I've left it too late to write a proper post today. I spent too long playing games. First, I played Neverness To Everness, in which I didn't really do much and still managed to spend an hour and a half not doing it. Then I spent two hours playing Nivalis Nights, where I did a lot and didn't really get much done.
Add that to a couple of hours last night, when I played Valheim and did very little indeed and it's not hard to see some kind of pattern starting to form. I've always played my games in a fairly aimless, haphazard way but it used to seem like that was my own, idiosyncratic choice. These days, the games seem to be designed to encourage my kind of playstyle.
Nivalis Nights, as I can confirm with a certain amount of pique, has not been particularly well-received by the critics. I made the mistake of picking it for Wilhelm's Fantasy Critic League and as of this moment it's made me precisely no points at all. For a while it was sitting at a moderate and probably quite fair average of 75% on OpenCritic but some curmudgeon, who would have to be a "Top Critic" gave it a miserable 55% and tanked the few points I had.
The gist of most of the "meh" reviews is that the game looks good but gets boring after a while. It has a peculiar elevator pitch: "What if Rick Deckard ran a Noodle Bar?" - that already sounded like a hard sell before the game came out. The general consensus seems to be "nice try but you missed".
Having put ten hours into the game, I'm not going to say the reviewers that haven't been all that impressed don't have a point. The game does seem to have a bit of an identity crisis. It continually tries to push you towards expanding your hospitality empire, while constantly giving you quests to go do something entirely different - and more interesting.
On the business side, it doesn't just want you to run a noodle bar, it wants you to rent a greenhouse to grow your own food and go out in a boat and catch your own fish because that keeps your costs down. It wants you to hire staff, set their hours, deal with their complaints, buy them better equipment and negotiate their pay rises.
You're supposed to buy the furniture and install it, put up decorations, talk to customers and restaurant critics and health inspectors and every other kind of grifter that wants a piece of you and your business, which in Nivalis is anyone who knows you and it exist. You're clearly meant to feel as though becoming a successful business-owner is the whole point - of both the game and life in the city.
Except the myriad of narrative quest-lines it keeps throwing at you have nothing to do with noodles. The streets are teeming with people and any damn one of them might suddenly pop a quest marker and invite you to get involved in their frequently incomprehensible problems.
The quests are complex and time-consuming and numerous. I have over thirty in my Journal. I spend most of my playtime trying to get some of them done. So far, I have finished seven. Out of a hundred and eighteen!
I only know they're done because every time you finish one you get an Achievement Point and it shows up in your permanent record. Achievements are a lot more important in NN than in most games. Entry to different parts of the city is reliant on reaching certain AP thresholds. Some trains won't let you board if you don't have enough AP. Points are easy to get - you get one every time you speak to a new vendor, for example - but you only get one for anything. One point for clicking on a vendor you haven't met before. One point for finishing a quest that had a dozen stages and took you two days.
For me, this is fine. I like it. It suits me. I have always approached quests or missions in any game as though they were windfalls in an orchard. I go around gathering them all up just because they're there, without any real intention of doing anything with them. I love a big quest journal that lets me add every quest I find until I have far more than I can finish and that's just what's happening here.
It's especially to my taste when the quests are also interesting and well written, which most of these are. My main problem right now is that, because I'm in the middle of so many at once, I have trouble remembering who is doing what and why and to whom and what they expect me to do about it.
The restaurant, I'm happy to say, seems to be looking after itself, at least for the moment. I hired a manager and she seems to be doing a good job. I no longer have to do my own marketing, most of the staff seem happy enough and every day we make a small profit. I've hardly had to steal anything from the cafe next door in days.
I suspect that won't last. Or, rather, the game keeps dropping hints that it won't. But then, the game keeps dropping hints that all kinds of terrible things are going to happen and so far none of them have. Then again, even ten hours in, I'm still getting quests that are very obviously Tutorials, so maybe I haven't even gotten to the real game yet.
I do have a few more constructively critical things to say about Nivalis Nights but they're going to have to wait a while. As I said at the start, I don't have time for a full-length post about it. I just thought I'd give a quick update to go along with the gorgeous snapshots I took today.
The visuals are just wonderful. The game's worth playing for them alone. The stories are pretty good, too. It's just the noodles that let it down.
Notes on AI used in this post.
I used SnapEdit to remove the UI because if there's a way to take screenshots with the UI off in game, I haven't figured it out yet. As you can see, I forgot to remove the little circle in the middle of each shot. If it was really AI, it would have done it for me!
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