaguely remember reading that it was because those were the zones the art team worked on first. Whether it technical issues took over or just the time it took to make the zones look that good wasn't available any more, once they moved above ground, nothing looked quite as fine. With that in mind, I'm always happy to have a reason to revisit the tunnels and caverns beneath the cities and that's what happens here.

The other holdover from the original game that gets to put in a repeat performance in Paths of Sedition is the crafting instance. Back in 2004, if you wanted to craft at all, you had to open a hatch and go down some stairs into an underground workshop. One of the early improvements made to the game, in a desperate hope of keeping people from leaving to go to World of Warcraft, was to put crafting stations above ground so players could at least see what was going on around them as they ground out hundreds of worthless items for skill increases.

A few years later almost no-one was using the underground crafting rooms any more and there was a plan to remove them altogether. Predictably, it caused an outcry. No-one in any MMORPG ever wants to see anything taken away. Whether anyone's actually using it is beside the point. 

Put a bit of carpet down and it'll be lovely.

The tradeskill instances were saved and even now, if you go into one, there's a fair chance you'll find a die-hard veteran down there, hammering away on their own, enjoying the solitude. As far as I know, though, until this event there never was a trapdoor to one of those cellars round the back of the Block and Tackle, one of the overground crafting halls that stands next the docks in South Freeport. There is now.

About the only part of the quest I wasn't all that happy with was the bit where you have to go to a zone of your own level to kill spiders. And that would have been fine if the choice of zones you're given at the level cap didn't all happen to be in Ballads of Zimarra. And if the drop rate had been better. 

Still, it was only a mild irritation in an otherwise enjoyable hour and a half. And there's more to do, of course. Having completed the questline, I'm now free to work on the achievement and then the collection as well as to farm the event currency to spend in the event shop.

Yeah. I probably won't be doing much of any of that. The questline itself gets you a nice familiar that's an upgrade to the free one from the last expansion (And which will, no doubt, itself be replaced by the free familiar from the next expansion in December.) You also get some house items that I'll only use to get them out of my bags.

Hoods and Robes! Bah! I had Hats and Boots in the sweepstake.

The vendor who takes the currency has a huge stock of house items, some of them rather nice, but I already have two enormous homes in Norrath, both bursting at the borders with cruft trophies. Not to mention all the other, less-decorated houses my dozen or so characters own. There's barely a one of them that doesn't own at least a couple of places. There's only so much decorating even I can cope with.

There's also a ground mount. Does anyone use ground mounts any more? And some quite attractive appearance armor. Probably some other stuff. If you want it, you can have it. It won't be hard to raise the funds. I'll leave it, thanks.

I'll probably do the tradeskill questline with someone, just to see it, although I believe it's pretty much identical, as far as story beats and rewards go. Unusually, you can't do both lines on the same character but who in EQII has only one character? Everyone has a stable of alts and half of them would be doing all the quests on all of them anyway. Doesn't stop people moaning about it on the forums though.

While Mordita was running around Freeport, she noticed Nights of the Dead has also started. EQII Traders has an article up about that, too. I may or may not get around to doing at least the new stuff and if I do I may or may not get around to writing a post about it. 

The good news is that my PC didn't give me any problems playing today. If that carries on then I will certainly be visiting Norrath more often. 

Let's hope so. There's an expansion coming! 

The Streets Of Nivalis

 Remember those dog days of summer, when I was complaining I was barely playing any games at all? Yeah, well that's over. Now the problem is trying to fit them all in...

...and at here there used to be several paragraphs about time constraints and game rotations. But when I came to read them back, even I didn't want to hear it. So let's forget all that and get straight to a game, shall we? 

And that game is Nivalis Nights.

As I said in an earlier post, I haven't experienced any of the performance issues that caused the game to be poorly received in some quarters at launch. I put that mostly down to playing on GeForce Now, where I'm guessing the servers are better configured and maintained than the average home PC. Certainly better than any of mine ever have been, at least.

For players who may have had a less pleasurable experience, there's some good news. There have already  been three patches just in the first week, all of them correcting improving or fixing various issues that were slowing the game down or causing it to run poorly; all generally aimed at improving the shaky optimization seen at launch. 

There's also been a host of bug fixes for all kinds of reported issues, everything from serious gameplay setbacks, like NPC store managers not doing their jobs, to cosmetic oversights, like player footprints left in the snow not swapping between left foot and right. There have been so many fixes and tweaks, in fact, it does make me wonder why more of them weren't caught in the testing process. I know releasing a game does suddenly expose it to thousands of highly motivated, unpaid QA people but even so, I'd have thought some of the things that are only now getting attention would have been pretty obvious to anyone play-testing the game, long ago.

Still, as No Man's Sky proves, you can still just about get away with banging it out and fixing it up later if a) you have a really solid game underneath it all and b) you do actually fix it. And Nivalis Nights is a good game already. If  Ion Lands keep working on it the way Hello Games have stuck with NMS, it could one day be a great one.

