Nivalis Nights

Nivalis Nights

Nivalis (retitled Nivalis Nights in June 2026) is a first-person cyberpunk slice-of-life simulation game developed by ION LANDS and published by 505 Games. Set in the same fictional universe as Cloudpunk (2020), the game drops players into the towering vertical metropolis of Nivalis, a city built above the sea where social standing is measured by how high up you live. Rather than focusing on combat or action, Nivalis puts the player in the role of a new business owner trying to build a life from the ground up. You run restaurants, mix cocktails, go fishing at the docks, cook meals from ingredients you grew yourself, and form relationships with roughly 135 fully voiced characters.

The game is built on Unity, the same engine used for Cloudpunk but refined over development for far greater detail. Although the city is made entirely of voxels, it does not run on a traditional voxel engine, which results in unusually high polygon counts; the team leans heavily on multiple levels of detail (LODs) to keep performance smooth. ION LANDS has retained the distinctive voxel-inspired art direction that defined Cloudpunk, spending three years evolving that visual identity into something that feels both familiar and substantially more detailed. The result is a rain-soaked, neon-lit city that looks like a diorama you could reach into.

Nivalis Nights is a singleplayer-only experience played entirely from a first-person perspective, as the developers confirmed in November 2024. There is no multiplayer component, no co-op, and no plans for either. There is no combat, no weapons, and no survival mechanics. An ESRB Teen rating with Language and Use of Alcohol descriptors was recorded on August 27, 2026. The game released on September 29, 2026 on Windows PC via Steam (App ID 1488490). The Epic Games Store version was announced separately without a date or window. No console versions have been announced. The launch was a full release rather than Early Access, and ION LANDS has said it does not plan a public demo.

There is no character creator, and the player character's gender is left undefined: a developer said on the official forum in September 2026 that "The player's gender is not defined. For now there is no character creation." and that customization "might be something we think about in the future". The visible hands are described by the developers as deliberately gender-neutral. The studio has said the first-person view is meant to put you directly at the centre of the experience rather than behind an avatar, so the only parts of your body you ever see are your arms and hands.

Key Details

Gameplay Overview

Nivalis is about building a life in a city that doesn't care whether you succeed or fail. The game opens with the player inheriting a run-down noodle bar from Thaddeus Carminus, a 92-year-old man who has decided it is finally time to retire. Pre-release footage shows a noodle bar named Ramen Noir with Banor, the bar's first employee, on its staff roster, which is consistent with that being the inherited venue, though no first-party text has said so. From that humble starting point, you expand into other business ventures: food stalls, stim stores, bars, full-service restaurants, and eventually nightclubs. Each business type requires managing finances, inventory, menus, staff schedules, and physical layout.

The studio has been direct about how to read the genre. Asked on an official forum thread on 31 August 2026 whether this amounts to a shop management game, a developer replied: "Shop management is only part of the game. It's more a life sim." The same account had written ten days earlier, on 21 August 2026, that "the core gameplay and the concept hasn't changed in five years" and that "We have however added a lot more features as we thought of new ways for the player to live their life in Nivalis." Taken together the two statements place the business layer inside a life simulation rather than the other way round, and describe a long development spent widening that life rather than redirecting it.

The story is optional in the same spirit. Replying on the official forum on 18 September 2026 to a question about pacing, the lead writer said: "You can ignore the story if you want. No one forces you to talk to people or figure out what is really going on in the city, to solve the murders or to make friends or romance characters." The same reply added, "But there's no time limit or anything." The 2 AM curfew is a daily rhythm, not a deadline on the game. Sabotage is optional too: asked on 20 September 2026 whether the game can be played without illegal activity, a developer answered, "It's not a big deal. It won't impact on you if you want to play this way."

Running a restaurant means sourcing ingredients, and that is where the game's other systems come into play. You can buy supplies from shops scattered around the city, grow your own produce in a greenhouse near the docks, or head out on your personal boat to catch fish in the cramped waterways between the city's support pillars. The cooking system lets you prepare dishes and mix drinks, and the recipes you develop become the signature items on your menu.

Beyond the business side, Nivalis has a deep relationship system built around what the developers call the Relationship Matrix. Every interaction with the game's roughly 135 characters shifts your standing along four axes: Enemy, Friend, Business, and Romance. Your choices determine whether you end up allied with corporate enforcers, underground syndicates, or grassroots neighborhood organizations. These alliances open and close different paths through the story.

