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Relationships and Characters
April 4, 2026 at 10:51 AM
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Nivalis features more than 135 fully voiced characters, each with their own personality, history, and opinions about the city they live in. The game contains roughly 200,000 words of dialogue, making conversations a major part of the experience. Who you talk to, what you say, and how you treat people all feed into a relationship tracking system that shapes the story and gameplay opportunities available to you. ION LANDS held over 8,000 auditions to cast more than 100 speaking roles, and the resulting performances give each character a distinct voice and presence.
The Relationship Matrix is the system that tracks how every character in the game feels about you. It is visualized as a Cartesian plane with four axes: Enemy, Friend, Business, and Romance. Every character exists somewhere on this plane, and your interactions push them incrementally along these axes.
A single conversation can shift a character's position in multiple directions. Helping someone with a personal problem might move them toward Friend while a sharp business negotiation with the same person might push the Business axis higher and the Friend axis down slightly. The system is not binary. Characters do not simply like or dislike you. They have layered, multi-dimensional opinions that evolve over time. Dialogue shifts are incremental, not sudden flips from one state to another.
The practical consequence of the Relationship Matrix is that it gates certain opportunities. A character who sees you as a trusted friend might offer you information or assistance they would never share with a mere business acquaintance. Someone who views you as an enemy might actively work against your interests, warning others about you or sabotaging your businesses. Romance opens still other possibilities, and the game confirms that romantic relationships with certain characters are fully developed story paths.
Conversations in Nivalis are fully voiced and play out through a dialogue system where your choices matter. You are not just picking from a list of pre-written responses; you are shaping how characters perceive you. A dismissive response to someone asking for help might save you time in the moment but costs you standing with that person and anyone they talk to.
The voice acting scope is enormous. The result is a city that feels populated by distinct individuals rather than interchangeable NPCs. People have accents, speech patterns, verbal tics, and emotional range. A conversation with a nervous shop owner feels different from a negotiation with a confident crime boss, not just in the words they say but in how they say them.
The characters of Nivalis are not isolated individuals. Many of them belong to or are connected with one of three major faction types, and your relationships with individual members affect your standing with the broader group. You can ally with corporate enforcers, underground syndicates, or grassroots community groups. These alliances shape the story and unlock different opportunities.
Faction Type | Description |
|---|---|
Corporate Enforcers | Corps Sec and affiliated corporate interests that maintain order in the upper city. Allying with them gives you access to protection and legal business opportunities, but it may alienate those in the lower levels who see you as a sellout. |
Underground Syndicates | Criminal organizations operating in the shadows. They offer access to black-market goods, protection rackets, and energy trading opportunities. Working with them carries risk: if Corps Sec catches wind of your involvement, the consequences can be severe. |
Grassroots Neighborhood Groups | Community organizations trying to improve life in Nivalis without corporate or criminal backing. They value loyalty and community spirit. Their rewards tend to be social rather than financial, but the connections you build can open doors that money cannot. |
While the full cast numbers over 135, several characters play particularly important roles in the story and gameplay.
Character | Details |
|---|---|
Age 92. Gruff but friendly, very tired of life in Nivalis, impatient yet thoughtful in his rare reflective moments. Has run a noodle bar in the lower city for decades. Sells you the business upon retirement. His quote: "I lived my whole life behind that hot plate. It was my whole world. Now it's time for me to find another one." Well-known and well-liked in the neighborhood. | |
Banor | Age 64. Ex-restaurant owner who becomes your first employee. Cheery despite his aches, over-shares personal stories, tells bad jokes, but is occasionally genuinely wise. His own restaurant closed years ago under circumstances he does not like to discuss. Knows the food business inside and out. |
Ava | Accompanies the protagonist throughout the game. Narrates the official trailer and greets the player upon waking each morning. Provides context and commentary as events unfold, giving the player a grounding voice in a city full of competing agendas. |
Salt Pete | Associated with the Calypso Island port area. Connected to the lower city's social networks. Claims the ocean holds "sentient slime, junk HOVAs and ancient, God-like AIs dreaming dark dreams." A valuable contact for anyone navigating the city's web of alliances. |
Nixxy | An IRL streamer who wears AR glasses and sees the city through an augmented reality overlay. Lives her life as content for her audience. Represents a particular kind of modern existence in the cyberpunk setting: always on, always performing. |
An android serial killer that operates without leaving any forensic trace. Featured on wanted posters throughout the city. Represents one of the most dangerous threats to life in Nivalis. See the dedicated article for more. | |
Nabla the Netphreak | Known from casting call documents. A net-connected individual with deep ties to the city's digital underworld. Further details remain unconfirmed. |
Idlehands | Known from casting call documents. Name suggests a character defined by restlessness or mischief. Further details remain unconfirmed. |
Players of Cloudpunk may wonder whether Camus, the AI companion from that game, will appear in Nivalis. ION LANDS has confirmed that Camus will not be in the game. The entire cast of Nivalis is new. While the game shares a universe with Cloudpunk and City of Ghosts, the characters are distinct. This is a deliberate choice to make Nivalis a standalone experience that does not require any knowledge of the previous games.
Relationships in Nivalis are not built through a single grand gesture. They develop incrementally, conversation by conversation, decision by decision. Someone who starts as a stranger might become a trusted friend over the course of many in-game days, but only if you consistently make choices that align with what they value. The slow burn is intentional. The developers want relationships to feel earned rather than purchased or cheated.
Your business activities also affect relationships. Hiring a character's friend as staff at your restaurant earns goodwill. Opening a competing business in someone's territory creates friction. Pricing your food so that lower-income residents can actually afford it builds community trust, while gouging prices might increase your margins but cost you social capital. Every business decision is also, in some way, a relationship decision. The business management and relationship systems are deeply intertwined.