At the moment, though, the reviews are mostly split between enthusiasts, who've been jonesing for a cyberpunk city they could really live in and professionals, who look at it as a game rather than a virtual city. The former are running around 9 out of 10, the latter closer to 7.5. 

And that's probably fair. As a virtual incarnation of a futuristic, dystopian city, it's superb but as as game, not only does it have those optimization issues and bugs but it's not entirely clear what sort of game it wants to be. I'm not wholly convinced that the really excellent world-building and depth of sociopolitical commentary fit entirely comfortably around the framework of a business sim, let alone one where the business in question is "hospitality".

I was speculating before about whether it would be possible to sidestep the entrepreneurial gameplay and just sink into the city and be there. At some point I definitely want to test that out to see if it can be done. For now, though, my impression is that the game wouldn't stand for it. And even if the game did, CorpSec wouldn't.

CorpSec is what passes for government in Nivalis. Government and law enforcement. The name is a portmanteau of Corporation and Security but don't run away with the idea the corporations are providing security for the citizens. It's the opposite. CorpSec makes sure the corporations remain secure in their dominant position. Everyone else is left to live in the cracks that leaves.

One of the ways stability and compliance is assured is through a law that says any owner of a business is legally required to try to make that business grow. It's the inevitable corollary of the infamous "line must go up" ethos that's wrecking the global economy today. Just giving good service or providing a useful product isn't enough. You have to grow and the unspoken coda is "or die."

In a society operating by that principle, running one small, successful noodle bar might be seen as a criminal offense. Ironically, failing to run one wouldn't. I had an enlightening conversation with a CorpSec official in which I asked what would happen if I failed to grow my business. He told me failure was fine. I was obligated to try but no-one cared whether I succeeded.

The implication is that owners of failing business would be swept away, lost in the undercurrents of Nivalis society. Someone else would take over my business and I'd be on the streets. Perhaps surprisingly, being homeless doesn't appear to be a crime in itself. Just a death sentence.

As yet, I don't know if it's even possible for a player character to become homeless. I got an eviction warning today but the landlord, when questioned, couldn't explain why. Nor did he seem to want to do anything about it. 

Next day, he sent me a memo (A memo!), asking me to come talk to him. When I did, he told me there was a new rule about pets in the building I wasn't compliant with. But I don't have any pets, I told him. No, he said, but the rule now is that you need to get one. 

I was quite excited by that. I didn't know there were pets in the game. Sadly, I don't believe there are. Ava, my Automata, tells me the landlord's a fantasist and I ought just to ignore him. She says he'll forget what he said by tomorrow and even if he doesn't, the last thing he wants is to have to actually do anything about it. 

On that basis, it seems my apartment is secure but even if I did get kicked out, there's a free flop-house in every district that you can use if you get caught out by the curfew. And if all else fails, I can sleep on my boat.

Given that this isn't a survival game and I don't have eat or drink, either, if I did run out of money, I'm not sure anything bad would happen. I do keep getting fines of 50 or 60 Lims for breaking curfew, so I guess there might be some consequences if I couldn't pay those and there's that massive debt I inherited from Thaddeus that I'm supposed to be paying off, from when he gave me the noodle bar but...

I guess what I'm saying is that at this stage, I don't know what a Game Over would look like for Nivalis Nights, or if there even is one. I'm pretty curious to find out, though. Almost curious enough to stop stocking my noodle bar and give up on paying my bills, just to see what happens.

The reason I keep getting fined for being out after curfew, by the way, is because when the lockdown comes I'm usually skulking in the bar down the street, waiting to steal their equipment and drag it back to my place. I was wondering in the last post , whether the way you can just steal furniture from other businesses was a bug or a feature. I can now confirm: it's a feature.

Not only can you do it, you're supposed to do it. Another business-person comes up to you at one point and clues you in on how to go about it and why you should. It's because of another CorpSec law I didn't mention: it's illegal for businesses to co-operate with each other in any way. Business must be competitive and if that includes sabotage and theft then it's all perfectly acceptable. Just don't get caught or they'll fine you about two hours wages.

I stole a coffee-maker the first night and sold it. The next night I stole a refrigerator. I needed one of those so I just put it in my noodle bar and now it's full of food. The bar I stole the fridge from replaced it immediately so the next night I stole that one as well. I didn't need three fridges so I sold it. 

Before I started my one-person crime-wave, I sold the treadmill from my apartment. I was broke when I did it but I got over 3k Lims for it and that kept me going for a few days. I think selling the furniture might be what got me the eviction notice but I just lied about it and it all seemed fine. 

Lying's another thing you're probably meant to do, at least if you want to get ahead. Several times, near the start of the game, various NPCs tell you you'll have to make a choice between being nice to people and clambering over them to get to the top. You can't do both, they tell you. I thought that was rhetoric at first but now I'm pretty sure it's game design. That's tutorial advice, right there.

I haven't made any hard decisions about it yet. I'm just taking each choice as it comes. How that's going to work out for me in the long run is going to be very interesting to see. I suspect it'll end with me going nowhere and the whole game stagnating as I run out of options by hedging my bets. I don't think the game is fond of stasis.

