Nivalis Nights gameplay: what you do all day
Nivalis Nights is a first-person life sim built around a story. You take over a small noodle bar, grow it into more venues, and split each day between the business and the people of the city. The studio calls it “a unique combination of narrative, life simulation, and management gameplay”.
The daily loop
Steam sums it up as “Choose how you spend each day in this cyberpunk slice of life.” These are the things you choose between.
- Run businesses Restaurants, ramen bars or night clubs, starting from one small noodle bar. Running your businesses
- Buy or grow ingredients From vendors, or from greenhouses you rent. Greenhouses
- Take your boat out Explore the water around the city and fish for your kitchen. Fishing and your boat
- Decorate Your own homes, or other people's for pay. Apartments and houses
- Get to know people Follow their stories and manage how they feel about you. Friends, rivals and partners
- Play the side games Challenge characters to mini games and enter a chess tournament. FAQ
There is also a rule-breaking side: slipping past security systems during curfew to sabotage competitors, with the warning that the same can be done to you.
A story with an ending
This is not an endless sandbox. Asked whether there is an end goal, the studio answered: “It has a defined story it wants to tell, and a specific ending we want players to reach.” Some systems keep going after that, and the route to the end changes with your choices. On Reddit the lead writer named four main threads, betrayal, mystery, murder and debt; the story page covers them and how long the story runs.
Much of that route runs through side quests. More than 130 characters each have their own goals and quests, and how you treat them changes the dialogue and the outcome. The characters page has the ones named so far.
Your own pace
The studio puts it plainly: “what you do and when you do it will be entirely up to you, at your own pace”. Steam lists the game as playable without timed input and with saving at any time. There is no overall clock either. The lead writer: “But there’s no time limit or anything.” You can even leave the story alone and just run the bar.
Day, night, weather and seasons
- Day and night. The studio says “day and night life offer different opportunities”, and that there is a curfew for a reason.
- Markets. Certain events change how some markets behave, so watching them pays off when you buy.
- Weather. Steam lists a realistic weather system.
- Seasons. The Summer Salad can only be served in summer, so the calendar has seasons. How they work has not been explained.
How big it is
| Ingredients | 240+ |
|---|---|
| Dishes | 190+ |
| Quests | 100+ |
| Furniture items | 620+ |
| Characters | 130+ |
How long all of that takes to play has not been announced.