// PC GAMER — GAMING
Nivalis Nights review: An avalanche of fascinating characters carrying a decent shop sim on their backs.
A just-enough shop sim that's elevated by a beautiful city design populated with over a hundred fascinating and tragic weirdos.
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Nivalis Nights is overwhelming. Intentionally, I suspect, to give me the immersive experience of living in a hyper-capitalist megacity hellscape. It has no map because Nivalis is canonically unmappable, only a HUD compass where my 20+ active quest markers all scuttle over each other, nearly as crowded as the alleyways of its layered, neon city where hundreds of citizens amble between giant apartments and fusion food joints.
What is it?: A quest-heavy cyberpunk shop simulation in a city obsessed with debt.Release date: September 29, 2026Expect to pay: $25 / £22Developer: Ion LandsPublisher: 505 GamesReviewed on: Intel Core Ultra 7 265, RTX 5070 Ti, 32GB RAMMultiplayer: NoSteam Deck: UnspecifiedLink: Steam
One of those joints is mine. Ramen Noir is a floundering noodle bar left to me by a friend named Thaddeus who flees the city for mysterious reasons, saddling me with its complementary insurmountable debt of 50,000 Lims.
Thaddeus also left me a greenhouse. A salty lad named Crabface bequeaths me a boat. Some lady named Ma Gomba wants me to grow her enoki mushrooms. Danny Danetti wants my opinion on his donut recipes. A sentient vacuum needs my help fleeing the human wife of his deceased former consciousness. CorpSec Agent Teleshko suggests, nay, demands that I expand my operation by buying additional businesses. Oh, right, and there's a serial killer at large who's taking out people with massive amounts of debt. You know, like me.
Folks, I am just trying to scrape out a profit serving chicken noodle soup and beer while I hoof it back and forth from the market buying nearly-expired ingredients on the cheap until I can afford to hire a general manager who will free me up to pursue even one of these quests.
Nivalis Nights calls itself a "slice-of-life" sim, which is a close enough description of what you get when you borrow life sim decorating, shop sim management, open-ish world exploration, farm sim produce production, and bungee cord them all together with a surprisingly story-heavy quest structure.
In the first five-ish hours, I worried that the genre soup of Nivalis Nights was going to ultimately disappoint me. Everything I found to praise about it came with a caveat.
The city is beautiful to look at and the layered, extremely vertical level design makes the possibility of exploring it seem fascinating.