But Nivalis is big. Really big. There might easily be ten thousand stories in this naked city. I'll have time to hear quite a few of them before my indecision drags me under. I'm looking forward to it a lot.

Postcards From Pukaland

 In what seems like it might be an attempt to break the world record for widest range of content in a single drop, the same update that brought a harrowing version of the Salem Witch Trials to Neverness To Everness also saw the opening of Hethereau's candy-themed amusement park, the unfortunately but probably accurately-named Pukaland. 

As far as I can tell, Puka is Hethereau's answer to Haribo, not that that's a question anyone ever needed to ask. The theme park, named for the brand of tooth-destroying sweets sold all over the city, has been standing, empty and shuttered, on a promontory to the south-east of the city ever since the game began. Now, after a major redesign, it's finally open.

If the latest update took us on a tour from tragic to trivial with this latest update, it's not as if Hotta just bundled the two together without thinking about the friction. It's more as though they meant to rub up against each other to make some kind of abrasive point. At least, I found it hard to miss the subtext, when "The Witch" ended and a new storyline started right away, taking the Appraiser and Blackbird straight to the fairground.

At first I thought it was nothing more than a charming opportunity for the two of them to decompress after their traumatic experiences in the nested Anomalous Realms, and to a large extent that's indeed what it is, but as the short storyline developed, I couldn't help feeling there was a little more to it than that. 

I'd go into detail but unfortunately, I didn't document exactly what happened while I was playing and now, as is becoming annoyingly common with NTE, when I go online to refresh my memory, I find no-one else has posted a walkthrough I can crib from. 

I can't even find a video on YouTube where someone plays through it all, although there must be about a gazillion rating the rides and telling you how best to exploit them for the new currency. It's almost like no-one gives a damn about the story.

I'll just have to do the precis from memory. It oughtn't to be too hard. I played through some of it last night and the rest this morning. Even my memory's not that bad. Do feel free to correct any errors or add anything I've forgotten in the comments, though.

It's not like it's a lot to remember, anyway. The storyline part probably didn't take me more than fifteen or twenty minutes. The rest of the couple of hours in Pukaland, I spent gawping and taking pictures. And going on the rides, of course.

The whole thing begins with some story on Bagel about urban legends. Apparently, mysterious shadows, doors to other worlds and similar apparitions have been seen at Pukaland since it opened, often showing up after some specific trigger, like taking photos in a precise spot or staying on a ride for a particular number of times.

 

The Appraiser and Blackbird begin by visiting one of the people who posted about their experiences and having talked to her, agree to go check it out for themselves. The Appraiser, naturally, figures there may be some Anomaly behind it which, honestly, sounds like the Occam's Razor explanation for any odd, unexplained activity in the city.

Flora agrees to meet Blackbird at the gates but when she gets there Blackbird is already feeling a little overwhelmed, as well she might. Pukaland is busy. 

It looks like the park's off to a great start. The wide avenues are teeming with excited visitors. It's busy day and night, in fact. I stayed there all the way through a full day-night cycle and apart from the sun going down and the lights coming on, you'd hardly know the difference. Everything's open 24-7, in the way of video game worlds and, while I thought I noticed a slight reduction in numbers in the small hours, there's more than enough business to justify the added overhead in staffing costs.

Flora uses her Esper ability to sense anomalies but finds nothing. Blackbird has no more luck with her divination. The place seems to be no more than just what it looks like: a harmless entertainment complex.  

They explore the park, looking for anything out of place and trying to replicate the kinds of events they read about on Bagel. Flora takes a picture of Blackbird, waving to her from the supposed one of the supposed hot-spots but no strange shadows appear in the photograph. The two of them talk to some other customers, one of whom suggests inexplicable things often appear in the background of such images but after they all have another look, no-one can see anything.

One couple Flora and Blackbird interview makes the point that even though they live in a city famous for its Anomalies, they've never actually encountered one. That theme recurs in other conversations, reminding us that although all the characters we, the players, usually interact with have plenty of hands-on experience with these bizarre and sometimes terrifying entities, for many people living ordinary lives, all they know about them is what they see on social media.

They ride the big wheel thirteen times, another reported trigger, but nothing happens. They explore the hedge maze (Oddly called a "Flora Maze" in the game, which amused me and must have come as a surprise to Flora herself.) where strange things are supposed to occur quite reliably but again they see nothing out of the ordinary.

Eventually Blackbird and the Appraiser decide there's nothing to the rumors but as they're about to leave, they spot a couple of visitors acting strangely. Being the responsible citizens they are, they ask the two what they're up to. I mean, I wouldn't, I'd mind my own business, but then I'm not a Witch or a secret government agent...

It turns out the two suspicious strangers are influencers on Bagel. They've also heard about the urban legend rumors and, like our heroes, have come to see if they can find out what's going on. Unlike Flora and Blackbird, though, having struck out, they've decided to fake some evidence so they can give their followers something to get excited about.

