I was profoundly interested in Nivalis Nights because it proposed something I never really knew I wanted—a chill life-sim set in a cyberpunk city. It’s a genre and a setting that feel so fundamentally at odds that trying to “live” in what is essentially meant to be a “worst-case scenario” of a technocratic society could actually be deeply engaging. The potential for interesting gameplay and storytelling is genuinely limitless, and I was really excited to see it in action.

However, Nivalis Nights takes what is a really interesting idea and doesn’t really build upon it in any meaningful way. It’s not a bad game by any means, but it falls short of what it could be by only taking the aesthetics of the cyberpunk genre, and not the deeper mechanics or themes. What results is a halfway decent business-management game with some life-sim elements peppered in, that gets kind of boring the longer you play it. 

In Nivalis Nights, the player wakes up with no memory of who they were or

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