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...

[You See The Corner Of Something Under A Chest] - I Pick It Up...

I had an odd piece of luck yesterday. I was in the bedroom and I just happened to notice the corner of something, sticking out from under the blanket trunk I inherited from my great-grandfather, who died long before I was born. It used to sit on the landing of the house I grew up in and when I was about eight or nine I could still hide inside it with the lid closed, so it's pretty big.

Anyway, what was poking out from under it turned out to be a Steam card. You may have read that they're not doing them any more, which is a total pain because it was only last year I realised you could buy them in our local supermarket. As soon as I realized that, I put "Steam Cards" on my wishlists, along with a note about where to get them, and I got about a hundred pounds-worth for Christmas. 

I added all of those to my account right after I got them and I've spent most of the money now. On games I haven't played, of course. I'm a traditionalist that way. 

I figured it was obviously one of the exhausted cards from back then, It must somehow have fallen on the floor and gotten kicked under the chest. That sort of thing happens all the time in our house. I picked it up but, as I was about to throw it in the bin, I happened to notice it the silvering on the back seemed to be intact.

I don't buy a lot of physical gift cards and I've never bought a scratch card in my life but lately I have been buying those virtual cards the cats sell at the Catzebo booths in Neverness To Everness. In fact, I've been buying some every day since they added them a few weeks back.  

At the time I wrote about those cards, I thought they were going to be a limited-time addition to the game that would go away when the next update dropped but that's not how it went. The booths are a permanent attraction on the streets of Hethereau now, which means I've had to become a lot more temperate with my purchases.

It was fine to go hard when they were only going to be there for short while. Even then, I only had the one crazy day, when I bought out the entire stock. Mostly I was pretty restrained. 

So anyone should be. The odds of winning, though, are very poor. I wrote in the post about how it looked very much to me as though the operation was designed to leech your wallet dry steadily and slowly and now, with a lot more data to go on, I'm still absolutely convinced that's true.

By far the most likely outcome, every time you play, is that you lose 10-20% of your stake. If you stick to the cheap cards (In the permanent version of the game there are only three types of card: 10k, 30k and 50k.) that doesn't matter much but if you buy all the cards every day, or even just all the 50k ones, you'll be broke in a week. 

Well, I would. Might take you longer but you'd get there.

 

Even with my relatively small spend, I wouldn't get ahead of my combined losses even if I won one of the big prizes. I must be well over a million in the hole by now. Most of that happened long ago, though, and I've written it off as part of the learning process. Also, it was fun. 

These days I mostly finish even or slightly ahead. As soon as I start losing, I stop. Well, soon after, anyway...

And it's not like you get nothing for your money, even if you lose. You get a bookmark.

For a long time I didn't really put much effort into bonding with the characters on my team but recently I've started to get into it. I have several at Affinity Level 5 and a couple at 6 and I'm working on getting all of those to ten, eventually. It'll be a long haul but I'm not in a hurry and the game's not going anywhere.

To that end, I'm doing stuff with them all as I run into them around town and I'm handing out all the gifts I'm allowed, every day. Every scratch card gives you a bookmark that's worth a hundred Bond points. That's what I'm mostly using.  

I do all the character side-quests as I come across them when I'm strolling down the wide avenues of Hethereau or whenever one of my imaginary friends sends me a message on Bagel, asking if I want to meet up. Those quests can be short and silly - I did one involving choosing hair-care products for Mint's tail the other day - or longer and weirder - like when Linko and the Appraiser went looking for aliens - but there are only so many of them and some are gated by specific affinity levels. 

Gifting has a daily restriction on how many gifts you can give but you can carry on giving gifts forever. No-one can have too many bookmarks, apparently. It's a guaranteed path to BFF status, if you have the patience for it. Which I do.

Getting back to the point, all these in-game scratch cards have attuned me to the process, so when I spotted that unblemished silver strip my fingers began to twitch. Could it be? 

Yes, it could. It seems that somehow, last Christmas, I'd managed to lose one of my precious Steam Cards under the blanket chest without even realizing it had gone missing. It's not that hard to imagine. There were a bunch of them, all separately wrapped. It's not like I was keeping a count of the number and value when I opened them. I'm not twelve years old!

I scratched the silver off and there was the code. I put the code into Steam and suddenly I was £20 richer. What to spend it on?

It was hardly a pressing decision. I hadn't spent all of what I added to the account last Christmas. I have a strong aversion to spending the last of anything. I always like to keep a little in reserve, just like Beryl always leaves that last piece of chicken for Mr. Manners.

But still. It's very rude to ignore such serendipitous good fortune. If you do, the universe starts to get the idea you don't want any favors and stops giving them to you. It's like anti-manifesting. And as it happened, I did have an idea of something I might want to play.

