Nivalis Nights - Very First Impressions

 If I'd had to pick my top three games from my Steam wishlist, the ones I was most excited to see and which I'd be most likely to buy and play on release... well, Number One would have been Ananta for sure. But Ananta's not out until next year. The games in slots 2 and 3 both came out this week.

When did that last happen, I wonder? Two games I really want to play, arriving within days of each other? Actually, it's not as uncommon as all that, I guess. There are only so many launch windows developers and publishers consider worth having and unless GTA6 happens to be squatting on one of them, everyone pushes and shoves to get their game out the door at the right moment, which often ends up meaning the same time.

The first of this particular pair to appear was Wadjet Eye's Nighthawks -The Vampire RPG. It's been a long wait. Eight years in the making, following a successful Kickstarter back in 2018, when it barely scraped past its $125k ask to finish with $136,125. Hard to imagine that kept the lights on for the best part of a decade.

I bought that one on release day just over a week ago but I haven't played it yet. Honestly, where does the time go? I'll get to it soon, I promise. 

Yesterday, the other game at the top of my Must-Have list came out - Nivalis Nights. Like Nighthawks, I'd picked it for Wilhelm's Fantasy Critic League so I'd been following its progress very closely. So closely, in fact, I found myself ahead of the deadline when I went to Steam to see how it was doing and to ask them to take my money. I tried to buy it and got told I was six hours too early. How's that for commitment?

 

Because I'd picked it for the League, I was interested to know how the game was being received, not to mention reviewed. When I came back to check later in the day, after it had been officially released, I was disturbed to find it had a "Mixed" rating on Steam. Mixed might be good for a grill but it's not great for a Steam rating.

On closer examination, it became clear there was pretty much just one reason for the negative reviews - poor optimization. The game was running badly even on high-end rigs and nothing makes people angrier than seeing the expensive kit they painstakingly put together from carefully chosen components, chugging along like some casual gamer's off-the-shelf impulse purchase from Amazon

Everyone who was able to run the game, or who had the patience to realise the performance issues would be fixed soon enough, seemed more than happy with the game itself, something I thought boded well for my chances of a good score in the League. Professional reviewers rarely seem to struggle with performance issues in the games they review, to the extent that there are sometimes complaints that they can't have been plying the same build the public had to put up with.

More importantly, there was the issue of whether I'd be able to run it. Nighthawks, I bought with confidence because the demo ran perfectly well on my machine, as well it might. It's pretty much an illustrated text adventure, after all. 

 

Nivalis Nights, though, looked like it was more akin to Cyberpunk 2077, a game I could theoretically have run on this machine, back when I had the graphics card installed, although even then success wouldn't have been guaranteed. With the onboard graphics I'm using now, good as they are, I wouldn't even want to try it. Factor in those widely-reported optimization issues and there's obviously no chance I could run Nivalis Nights locally.

Luckily, I thought I might have another option. Nivalis Nights is a kind of sequel to Cloudpunk, the game I played and reviewed earlier this year.  Cloudpunk is on GeForce Now. Would Nivalis Nights be there as well?

Yes and no. As in yes, it would, but no, it wasn't there yet. I found that out after I ran a google search to see if there were plans to add it, saw there were, went and bought the game on the strength of that assurance and then couldn't find it on the platform. Back to Google again, where I learned it can take up to 24 hours from the launch of a game before NVidia adds it to the GeForce Now servers, checks it and authorizes it for customers to select.

Why can't we have everything NOWWWW!!!???

 

Ahem...

So, to go back a little, I bought the game. At full price it would be £21.99 but there's a 10% discount for the couple of weeks following launch, something I'm learning seems to be pretty standard for new releases. That ought to have brought it to £19.79, which seemed like a very fair price to me. 

I was about to buy it for that when i noticed there was an offer for both Cloudpunk and Nivalis Nights as a bundle with a slightly bizarre discount of 34% That should have been £23.16, a bargain, no doubt, but no use to me since I already own Cloudpunk. Except the price it was showing for the two games wasn't £23.16. It was £17.81. 

Eh?

That made buying the pack almost £2 cheaper than just buying the new game on its own. Does that make any sense? No, but who cares? I bought the pack. It was almost like I was getting extra credit just for owning the earlier game. 

How it was being calculated puzzled me. So I asked ChatGPT to explain it.

 

I'd cut and paste the explanation but it would make this post ridiculously long and anyway ChatGPT couldn't really figure it out either. The AI came up with a whole load of calculations and scenarios but it was mostly guessing. It did work out that £17.81 is exactly 10% off the price for Nivalis Nights after that, too, has been discounted by 10%, which has to be more than a co-incidence, but why Steam would apply the discount twice is anyone's guess. 

Maybe it's a glitch but whatever. I'll take it. I don't understand it but I'll take it.

It wasn't until this morning that I logged into GeForce Now again to see if Nivalis Nights had arrived. It had been about fifteen hours since launch. Was that long enough? 

