ION LANDS, developers of Cloudpunk and Cloudpunk – City of Ghosts, are making a life simulator called Nivalis. It’s a game set in the cyberpunk city of Nivalis, from the Cloudpunk games, and will see you start up a business and climb your way to the top. You’ll have to make important decisions and push your business to be the best it can be if you want to succeed, but there are many terrible dangers to fight against along the way. This game will have brilliant visuals, as the Cloudpunk games do, and it’s already got a really interesting setting. For me, this is going to be the life simulator experience that Cyberpunk 2077 failed to deliver.
I’m not saying that Cyberpunk 2077 was ever meant to be a life simulator, but it did promise you the opportunity to live a life in a cyberpunk city. While some of that is possible, it’s also extremely limited in its scope. There’s so much less scope for branching out and doing more normal life stuff than in many other open-world games, and that’s a huge disappointment for me. Nivalis is going to change that though. It’s going to deliver on that promise, bringing an experience that is purely about living a life in a cyberpunk city with no other distractions.
This isn’t a dig at CD Projekt Red. For what it’s worth, I do think that Cyberpunk 2077 is a good game. Sure, its launch was flat and awful, but really it is a pretty decent game when you dig into it. There’s a lot going on, but it all feels like it’s surface level. In Cloudpunk, everything was deeper than that, and the world wasn’t even the main draw. You could talk to strangers and have an impact on the world later in the game. It was so interesting to me in my playthroughs that I kept messing around to see what impact my choices could have.
Nivalis is going to be similar, but it’s your business that you’re changing. I think that a gritty life simulator with management gameplay is going to be just what Cloudpunk fans are after, and I think there’s a much broader audience out there asking for this too.
