There are two sides to every game delay coin. On the one hand, it’s a shame when you’re looking forward to a thing only to have to wait even longer for said thing. On the other, there’s too many damn video games these days and, oh, gods, don’t we all just have a laundry list of things to attend to right now? So make of it what you will that Nivalis, the cyberpunk restaurant sim set in the world of Cloudpunk, has been delayed.
Word of said delay (its second one) comes in the form of a recent Steam news post, which took the time to highlight just how big this technically small indie game actually is: “Right now, we’re deeply focused on the voice over: we’ve just completed the casting process for over 100 new voice roles after our first casting of 32 roles for our demo 2 years ago,” the post explains. “In Nivalis, there will be around 135 primary and secondary fully voiced characters, for a total of about 200,000 words.”
That, to be clear, is genuinely very impressive. We all know how even the biggest of RPGs reuse voice actors for multiple characters and NPCs. With that, the post notes that amongst all of this voice acting stuff, “releasing the game in 2025 would risk compromising its quality.” So the game will now be releasing in 2026, though an exact release day or even month hasn’t been revealed just yet (apparently the devs are working on this with their publisher, and confirmation of a release date will hopefully be coming before the year is out).
Nivalis, for those that haven’t heard of it, conceptually feels like quite an open game. You can manage a restaurant or a night club, buy or grow your own ingredients for your establishment, go fishing, purchase a home, and most importantly meet people. It’s the meeting people that almost seems to be the key thing here, and the thing I’m most curious about.
The game’s Steam page does note that Nivalis is not an easy city to live in, with gangs hoping to harvest your organs, Corps fining you just for breathing, and “the whole time, the ground under your feet is crumbling.” So in a world like this, what are its people like? With as many voice lines as the devs claim the game has, hopefully these people are varied and strongly defined, but I also want them to be people with believable problems, wants, and needs.
Like many of us in this world I worked in hospitality for many years, and met all sorts of folks, which sometimes was even quite a nice thing to do. It was also often not a nice thing to do, a dichotomy I hope is represented in Nivalis, whenever it launches next year. You can wishlist it on Steam here.