Blackbird is very put out by this, being the innocent shut-in she is. Let's not forget, almost her only knowledge and understanding of the outside world over the past couple of hundred years has come from watching a screen. The Appraiser, more worldly, isn't shocked but she gently suggests to the two would-be deceivers that it might be better to let their fans know that what they're showing them isn't really real.

And that's about the end of it. It's a small, gentle story but it comes with a moral. The whole thing is undoubtedly a commentary on social media and the responsibility it brings to be truthful and transparent. It takes a position on conspiracy theories and it's agin' 'em. The more NTE I play, the more lessons it tries to teach me. 

Having tried and failed to find any public account of the storyline I just attempted to recreate from memory, I have to wonder who's listening. As far as I can tell, the main interest most people using social media have in Pukaland lies in telling others how to get in and out of it as fast as possible with the highest rewards for the lowest level of effort.

Which is a shame because Pukaland is amazing. It's a huge area, the size of a whole city district, and it's teeming with things to do and see. It's not only that there'ssomething to do around every corner, on every avenue and plaza, but there are hundreds of NPCs there with you, doing it too. The illusion of an actual place filled with real activity is more than impressive. 

As for the games and rides, there's plenty of variety, something for everyone. I played darts, which I very much enjoyed and shot at plushies, which was fun, too. I rode the Ferris Wheel and the Merry-Go-Round, got lost in the maze and hurtled around on the roller coaster and all that scarcely scraped the surface of what there is to do.

I wanted to go into the Fun House, which looked like it would be a hoot, but it was closed for renovations. The middle-aged man throwing up outside was likely the clue things weren't quite as they should be in there. I hear there's also a balloon ride that takes you higher above Hethereau even than the Skytower. I'd very much like to try that.

Trust me, I'll be back. I skimmed a reddit thread where redditors were being as cynical and dismissive about the rides and activities as you'd expect but for once I think their cynicism is misplaced. On first impressions, I'd say Pukaland is as good a collection of mini games as I've seen anywhere.

Sure, some of them might not be as polished as you'd get in a full game dedicated to such things but these are throwaway activities in a game that has a million other things going on. Granted, they'll presumably be permanent additions to the game but no-one's expecting any of this to become anyone's full-time gaming habit. It's an add-on and a very impressive one it is, too.

From what I've seen so far, many of the games and rides justify their existence purely in respect of the fun they offer in the moment but the rewards you get for doing them aren't at all bad, either. The entry fee in Fons for each activity is low, the number of Puka Tickets you can win is generous and the range of activities ought to have something to suit everyone. 

I went to one of the booths where you can redeem your tickets for prizes, just to see what was on offer, and I was quite impressed with what was on offer there. The prices aren't too high for a start. I already had enough for a few things but looking through the options I soon found something worth saving up for - a boat!

The boat, which from the description looks like it can be substantially upgraded, and the glider that looks like a biplane are both on my wishlist now. The former costs 10k tickets for the basic model, the latter just half of that. I'd already earned 1300 tickets in less than half an hour so both sound eminently doable.

I'll probably have do what's needed to get the rest before the next content drop though. As 999 Nights proved, no matter how engaging, satisfying and enjoyable a new addition to the game can seem when it arrives, as soon as the next update comes, it's all but forgotten. 

How long Hotta can keep pumping out content at this rate and how long it will continue to engage players if they do is an unknown quantity but my worry is that they'll be caught in a Catch 22 whatever happens. If they fail to keep up the pace, players will call it a "Daed Game" and  move on but if they succeed, those same players will take the flood of new content for granted, expect it never to end. burn through it in no time and then complain it's not enough. As players, we often talk about the grind but it probably feels just as much like a treadmill on the other side of the screen.

That's about all I have to say for now but since every story in Hethereau comes with a moral, I'll add one for this post, too.

Enjoy it while you can. 

Help This Blackbird - The Witch's Tale

 This  morning I finished the latest instalment of the main story in Neverness To Everness. It's called, very simply, "The Witch" and it's one of the best I've seen in any game of its kind or, for that matter, any other sort of game I've played.

It does start with a significant advantage over most gacha game or MMORPG stories in that it's based on a familiar tale, one that's been very successfully adapted several times before. Still, building on sound foundations doesn't always mean that what you're building is going to stand. This is solid.

The narrative adapts the horrifying events of the Salem witch trials, particularly as they were presented by Arthur Miller in The Crucible. Like many people, I read the play at school, when I was in my teens, and I also went to see it performed. I found it disturbing enough, back then. I found this adaptation even more so. 

Miller wrote The Crucible as a response to the McCarthyite witch hunts and show trials of the fifties. None of his fears have been alleviated in the slightest over the years.The lessons he'd have wanted the audience to learn are as relevant now, as crucial as ever.