Not everything you do in a day is work. You can challenge the city's inhabitants to minigames, and the one the studio has named is a high-stakes cyberpunk chess tournament that sits alongside the business and story tracks as its own pursuit. The other side of the same coin is sabotage: after dark you can slip past security systems during the curfew and sabotage a rival's operation. The developers are blunt that this cuts both ways, since whatever you can do to a competitor can be done to you.

Your daily routine is bounded by a 2 AM curfew. Each morning you wake up in your apartment, read a newspaper summary showing your influence on the city, and decide how to spend the day. Weather affects foot traffic and business performance. A photo mode with adjustable focus, aperture, focal length, and creative filters lets you capture the city at its most striking moments.

Setting

The city of Nivalis is a place of extremes. It sits above the ocean, and the higher you go, the wealthier and more powerful the residents become. Down at sea level, you find cramped waterways, flickering neon signs, and people trying to scrape by. The city is divided into a series of distinct explorable areas, all hand-crafted by the development team rather than procedurally generated. Getting around involves walking, riding the subway and train system, hailing a flying taxi for elevated districts, or taking your personal boat through the canals. Unlike Cloudpunk, you cannot fly HOVAs yourself, and you cannot drive any vehicles; the game maintains a street-level, pedestrian perspective at all times.

Nivalis is a city on the edge. Ecological collapse threatens to send the whole structure into the sea. CORA, the master AI from Cloudpunk, oversees the city's infrastructure, but malfunctions have caused widespread failures. CorpSec, the corporate security force, keeps order in the upper levels while gangs operate openly down below, some of them harvesting organs from anyone unlucky enough to get caught alone. And somewhere in the city, the Aseptic, an android serial killer that leaves no forensic trace, continues to claim victims. Billboards push images of beautiful women, fast food, and exotic animals. Cloud pollution turns the sky orange by day while claustrophobic darkness settles in at night.

Development History

ION LANDS began development of Nivalis after completing the City of Ghosts expansion for Cloudpunk in 2021. The studio, based in Berlin with a small team whose exact size has not been published, originally targeted a 2024 release window. That target slipped to Spring 2025 as the scope of the project became clear. In October 2025, the studio announced a further delay, pushing the release into 2026 without a specific date.

The primary reason for the extended timeline has been voice acting. With roughly 200,000 words of dialogue spread across roughly 135 characters, the casting and recording process alone has been a massive undertaking. ION LANDS conducted over 8,000 auditions to fill more than 100 speaking roles. Motion capture sessions at Mocaplab in Paris (with actors Christel Wallois and Florian Hutter among others) added further production time. In February 2026, studio head Marko Dieckmann announced that the team was entering the "final development stretch," though no release date was set. In late June 2026, the studio revealed the game's final title, Nivalis Nights, alongside a confirmed release date of September 29, 2026, explaining that a legal matter with a third party, which had paused public marketing since October 2025, had been resolved.

On 17 September 2026 the studio announced that more than one million people had added the game to their Steam wishlist. Studio head Marko Dieckmann put the figure in context by comparing it with about 130,000 wishlists at Cloudpunk's launch, a number that had already felt like a major achievement for the team at the time, and said the studio does not take the support for granted. Earlier, in November 2024, the game was announced as a nominee for the PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted broadcast, which aired on 5 December 2024. A developer wrote on the official forum on 18 September 2026 that the studio probably would not have time to make another video of its own before launch, while the publisher had been releasing roughly one a week; the newest official gameplay video, published on 4 September 2026, follows a day in the life of the player.

The studio announced base prices of USD 24.99, EUR 24.99 and GBP 21.99 on September 24, 2026, and the game is now available to buy. A 10% launch discount listed on October 6 (USD 22.49 in the US) had ended by October 13, when the listing showed the full base price. Before release, the developers declined to announce the price in the March Q&A and again on September 20. Their stated reason for avoiding pre-orders was that "Pre-Orders are fine, but we believe in only paying for something if you can play it right away." The September 29 launch was a full release, and no public demo was listed in the current metadata. A separate soundtrack released the same day with 54 tracks in MP3 and FLAC formats. The game supports offline play, full controller support, ultrawide monitors, Steam cloud saves, 120 Steam achievements and Family Sharing. There is no VR support, no modding support and no multiplayer.