The same morning, yesterday morning, before I found the card, I'd had one of those emails from Steam, telling me something on my wishlist had gone on sale. I get a lot of those. I rarely pay them much attention. Half the games on my wishlist go on sale all the time.

As it happens, though, this wasn't just some old favorite having another 30% off moment. It was a game that only launched yesterday that had chosen, as many games do, to begin at 10% off for a brief period before going to full price. 

Usually I have no idea when any game on my wishlist is going to launch. Name any of them and I probably put it on years ago and forgot about it almost immediately. This one, though, is one of my picks for the Fantasy Critic League Wilhelm's running, so I'd been waiting for it. 

It's called Nighthawks and it's by Wadjet Eye, a developer many of whose previous games I've both played and reviewed here. I played the demo in a Next Fest last year and I said of it then

 "I had a great time with the demo. The full game is clearly going to be epic. It's likely to be one of the few games on my wishlist I buy at full price as soon as it becomes available."

I often say things like that. I rarely follow through. I believe it when I say it but once I've said it I forget it. I'm like that. It's annoying, isn't it?

This time, though, the astral forces were clearly coming together in a concerted effort to make me keep my word, for once. It would have been positively hubristic to have ignored the omens. So I bought it.

Obviously, I haven't played it. I've downloaded it, both to the desktop and the laptop, where I'm fairly confident it will run, since it's effectively a visual novel with mostly static images. Finding the time to play it is going to be the challenge. 

When I do, no doubt I'll review it here, but for now I'd very much like someone else to review it. Preferably someone the FCL considers a "Top Critic". It's become very clear in this, our second season, that picking a winner is only half the job. You also have to pick something that's not going to vanish into the great darkness cast by the shadow of the 20,000 or more games released every year.

I'm still waiting for a third Top Critic to review Beastro, a game I picked that came out back in June. It has six reviews so far, only two of which count. If it could get one more, it would almost certainly score me something. It has a "Very Positive" Steam rating from over 600 reviews but that counts for nothing where the League is concerned. Until one more Top Critic weighs in, it's worth a fat zero.

The same fate might befall Nighthawks although I'm hopeful it won't. Wadjet Eye is a reasonably well-known developer and much respected in the point&click adventure niche where it mostly operates. This is a slight departure for them but visual novels and P&Cs are almost interchangeable on many levels so I'm optimistic. Plus, the demo was excellent. [Edit: I've just seen it's got 89/100 from PC Gamer so if thay're interested, I'm sure others will be.]

Nighthawks also received some unexpected publicity just before launch, when Steam's algorithm mistakenly identified it as an "Adults Only" game. The team posted an amusing report on the store page explaining the panic that caused and what they had to do to get their game re-assessed and correctly labeled. 

As they say in that piece, they were lucky to have "the fanbase and the (relative) clout to make a bit of noise and get this handled quickly", which is why I also believe Nighthawks will eventually pick up enough reviews to register a score for my Fantasy Game Company, Pretty Blue Fox Games. Beastro, though, I suspect is a lost cause. 

Sidebar: Pretty Blue Fox, by the way, in case you don't recognize it, is the name of  the game-playing group in Philip K Dick's early-60s novel, The Game-Players of Titan. I've been using it in various contexts almost since I started gaming because heaven forfend I'd actually come up with an idea of my own. 

However well or badly the game does for me in the League, I'm certain it's going to be a lot of fun to play. In that respect, I'm equally confident about the other League pick I have, the  one that's due to launch in less than a week. That one's called Nivalis Nights and it's the sequel to the excellent Cloudpunk. 

Unlike Beastro and Nighthawks, Nivalis already has an Open Critic page set up even before it launches, which I'm taking as a good sign. There's every chance I'll also buy Nivalis Nights on release although if I'm going to be rational about it, I should probably wait until I actually have time to play it, by which time it will most likely be on sale.

But hey, where's the fun in being rational? 

Night And The City - The Cloudpunk Review

Last night I finished Cloudpunk. According to Steam it took me a little over eleven hours, which feels about right. It's one of the best games I've played in a long while and I'd recommend it highly to anyone with even a passing interest in either cyberpunk settings or strong storytelling.

There's really not a lot I can say about the main storyline that isn't going to stray into spoiler territory. In fact, even confirming there is a central plot might be giving away too much. I'd probably been playing for a couple of hours before I even began to suspect there was one and honestly the game would work perfectly well without, as the purely episodic collection of short stories I originally thought it was going to be.

