The first thing I noticed when waking up in the city of Nivalis for the first time is that it’s gorgeous. My top-floor apartment there overlooks a neon-illuminated cyberpunk metropolis, and the way the rain inches down my windows and reflects the neon’s multicolored glow just looks stunning. I quickly learned that things aren’t as charming outside, though—there’s a killer on the loose, a malicious megacorp controlling everything, a mandatory curfew enforced by security bots, the looming burden of debt, and, best of all, an NPC who threatened to give me the recipe for “Go Fuck Yourself Pie.”

I was immediately excited by all of this when I launched Nivalis Nights, a cyberpunk restaurant management and life sim that’s also ION LANDS’ follow-up to Cloudpunk. I put a few hours into it this week, and I was really looking forward to finally playing a management sim with a grittier edge. Unfortunately, its ambition feels awkwardly compressed, leading to a game whose first few hours have felt incredibly overwhelming and a tad undercooked.

The second thing I noticed after I woke up was Ava, who quickly became my nemesis. Ava is an automaton who lacks a physical presence and is instead apparently baked into my brain, existing somewhere in there in order to deliver tutorials and chat with me. (I honestly forgot how she explained her own existence. That’s because I didn’t want to listen to her at all!)

The problem with Ava being basically part of me is that she interrupts everything .

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