Discourse notwithstanding, there is a time and a place for cosiness in games. It’s nice to chill out sometimes! I can admit that. I also just prefer a bit of friction in a game, something to put the edge on occasionally, even if there is cosiness to be found within it. And according to the lead writer of Nivalis Nights, Thomas Welsh, you can find some of that cosiness, it just isn’t a cosy game, and you have to put some work in to get it.
“The start of the game is intentionally overwhelming,” Welsh tells PC Gamer in an interview. “Nivalis doesn’t have player death or shooting or boss fights, but that doesn’t mean it’s a cosy game. Life in a cyberpunk world shouldn’t be relaxing and free of stress – not at first anyway. If you want a cosy existence in this city, you’re going to have to earn it. We imagined a world that felt like every app on your phone was sending you an urgent notification. Players can swim upstream, and they might end up rich, living on a farm. Or they might learn that success in Nivalis can look different for each person. You can even finish the story while being terrible at business.”
I am quite fond of Welsh’s specific point of life in a cyberpunk setting not being relaxing and stress free. That’s what the genre is built on! It’s a genre of hyperbole, of looking at what’s happening in the world of technology, identifying the way it’s miserable, and blowing it up to a macro scale with holograms and flying cars and being inundated with ads in ways that are somehow even worse than right now. Okay, sure, by the sounds of things you can find some amount of cosiness somewhere in the game with enough work, I’m just glad that there’s some intention of not just handing it on a silver platter as is a bit too common these days.
Welsh also spoke to PC Gamer about the game’s dating mechanics, noting how the team “wanted it to be messy,” and that they “wanted the player to have a ‘what did I say wrong?’ experience. When they miss out on romance, they never quite know why it didn’t line up, just like in real life. We also wanted to avoid ‘I was nice to you three times in a row, so can I have one sex please?'” Gosh, I should probably find time for this game that seems to have had a good bit of thought put into it, ‘ey? Perhaps when my schedule clears up in 2039.