Visual Pipeline and Art Direction

ION LANDS spent three years developing the visual style for Nivalis, building on the voxel aesthetic established in Cloudpunk but pushing it into substantially more detailed territory. The studio uses a 256-color voxel palette with physically based rendering (PBR) values assigned to each color, allowing voxel surfaces to react realistically to the city's mix of baked, real-time, and volumetric lighting. Individual voxel assets are created in MagicaVoxel, the same tool used for Cloudpunk, but at a higher density. Because the world is built from voxels yet does not run on a traditional voxel engine, the polygon counts are unusually high, so the game leans heavily on multiple levels of detail (LODs) rather than a built-in geometry-streaming system.

Characters are an exception to the voxel approach. Human characters use traditional polygon meshes rather than voxels, which allows for more expressive facial animation and body language. Portrait art is handled by William Sweetman. This hybrid approach (voxel environments, traditional character models) gives the game a distinctive look where the people feel grounded and real within an environment that has a handcrafted, almost toybox-like quality.

Connection to Cloudpunk

Nivalis takes place in the same city as Cloudpunk and its expansion, City of Ghosts (2021). Players who spent time delivering packages and picking up fares across the skyline in those games will recognize the setting, though the perspective has shifted dramatically. Where Cloudpunk had you flying a HOVA through the skies, Nivalis keeps you on the ground (and the water), looking up at the towers rather than down from them. The tonal shift is just as significant: Cloudpunk told a story about a single night in the city, while Nivalis unfolds over days and weeks as you establish roots and build connections. ION LANDS has described Nivalis as a separate spin-off rather than a direct sequel. Camus, the protagonist's companion from Cloudpunk, will not appear; the cast is entirely new. See the Cloudpunk Connection article for a deeper look at the shared lore.

Technical Optimization

Ahead of the September 2026 launch, the team moved into a final-polish phase focused on bug fixing, localization, and heavy optimization. Several of those optimization details have been shared publicly. Although the world is built entirely from voxels, it does not run on a traditional voxel engine, which results in much higher polygon counts than usual; to keep performance smooth without sacrificing the handcrafted look, the game leans heavily on multiple levels of detail (LODs).

Lighting and memory have been a particular focus. The team completely overhauled the game's light probes, the invisible sensors that capture environmental lighting data instead of recalculating it in real time, and combined that with extensive furniture-asset polishing to sharply reduce memory usage. To keep the city's crowds affordable, an NPC "Ghost system" simulates characters at three levels of detail depending on whether they are out of the player's district, hidden, or visible, while an object-pooling system reuses a managed pool of more than 10,000 elements like tables, chairs, and dishes rather than constantly creating and destroying them.

The target is a steady 60 frames per second, which leaves a frame budget of just 16.66 milliseconds, so the team has prioritized reducing memory allocations to minimize the stutters that garbage collection can cause. For the per-component minimum and recommended hardware, see the System Requirements article.

Platform and Feature Summary

Launch and post-release updates

Nivalis Nights launched on September 29, 2026. Four updates followed on October 1, October 2, October 5 and October 9, with a hotfix after Update #3 on October 5. They addressed character and crowd performance, manager restocking, staff task order, venue storage, fishing and several quests. Update #3 added three greenhouses in the Industrial District and made Zaffer's neon sign available as a decoration for venues and apartments. The same update rebalanced district achievement-point unlock levels, without publishing a new threshold table. The separate Updates and Patch Notes page records the dated changes; Achievements lists the public achievement objectives.

Update #4 on October 9 added per-venue Venue Management Settings with restocking targets and a daily restocking budget, aimed at late-game venues that had been struggling with restocking and with money draining away, along with new graphics options such as Crowd Density and Hybrid CPU Optimization and lower memory use while travelling. The developers said the next patch was already in the works.

Reception

As of October 13, 2026, critical reception was generally favorable, with an aggregate critic score in the high 70s out of 100 from ten published reviews. Player reviews on Steam were rated Mostly Positive, with roughly three quarters of more than 4,000 user reviews positive. The developers' own Update #4 announcement acknowledged that many players running late-game venues had struggled with restocking and money draining away, which that update set out to address.