Games, like movies and television and pretty much every other medium, often take their ideas directly from pre-existing works. The results can range from travesty to transcendence. The Witch may not eclipse a classic like The Crucible but it more than justifies the decision to take on such difficult, challenging and disturbing subject matter. It succeeds on almost every level in both honoring and interpreting its source.

As must be obvious, I was very impressed. I'd say I loved it but the themes and implications hit too hard and probe too deeply to inspire affection. Respect and admiration feel like more appropriate responses. But I did love it, all the same.

The story begins when Blackbird, the mysterious Esper who lives at the Witch's House, contacts the Appraiser  to offer her a commission. Blackbird has received a letter from someone by the name of Merula, who says Blackbird is the only one who can help her.

At this point, I'd love to link to a full walk-through so anyone interested in finding out the full details of what happens next can go read the precis. I'd love to but I can't because as far as I can tell, there isn't one. I'd say that's an ill omen for the game but it also might just be because the quest, if we're comfortable with calling it that, is very long. Maybe no-one's gotten around to writing it all down yet.

There are several full-length videos of the whole thing on YouTube. I haven't watched any of them myself but I'll link to a couple in case anyone has a few hours to spare. I can't vouch for the presentation. Here's one with the male Appraiser. And one with the female version.

I played through the whole thing in two sessions. There are eight chapters. Thanks to GeForce Now giving me a summary every time I log out, I can say with accuracy that first session took me two hours and fifteen minutes and the second an hour. Allowing for a very small amount of housekeeping, from start to finish, "The Witch" takes about three hours.

Of those three hours, I'd estimate about two hours and forty-five minutes involve cut scenes and conversations. The whole thing feels like a long movie or a full season of a TV show. 

There's very little combat indeed, just a short and easy boss fight close to the start and another, only slightly harder, right at the end. A couple of times, a handful of ordinary mobs need to be dispatched but those fights are so trivial they amount to not much more than shouldering past someone blocking your path.

There aren't any puzzles. No objects to manipulate, devices to use, doors to unlock... nothing. There isn't even much running around. Most of the action takes place in St Arbor, a small village, where everyone you need to speak to lives right around the corner or just down the street - and you get a marker to show you exactly where they are.

Almost the entirety of the action involves either eavesdropping on townspeople talking then discussing what they've said and deciding what to do about it. There's a lot of talking. And it's rivetting. 

It wouldn't work if the writing wasn't so good. It's uniformly excellent, managing to find a tone that feels authentically appropriate to the time period and the setting, while never coming across as awkwardly archaic or forced. 

That's no small achievement. I've seen many games attempt to find this tone. "18th century New England witch trial" has been a very popular quest setting for as long as I've been playing online games. Few writers manage to catch the tone they're seeking. Usually it falls flat.

Here, it works particularly well, partly because The Appraiser and Blackbird both already have somewhat formal speech patterns, more so than many video game characters and certainly much more so than most of the other characters in NTE. I'm not sure how well Mint or Chiz would have fitted into the milieu.

Assuming the original writing wasn't in English, the translation is exemplary. There's still the occasional hint of that unmistakable "Translated from Korean" syntax but by now I hear that as a charming inflection, almost a dialect or an accent, never a flaw. 

Which isn't to say the writing is flawless. There are a couple of slips but they're barely noticeable. A word, pluralised in the text, when it's singular in the voice-over. Tiny things like that, easy to ignore.

The voice acting, as always, is solid-to-excellent. Blackbird is very charming and I really love the way the Appraiser sounds. I'm not sure now, whether it sounds like my character's voice would sound in my head or if her voice sounds that way in there because of the voice acting. Either way, it's perfect.

Blackbird, in whom I'd previously had very little interest, emerges as a fascinating, complex character. Apparently she's lived in the Witch House for hundreds of years, only very rarely stepping outside. She know little of modern life other than what she's gleaned from anime, to which she's addicted. 

Her affairs are managed by Lavinia, a severe and somewhat unnerving character, a kind of dark reflection of the more amenable Adler at Eibon. It's curious how almost every grouping in the game has these sorts of quasi-familial structures in place, flattened hierarchies in which authority is hard to define.

At the conclusion of the story, which I won't attempt to recount or spoil, Lavinia offers the Appraiser another commission: take Blackbird out and show her all the good things there are to see and do in Hethereau. As Blackbird puts it:

It's a bittersweet way to end what's most likely felt like a solid three hours watching an anime. You have to wonder how much irony was intended.

The story itself is as dark as the village of St Arbor, a place where the sun never seems to shine and where almost everything of consequence happens at night. Anyone who's seen or read The Crucible ought to be prepared for the psychological horror, although I must say my own inoculation against the sensation of existential threat had long worn off. And at least, when I saw the play, no-one actually got burned alive on stage. 

It's a hard watch at times. In deference to the game's PEGI 12 rating, the camera cuts away for what I found to be the most disturbing scene, the one where live animals are fed to the fire. When it's the humans' turn it's similarly over in a moment with a short scream and a flare of light. Towards the climax, though, there are some prolonged scenes of immolation that don't bear much thinking about if you want a good night's sleep afterwards.

