As part of the Games Made in Germany Steam Festival, supported by B2B Magazine GamesMarkt, developer Ion Lands has finally revealed the release date for Novalis. The game will be available in Spring 2025, allowing fans to return to the city first seen in Cloudpunk.
Nivalis is a cozy cyberpunk slice-of-life game in which you set up and run a restaurant for the citizens living out their lives in the titular city, decorate apartments, make friends and enemies, find love, and even go fishing. The game is a surprising follow up to the narrative delivery driving game Cloudpunk, but one that looks to delve deeper into what is arguably the second main character of that game. The city you explore itself.
See the city beneath the clouds like never before when Nivalis launches in early 2025
In Nivalis, you begin your journey as a restauranteur with a small stall selling ramen and noodles. From there, you can specialize and expand to offer new food, stims, or shift your focus to something else entirely, like a nightclub. You’ll meet a diverse range of strange characters, some of whom can help you succeed, require your assistance with interesting problems, or make a nuisance of themselves and threaten your business.
The game has a lot of depth to it, requiring you to source the ingredients for the food you serve by purchasing or growing it. That’s where fishing comes into play because you’ve got to find meat for your cyberpunk sushi from somewhere. I don’t trust the waters of Nivalis myself, but your customers don’t need to know where the fish came from.
I’m most excited about the stories you get to experience in Nivalis. Cloudpunk showcased many aspects of this intriguing world, including the ever-growing city and the AI that powers it, an escalator to nowhere, and a faction living off moss in the city’s giant sewer system.
The characters in Cloudpunk are also a huge part of what makes that game so engrossing, so I’m expecting big things from the characters we’ll meet in this game. From a head who rises through the ranks to the top of society to a group of androids who have had their memories erased over and over again to keep them compliant, there’s so much potential in this world for stories that have never been told, and I can’t wait to see how they unfold when we get to play it.