That said, the plot, when it develops, is excellent; coherent, intriguing, exciting and eventually satisfying. It's so complete in itself that I'm somewhat put off buying the DLC that carries on from where the base game finishes. It's one of those problems of success you very occasionally hear about. Things finished so well, I'm not sure I want to hear about a whole new set of problems threatening to spoil the happy ending.

Let me see what I can safely say about the story and the characters without giving too much away. 

The set-up is that Rania, a youngish woman from the Eastern Peninsula, has arrived in the vast, sprawling city of Nivalis, where she knows absolutely no-one. Rania is an outsider in the city, which allows for your own ignorance as a player, but she's also a cultural outsider. She wears a head-covering and her background is clearly rural and possibly also ethnically diverse, although what the ethnic norm in Nivalis might be is anyone's guess. Just being human gives her privilege.

She's on the run from a debt collection agency with exhaustive and terrifying powers. What she owes, to whom and what the penalties might be for not repaying the debt is never specified but we meet other people in similar situations to whom very bad things have been done, so her sense of endangerment is patently justified. 

To pay the rent on her one-room apartment, she's taken a job as a delivery driver for a borderline-illegal company called Cloudpunk. It's never entirely clear how much of their operation is tolerated by the authorities but it's certainly not all of it. 

This gives her the use of a HOVA, a flying car, but she has to pay for the fuel and repairs out of her earnings. The game begins with the start of her first shift. It's a night-shift, naturally.

And that would be enough for a game, in my opinion. I was quite happy, picking up the deliveries, flying around the incredibly detailed and complex city, discovering new areas, meeting new people and hearing snatches of their stories. Particularly since I was doing it in the company of Camus.

There are a lot of good things about Cyberpunk but the best might be Camus, the "s" in whose name is sibilated, not silent like the existentialist for whom he may or may not be named. 

Camus is a dog except when he's not. He's an Automata, which from context I believe is some specific kind of AI. There are AIs, Automata, Androids and Humans in the city but at least one Automata we meet used to be Human and the term AI doesn't always seem to mean exactly the same thing.

This ambiguity, of course, plays directly into my own, personal preferences when it comes to science fiction. Having grown up on, and having had my core intellectual conceptions shaped by, the work of Philip K Dick, any discussion of machine consciousness presses all my engagement buttons. There's a lot of that in Cloudpunk and it's done with considerable subtlety and nuance. If you want a game to make you think, this one will do it.

Camus's situation is a prime example. He's an Automata with self-awareness, who used to be housed in the body of a dog, presumably an android dog, although I'm not sure if that's ever explicitly confirmed, as neither is what he may have been before he was a dog. 

When Rania fled the Eastern Peninsula she brought Camus with her on some kind of hard drive and when she acquires the HOVA she installs him as its resident persona, replacing the generic one that comes with the car. He's her pet, her friend, her companion and in some indefinable way, her conscience.

Most of the time, Camus is in charge of communications and systems in the HOVA but occasionally the original, generic persona is re-instated and once Camus even ends up back in the hard drive for a while. 

At times, Camus muses at some length on his existential situation, conversations I found fascinating and could happily have heard much more of. He also asks some very searching philosophical questions, not least whether he can still be considered a dog now he's a car. People who meet him in the city for the first time naturally believe he's the HOVA. They have no idea he is or even was ever a dog. We do, though. He's a constant, affable, occasionally questioning presence and I just couldn't get enough of him.

When he speaks, he's represented by an icon that looks like the head of a border collie and his naive, innocent way of expressing himself somehow manages to make him sound like a dog, but also like a machine intelligence, or more properly what we might imagine either of those things to be like, could we hear them. It's exceptionally convincing, in equal part due to the quality of the writing and the perfectly-pitched voice acting.

The writing throughout is of that same, high standard and it's all the work of a single person, Thomas Welsh. The voice acting, which is handled by literally dozens of actors, is more variable. 

Most of it is really excellent. Andrea Petrille, who  voices Rania, gives one of the best performances I've heard in any game, pretty much note-perfect throughout. The other voice actors are almost all on top of their game too, so it's jarring when you very occasionally run into one who isn't. The two gang members I talked to a couple of times and Rania's co-worker, Baz, I found less than convincing but they were the exceptions and even they only stood out in contrast to the rest of the cast. In most games their performances would have been just fine.

The story, dialog and acting would be more than enough to recommend the game on their own but the visuals are also wonderful. Nivalis is immense and overwhelming. Like every cyberpunk city ever, it owes an immense debt to Ridley Scott's vision in Blade Runner, but unlike many it takes that as a starting point and carries on from there to become something original.

There's a vertiginous complexity to the cityscape, made up as it is of skyscrapers rising above the clouds, criss-crossed by highways and transected by tunnels. Piazzas and boulevards are separated by chasms, the only access being by flying car, pater-noster or the blue-screen portals that somehow flick pedestrians from one side to the other.