Unlike the graphics, the dialog pulls no punches. There's no skipping lightly over the actions of the villagers or the impact of the choices they make. People die for no reason other than that someone bears them a grudge or wants their property or to save their own skin. 

And since it's a ll a pre-ordained story, nothing anyone can do, note even the Appraiser and Blackbird, can change a thing. It's not exactly what I'd call entertainment but The Witch absolutely earns its right to be taken seriously.

Even so, it's still an adventure story in a video game about extra-dimensional entities and psychic powers. It takes some doing to integrate something like that, successfully and convincingly, into a real-world historical setting, much less layer it with some heavy social commentary. The Witch not only manages to do that - it makes it seem almost easy. 

Perhaps the hardest disbelief to suspend is the repeated, confident assertion that the best way to nullify the Inquisitor, the anomaly behind the terrible events locked inside an anomalous realm, inside another anomalous realm, just to make it even harder, is to release it into Hethereau, where society has advanced to such a stage that no witch hunting anomaly could hope to gain enough traction to prosper. In other words, humanity has outgrown the kind of fear and hatred that feeds such a phenomenon. 

Nice to think so. But then, Hethereau is, self-evidently, a much nicer place to live than anywhere in this real world. I'd move there tomorrow, given the chance.

I've enjoyed all the stories in Neverness To Everness I've seen so far but this is without a doubt the most tightly constructed and the most successful in what it seems to want to achieve. Assuming, that is, that what the writers set out to do was give moral instruction. It seems hard to think any player of the game could come away from The Witch without a clearer idea of what fear of the other leads to and how moral courage is imperative in standing up against prejudice.

Unless, that is, that player opted to skip all the dialog. Which is an option although I can't say I understand why. It might make sense in other games that rely much more on combat and action but, given that the eight chapters are pretty much all dialog, hitting the "Skip" button wouldn't leave a lot left for anyone to do.

I didn't skip. I lapped up every last word. I watched all the cut scenes. I crouched behind bushes and listened to all the conversations I wasn't supposed to be listening to. And I never once wished anything would go faster or that anyone would just get to the point. I found both the pacing and the content entirely to my liking. I'm very much hoping for more of the same as the game goes on.

It's also becoming a little clearer to me that the way Neverness To Everness has been conceived gives the writers more leeway to tell the story of Hethereau in this episodic fashion. The city isn't under imminent threat in the way we're so familiar with from other games. The characters aren't fighting a war or for their very existence. There's no sense of pressure of time.

The Appraiser, as is frequently emphasized, has a job. All the characters have jobs. Each storyline so far has either been a day's work or a day off. If NTE was an anime, it'd be a hybrid between a detective show and a slice-of-life drama with the cast investigating anomalies by day and playing games or going to the movies after work. 

That a gamelike that  can also encompass such a difficult and dark tale as The Witch and make it seem like an integral part of the setting is a tribute to the skill of the writers. A tip of the witch's hat to all of them.  

Nivalis Nights - A Smattering Of Random First Impressions

Thanks to a suggestion by Nimgimli in the comments, I now know how to take screenshots in GeForce Now and have them save to my local drive rather than wherever NVIDIA keeps its data center. Also, I have only just this moment noticed NVIDIA styles itself in ALL CAPS. 

I have yet to figure out a good way to take screenshots in Nivalis Nights without the UI, though. If I have a pet peeve (Note to self: Name next vanity pet "Peeve".) it's the way most devs don't provide an easily-accessible option in the default settings for removing the UI and taking screenshots. It's like they don't want their games to look their best on social media.

No, that's can't be it. It's more likely the opposite. Social media's their main focus. Not archaic blogs like this. 

Most modern games include in-game cameras that have all kinds of filters and frames, specifically designed to produce images suitable for use on Instagram or Facebook. (I believe some people still use Facebook. Gemini keeps linking Facebook pages as authority for the misinformation it feeds me, anyway...)

I love those in-game cameras. They're ideal for posed shots. Nivalis Nights has a perfectly good one, too. The problem with them is that they're designed for photo shoots not journalism. They're impractically slow to access and set up if all you want to do is record what's there in front of you as you play. As for action shots - forget it!

What passes for an action shot in Nivalis Nights. By which I mean you can see my hands.

The old fashioned, basic screenshot-on-a-hotkey option is so much more convenient for reportage and in-combat captures. If you can bind Hide UI and Screenshot to the same key, so much the better. Where that's available, I like to hammer the key a few times mid-fight and pick out a good shot later. I don't want to be trying to set up a tripod while some baddie's ripping my arms off.

Playing on GeForce Now's remote servers adds another level of difficulty. Any in-game camera becomes functionally useless because every shot you take goes to someone else's hard drive. 

Sidebar: It's like in the old days before digital cameras, when I'd take scores of photos on holiday and then never get around to having the films developed. The images exist in a the same way that damn cat in the lead-lined box exists, neither one thing nor the other. 

