Nivalis Nights Review

Game: Nivalis Nights
Genre: Adventure, RPG, Simulation
System: Steam (Windows)
Developers | Publishers: ION LANDS | 505 Games
Steam Deck: Unknown
Controller Support: Yes
Price: US $24.99  | UK £21.99 | EU € 24,99
Release Date: September 29th, 2026

A review code was provided; many thanks to Press Engine.

Nivalis Nights is a 2026 RPG adventure game developed by ION LANDS and released by 505 Games.

The Premise of Nivalis Nights

In Nivalis Nights, you can grow a business, manage restaurants and clubs, make friends and enemies, buy and decorate apartments, go fishing, find love, and explore a cyberpunk city to your heart’s content.

We start humbly with a single noodle stand and climb our way up to own some of the city’s best restaurants. Each day we make a choice, work on our business or our relationships, and if that becomes too much, we can hop into our boat to explore the city, customize our home, or even take part in a cyberpunk chess tournament.

Gameplay

At the beginning, it feels like Nivalis Nights drops you somewhere in the middle of the story; your character already has relationships with some characters, for example, the one that gets you started in business ownership. You already have a home, know some of the city, and have a cyber assistant to help with the rest. That is not to say that there aren’t enough instructions or that it is overly complicated to get into the story. It just avoids the new guy cliché, where your character is a newcomer.

Running our own restaurant and expanding the business is the game’s main focus. Tasks range from sourcing ingredients and finding new recipes to hiring staff, buying furniture, managing reviews, and even making small talk with customers. We start at the noodle stand, Ramen Noir, with one simple noodle soup recipe and slowly expand with more recipes, seats, and more. A big part of the game is sourcing ingredients, buying, growing, and fishing. As we grow the business, we get to hire more staff, including general managers and cooks. It’s a good idea to closely track what sells well and check reviews. Restaurant ratings matter for our overall growth. If you take part in the day-to-day business, you can chat with customers and even offer them discounts and free meals, which might raise your overall ratings a bit.

Another part of the game is exploring life in Nivalis. We get to explore the city and talk to its people by completing quests. At the beginning, we get one or two tasks, no big deal, but as time passes, the tasks increase, and the orientation system stays the same. The first task, finding the noodle bar, took me embarrassingly long. I can’t say that finding where places and people are ever got easier for me. The game uses a compass system with a marker on the top bar of the screen. You can also see markers for all your other incomplete quests, and as they multiply, you end up with a lot of markers layered on top of each other. Nivalis Nights has a very pretty map, but it only shows the city’s general layout and the fast-travel locations you’ve unlocked so far. If you need to find or go to a specific place within those locations, the map is practically useless. I think the game would benefit tremendously from an option to mark an active quest and render the others inactive.

Maybe the difficult navigation system is by choice, thus making the game more immersive, and it probably will be for some players. Nivalis Nights has other obstacles, of course; if we can go almost everywhere and do everything by day, then at night a curfew is in place. We are supposed to stay at home and sleep, which ends the day. Breaking curfew and getting caught means we will pay heavy fines. Breaking the curfew without getting caught means successfully hiding from security cameras and patrolling drones until the end of the night.

The World Of Nivalis Nights

For me, the real star of Nivalis Nights is the city itself. Visually, the game is a colorful mix of pixel and 3d graphics, which I haven’t seen much of in-game before. The city feels alive, with NPCs walking around, eating, and talking. I’d love it if the city had more interactive elements, instead of mostly just picking up trash. Even at home, we can turn appliances on and off, but we can’t, for example, cook or experiment with recipes. When we meet interactable characters, we can recognize them by the letter symbol over their head. Sometimes these characters give us new quests and an interesting bit of gossip about Nivalis.

I really loved the boat and exploring the city from the water. There’s a real sense of freedom, and the ocean views nicely contrast with the neon-drenched Nivalis. I also have to mention the soundtrack; it’s exactly what you would expect from a cyberpunk soundtrack. It’s electronic and very reminiscent of Vangelis’ original Blade Runner soundtrack in the best possible way. I also really loved the travel scenes and never skipped it even if there is a button for it. Nivalis Nights is set in the same universe as Cloudpunk, and the worlds share some similarities. I played Cloudpunk a long time ago, but I couldn’t recognize any of its characters in Nivalis Nights.

Some Other Things

Conclusion

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