There was no sign of the game in the GeForce Now version of my Steam library but Gemini had warned me that might happen. Apparently GeForce now sometimes needs a little push. I resynced the two of them and there it was. It's a lot just to get to play a game, isn't it? But that's modern life for you. The real question is - is the game any good?

I'll tell you when I've played it. What I can tell you so far is that it looks great. If you ever wanted to stroll around a slightly pixilated version of the city from the original Blade Runner, which seems to be the fantasy of about a gazillion people and has certainly been on my to-do list since I saw the original movie on release in 1982, then this might be your game. 

 

It's all there - the flying cars, the rain-filled streets, the clunky robot carts, the neon, the huge advertizing screens, the punks - every box ticked. The lack of any attempt at hyper-realism really sells it, too. The future looks so much better in this slightly shaky-cam version. 

Also, as a huge bonus for anyone who played Cloudpunk, it's really, obviously, unmistakably the same city. I was recognizing streets and locations as soon as I left the apartment. I couldn't tell you what they were called but they looked so familiar. 

That really sold it for me. but not everyone's as sold as I am. I love the look of the world but I've seen some complaints about NPCs looking like "plastic sex-dolls". I won't comment on the accuracy of that comparison but I have no problem with what they look like. Sure, they don't look realistic but then neither does anything else so why should the people?

I'm guessing my character looks like that too but theres' no way to know for sure. There's no character creation and no third-person option. You start the game looking out of the eyes of a pre-existing citizen of Nivalis and it goes from there. 

It's not an RPG so there's no paper-doll for gear that I saw and no associated little picture of yourself and what you're wearing. The game doesn't reveal your gender. It doesn't even tell you what your name is. It seems like a smart solution to some of the well-rehearsed problems but I wonder if such a degree of anonymity is going to wear thin over time? I do like to know who I am.

 

Just in case you hadn't gotten the message that you won't be admiring your looks, you can't even see your reflection in the mirror in the bathroom. I don't think the player-character's a vampire... then again, the game is called Nivalis Nights...

On a more practical level, I'm very pleased to say that, playing on GeForce Now, I saw no hint of any performance or optimization issues. Smooth as butter. I only played for twenty minutes, just to get a feel for the game, take some screenshots and make sure it worked, but in that time I checked out my apartment, wandered around the streets a little, spoke to a couple of NPCs, took a cab to the market and finished the first step of the tutorial quest, all without any hitches, glitches or issues.

And it felt great. I really liked Cloudpunk, which also used stylized, pixillated graphics to excellent effect and this feels like that but better. I'm slightly wary of the actual gameplay, which seems to lean a little too heavily towards the running-a-business end of the simulation spectrum for my tastes, but once you have your city and your engine, you can use it to tell all kinds of stories. I'm sure some of them will be more interesting than how many waffles did I sell this morning.

There's a hint towards better things to come in the very first scene, which has AVA, your digital personal assistant, telling you, with a disturbing degree of satisfaction, that the quadrant of the city where you live is on lockdown because a serial killer's on the loose. It wasn't the news itself that disturbed me, so much as the way AVA said she hoped the killer was safely trapped inside the locked down district. With us!

 

Following the Chekhov's Gun principle, I'd like to think the writers wouldn't mention a serial killer at the start of Act One if there wasn't going to be a series of killings by the end of the game. They wouldn't just be using it as an excuse to restrict players to the only district of Nivalis they've actually finished, would they? No, it couldn't be that...

As you can see, I took plenty of screen shots. As usual, one of the first things I looked for was a way to hide the HUD. I couldn't find one myself but Gemini gave me a convoluted explanation of how to do it. I haven't tried it yet so I don't know if it's a hallucination. I suspect it might be.

Sidebar: Have you ever said HUD out loud? I haven't. AVA says it and she sounds out each letter - H. U. D. Like that. I've always imagined it was pronounced Hud like the name of the Paul Newman movie. But then I always assumed FAQ was pronounced Fack.Why wouldn't it be? It was only years after I saw it written down that I first heard someone say Eff Ay Queue. Which I still think sounds wrong. But then, I also say Loll! for LOL, not Ell Oh Ell because I was saying Loll for Laugh Out Loud back in the '80s, long before social media claimed to have invented it. But don't get me started on how very much older all these abbreviations are than everyone seems to think...

There is a Photo option in the game that works very nicely but as usual the one real drawback of playing on GeForce Now is that any shots I "save" in game go to NVidia's servers, where they get deleted at the end of the session. I have to remember to use Windows to add any Photos I take to my Screenshots folder. It works but like all workarounds it's clunky.

And that's about as far as I've gotten so far. I'll just say that I've been rushing through this so I can get back and have another go. That's a pretty good recommendation right there but of course I haven't really done anything in the game yet. We'll see how I feel when I've had a chance to experience some of the actual gameplay.

As for my chances of a reasonable score for the League, I'm cautiously optimistic. The game had over a million wishlists on Steam so I'm confident it'll get reviewed by the right publications. Let's just hope the reviewers have as few technical issues with the game as I have...