When I was clearing out drawers this summer, not only did I throw away hundreds of hopeless holiday snaps, I also binned a couple of dozen undeveloped rolls of film. What was on them? We'll never know. Their liminal existence has been committed to landfill until entropy settles the matter once and for all.

As I begin to settle in to GeForce Now as my primary gaming platform, some of these issues are starting to resolve themselves. Workarounds are becoming habits. And that's fine. It's good not to have to think about how to take a shot before I take the shot. 

Cut scenes mean clean screens. 

I can take clean pictures of Neverness To Everness and Valheim and store them locally without much trouble but Nivalis Nights remains recalcitrant although it is very early days. NTE didn't get around to adding a simple option to hide the UI until it had been out for a few months. 

There's no such option in NN yet but there is a mod you can apply that will do the job because players are always much faster then developers when it comes to quality of life hacks. Unfortunately, you can't use mods on GeForce Now so it doesn't help me any. I'll have to keep using ugly shots that show the UI or crop them tightly to leave it out. Or I could get AI to remove the UI but that takes a while.

In my quest for cleaner screenshots, it was only late last night that I discovered how to hide the huge quest panel that dominates the right-hand side of the screen. While I'm playing, I like having it there. It's very helpful. For screenshots, though, it takes up a ridiculous amount of space and there's no obvious hotkey or command to close it.

That's because Nivalis Nights is one of the worst-documented games I've played in years. It's one thing to go all "in media res" and "learning by doing" - I'm fine with all of that - but you do need to tell people what the basic controls are. 

It's a reasonably popular game - just under 7,000 concurrent players on Steam at launch, although that's a bit of a poor return from the reported "one million wishlists". I imagine a lot of potential purchasers are waiting to hear the widely-reported performance issues have been fixed before committing. With that take-up, there's already a decent amount of information on the internet so a quick search finds answers to most of the questions that really should have been resolvable by a quick glance at the Settings.

It's fine. I didn't want to see anything on that side of the screen anyway...

Here's how you hide the Journal panel: Hold down the J key for about three-quarters of a second. Obviously that's something that was discovered by some fat-fingered, slow-handed player, who then probably spent a few frustrating minutes trying to find out where the hell their quest journal had gone. 

And even that option has its problems, it seems. There's a patch out already that purports to fix some of the performance issues and address a few of the more commonly reported bugs and at the end of the patch notes it warns 

"When hiding the quest log (holding the J Key), it can happen that the text becomes illegible after the quest log has been hidden for some time and then is unhidden again. This issue is already fixed, but we were not able to include it in this patch. Reloading your save will fix this issue if you do encounter it."

Speaking of saves, there is an auto-save but it's quite slow to trigger. My first session lasted nineteen minutes but when I logged in the next day, ready to carry on from where I left off, the Continue button was greyed out. I had to start over from scratch. Not too much of an imposition, given the short time it took me to catch up to where I'd finished, but it was still annoying.

I'm so used to playing online games that don't require manual saves it hadn't even occurred to me to save my game before logging out. I'm doing it now. I also now notice when the little "Saving Game..." icon pops up in the bottom-right. I haven't yet figured out if it's a time-based process or if it triggers when some specific type of event occurs. Either way, I won't be trusting it alone. Manual saves all the way from now on.

Can you handle my game saves for me please, AVA?

 And that's enough about the technical issues, important though they are to a first impression. If you really feel a game, though, you'll let all kinds of technical issues slide. Well, I will. 

So, am I feeling it for Nivalis Nights? Hmm. Mostly yes. A little bit no. It's complicated.

It's also extremely early to be making any criticisms or endorsements that I'll most likely end up having to take back later. I've played for just over three hours so far. If the game was better-documented I'd be able to tell you if that takes me past the tutorial. I'm inclined to think it doesn't but who knows for sure?

There's a great deal about the game I like very much indeed. I already mentioned in the Very First Impressions post how much I like the look of Nivalis and the more I see of the city, the better I like it. I tweaked the graphics up a little and now it looks better than ever. 

As it does in Neverness To Everness, the weather plays a huge role in defining and enhancing the mood. Unlike in NTE, you can't just set the weather to whatever you'd like it to be but you do get a very accurate weather forecast for the coming week. If it says there will be storms on Wednesday, there will be storms on Wednesday. Spectacular storms.

And if the sun comes out... oh, boy! Nivalis is a different city in the sunlight. All that moody noir? Stripped away. Everything that was dark now glows. It's an extraordinarily delightful transition.

It's a different world when the sun comes out.

 The city itself is an absolute masterpiece. Huge, rambling, chaotic and entirely convincing. This year has seen the two best cities I've ever visited in virtuality, Hethereau and Nivalis. With GTA6 to come, and Vice City doubling the size of Los Santos, this has to be the Year of the City in gaming.

I spend much of my time in NTE just wandering around Hethereau. I've been doing it for six months and I haven't had enough of it yet. I can easily imagine doing the same with Nivalis except for one thing: there's this slightly annoying game attached.