It's a wild and dangerous environment, where vehicles careen at speed, appearing to follow no rules, not even which side of the stream to fly on. Drug pushers and gang members pace the walkways in direct sight of sinister Corpsec police. Preachers rant about the endtimes and confused veterans panhandle for lims. Anyone you meet could be a threat or an opportunity or most likely both.

One of the very best things about Cloudpunk is that when the game ends, it doesn't end. Again, no spoilers, but when the credits have rolled and you've beaten the game, Nivalis just carries on and you can carry on with it, if you want. 

That apartment Rania's renting is a lot nicer than she'll admit and nicer still when you help her decorate, something you can do - if you have the money. It has a balcony, even, and a fish tank, now she's paid for one. There are other things more special and meaningful, too, but I can't tell you or even show you a picture or it would spoil the surprise when you play the game, which you really should.

About the only thing I haven't mentioned is the gameplay itself. It's pretty good, too. I think it would class as great if you're more adept at flying your HOVA than I was. 

From a reddit AMA with the writer that I read after I'd finished playing last night, I gather the main thrust and thrill of the game is supposed to be the driving itself but I never got good enough at it to relax and enjoy myself. I was too concerned about crashing into oncoming traffic and more than once I managed to steer myself into tight spaces I couldn't get out of, which was stressful, especially that time I had a ticking bomb in the car with me.

I suspect the whole thing would be easier with a controller. If I get the DLC I might try it that way. Even so, and with all the ineptitude I brought to the game, I enjoyed the traveling. Which was just as well because there's a lot of it. 

Fortunately, the HOVA is easy to control, for the most part, and very forgiving of damage. There are garages everywhere and repairs aren't too expensive. Nor is fuel. I also found out that you can't destroy the car or run completely out of fuel but I didn't discover that until I'd finished the game. Might have taken the stress down a notch if I'd known.

Instead, out of caution, the longer I played, the slower I took things and the better it felt. There are quite a few modifications you can make to your vehicle but I only bought the ones that decreased the damage it took, never any that made it go faster. Go faster was the last thing I wanted it to do.

In the overall design of the game, there were only a handful of things I felt might have been done differently and even those were more an aesthetic issue than anything. For example, I did find it strange how you could quite easily make more money just wandering around the city, picking up discarded objects to sell to vendors, than you'd make in a night's work delivering packages for Cloudpunk. It made me wonder why she'd bothered getting the job in the first place.

Then again, if Rania didn't work for Cloudpunk, she wouldn't have a vehicle and she wouldn't be able to zoom around picking up salvage from here there and everywhere. There's only so much valuable litter to find on a single block. 

Then there was the parking paradox: since no-one ever seemed to do anything in Nivalis without getting paid for it, and since the authorities were militaristic goons, it seemed unlikely all the parking in the city would be free. It's not like I wanted to be made to pay for it but it felt like an oversight that I wasn't. 

These are just tiny cavils but they do occasionally remind you you're playing a game. I prefer to avoid that whenever possible. Slightly more annoying was the over-zealous reaction of the game engine at certain crucial moments, when it would decide that, since I was standing right next to an interactable object, any key-press must mean I wanted to use it. That made getting in and out of my apartment more of a mini-game than it needed to be and left me driving a different vehicle to the one I meant to choose, when I was given an upgrade.

The worst thing was when Rania ended up making a choice she hadn't intended because she was in the exact spot the game expected her to be when the time came to make it and I foolishly tried to move her somewhere else so I could think about it. The game revolves around morally challenging dilemmas but a couple of my more dubious decisions weren't actually my choices at all, just mis-clicks.

None of that detracts in any way from the overall experience, which was engrossing, involving, moving and not infrequently thrilling. I loved my time in Nivalis, which is why I was extremely happy to discover the same team that made it has spent the last four years working on a sequel, all about the city itself.

The new game, called simply "Nivalis", takes the form of an entrepreneurial sim, possibly one of my least-favorite genres, in which you start with a noodle bar and work your way up to a chain of restaurants. Not my thing at all but I'll take it as a way in to a full-on simulation of this amazing city.

There are three trailers for the game, which is in the late stages of development now and has a release date of "2025". If the trailers are remotely representative of the game itself, it's going to be absolutely stunning. I've wishlisted it and for once I might even pay full price for it as soon as it goes live.

Before that happens, though, I should probably buy the DLC, City of Ghosts. I'll get to that just as soon as I've finished up all the side quests I missed in the base game. And finished decorating Rania's apartment. And when I've explored the rest of the city...