Nivalis Nights Review — Noodle Baron

Many cyberpunk settings focus on crime, gangsters, and high-risk, high-reward heists. It is easy to see why: in a world where the pursuit of capital has led to megacorporations annihilating the environment, building hive cities, and outright taking over the government, and where cybernetic implants that can alter human limitations make dangerous activities far less dangerous, it’s no wonder many of us would imagine ourselves in these settings and decide we’d risk it all for one big score, especially if it means sticking it to the man in the process. Hell, I know I, for one, would chrome up and start edgerunning the second the opportunity became available, knowing full well I would probably not go out in a violent and heroic last stand, but would instead use my new spring legs to try to jump between rooftops and plummet to my death. Still, it is rare to see a game that not only asks you to live a relatively normal life in one of these settings, but has the optimism to say that you could totally become a multimillionaire business owner, something that is incredibly difficult today and would likely be even harder in a hyper-capitalist cyberpunk setting.

That is the premise of Nivalis Nights, a cyberpunk RPG slash business management sim that tasks you with becoming the new real estate monger in a dystopian-lite cyberpunk city.

The mechanical loop of Nivalis Nights is simple on paper, but it can get a bit busy in practice. The game begins as you inherit a noodle shop from a stranger, along with its debts, which makes it a bit more believable that it would just be given away. It is your job to stock the shelves with ingredients, discover new recipes for your employees to cook, and, of course, hire new employees as the business grows. While you can interact with the business yourself, fulfilling orders with the rather easy press-to-make food machines, your business will eventually grow to the point where you can be totally hands-off. The game then encourages you to go out and buy other businesses, rent buildings, grow your own ingredients, etc., until you are essentially one of the biggest corporations in the city.

This is all done on a day-to-day basis, with real in-game time passing. You use this time to run your businesses or interact with the city’s residents, be it completing quests for them or shopping at their stores. The city has multiple districts and encourages you to go from place to place, mostly to find better prices from vendors on the goods you need to keep your business afloat. At the end of the day, you pay your employees and choose how much money to put toward your debts, before seeing a ranking of the businesses and where you stand on it.

There are a lot of residents to interact with in Nivalis Nights, but I have to say the process of doing so felt pretty dull and lifeless. Most NPCs that have dialogue exist as one-time quest givers, and once the quest is done, you don’t really interact with them again. Shopkeepers and the employees you hire, with the exception of the one you “inherit” from the noodle shop, don’t really have any personality, and you can’t talk to them. You would think these characters would be the most important in the game, the ones you would spend the most time getting to know, but Nivalis Nights seems to have different ideas about what a healthy employee-boss relationship is, aka one where you hire someone and then never speak to them again.

The biggest issue with the gameplay of Nivalis Nights seems to be a lack of depth. There is a lot to do, from working in your own business to managing employees to running a successful meat-printing farm, but none of these mechanics are particularly interesting or deep. Everything in the game is done by pressing an interact key or using a menu. Once the immersion of the fantasy starts to wear off, you start to realize that you’re kind of doing the same repetitive tasks over and over again with no real changes.

That isn’t to say the game isn’t fun. Again, when you’re immersed in the fantasy, Nivalis Nights is really interesting. It is exciting to watch your businesses become profitable; it is exciting to step in and take over when your employees are overwhelmed to beat the dinner rush. It is exciting to watch your bank account drop low and then watch your hard work pay off with dollars hitting that balance. It is just an excitement best enjoyed in bursts, because things can end up becoming very repetitive and there isn’t a whole lot there to break up the tedium of the grind.

Unfortunately, Nivalis Nights also has its fair share of bugs, which the developers continue to work on patching out. Some of these are nonintrusive and even benefit the player, like the way you can spam the food processor to make multiple orders at once. Others are more annoying, like how certain food machines won’t let you take orders from them, or when a mission teleports you across the map. Again, it seems like the developers are working on these, but I got to the game late, and bugs were still very much present.

Try Hard Guides was provided a Steam key for this PC review of Nivalis Nights. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page! Nivalis Nights is available on Steam.