I did say "slightly annoying". From the little of it I've experienced so far, I'd say it's a pretty good game. It's just that at this stage I don't feel like any kind of game is really what I'm after. I'd like to spend a few hours just wandering around, getting my bearings, opening the fast transport points, seeing the sights and basically playing tourist.

The developers do not want me to do that. What they want me to do is run a noodle bar. It's literally the first thing. The introductory quest. You go meet this guy, talk to him and when you do, he gives you his noodle bar and says, it's yours, here you go, now you're in business. And then he leaves.

I have no interest whatsoever in running a noodle bar. Not a real one and not a fictional one. I for sure don't appreciate being lumbered with one before I've even figured out who and where I am. I like it even less when I find out that by taking ownership of the damn thing I've also lumbered myself with the previous owner's massive debt.

The depressing ending to each day's work.

Now, apparently, I have to work my ass off, setting up a stupid noodle bar, shopping for food, hiring staff, buying furniture, dealing with all the other restauranteurs in a half-kilometer radius, most of whom don't like the new competition, just to pay off this debt that isn't even mine!. All of this when all I want to do is goof off and see the city...

It's actually a very good set-up for a business sim, which is a significant part of what Nivalis Nights sets itself up to be. I knew that when I bought it so I can hardly complain of a bait and switch. What I thought was that I'd just pay lip service to the business part while I focused on all the other activities, things I'd find more to my taste.

And that's what I've been trying to do. I got the place started then left it running. I got my boat last night and went fishing instead, which was a lot of fun. I've also been speaking to all kinds of people all over the city, picking up quests left and right. I've even finished some of them. There are some great little stories in the interactions, some that pick things up from where we left them in Cloudpunk. Some of the same characters even make a re-appearance.

Nixxy liked my snappy comeback so much she might make me a regular!

 All of that I'm really enjoying. But now I'm nearly broke thanks to that damn noodle bar and AVA keeps giving me dire warnings about how my business is falling apart and the whole thing is becoming really stressful. I do not have any interest in playing games that deliberately try to trigger a stress response so that's not going down well with me at all.

As soon as I felt things starting to get on top of me, I went googling for a way to destress the situation. I was hoping maybe there was an opt-out for the noodle bar but there doesn't seem to be. There is, however, a very easy way to find yourself suddenly rich enough to hire a manager, add a bunch of tables and let the place run itself while you rake in the profits: just steal stuff. 

That's how you do it. Apparently all you have to do is ignore the nightly curfew warning and when all the other business owners have locked themselves safely away in their apartments, you go round to their establishments, help yourself to their tables and chairs and all the appliances in their kitchens. Then you put everything you can use in your noodle bar and sell the rest. 

And that's it. That's the meta. I read it on reddit and on the Steam Discussion thread and several professional game websites. It's not like I just believed some AI's hallucination. I haven't tried it myself but I'm sure it'll work.

Except for one thing: I don't like to steal in video games. Okay, I'm not saying I've never done it but I don't enjoy it. I avoid it as much as I can in any game that allows it. I especially avoid it in any game that encourages it. It just makes me uncomfortable to do it, so I don't.

I'm not sure yet if I'm going to do it in this game. I might have to. And I can rationalize doing it, to a degree.

Now that's a decent use-case for AI...

 I've seen Nivalis Nights described as an unusual entry in the cosy game genre, Stardew Valley with a quirky cyberpunk skin. It is not that. In Cloudpunk, Nivalis was conceived as a postcapitalist dystopia. It hasn't suddenly turned into a fluffy little My Little Hello Kitty liberal democracy in Nivalis Nights. If that's the kind of city you're looking for, let me direct you to Hethereau.

In those circumstances, I might be willing to start helping myself to anything that's not nailed down. Dog eat dog, every man for himself, survival of the fittest, insert Ayn Rand quote here. If I do, though, it sure as hell won't be because it makes sense. 

How can you just take furniture from the bar next door and set it up outside your own place without anyone noticing? I guess I haven't tried it yet so maybe there's a gloss that makes it seem reasonable but from what I've read everyone just carries on as if it hasn't happened. I have to say it sounds more like a bug than a feature to me but we'll see. If they don't patch it out, I guess they meant for us to do it that way.

Since this is a game where you can have multiple saves, what I think I'll probably do is give the old night-time thievery a try and see how it sits with me. If I can stomach it and if it works then I'll carry on with that as my main save. 

If it doesn't, or if I find it too weird, I'll start again and see what happens if I don't do that introductory quest. Never go see the guy. Don't talk to him. Ignore AVA when she keeps reminding me. Never own a noodle bar.

I know it's the start of the Main Story Quest but I'm curious to know: if you abandon the MSQ altogether and just focus on exploring the city and living in it, can you do all the other stuff that's not connected to the story? Or is a bunch of stuff gated behind how well your fast food outlet does?

Either way, it would be interesting to find out, so even if grand theft does turn out to be the fix for noodle bar stress, I might try it anyway. Just what I need. Two versions of the game running in parallel. Just when i already have too many games to play...