The city of Nivalis feels alive when you're unemployed
Get un-busy
The best thing you can do in Nivalis Nights is hold down the J key and watch your list of quests vanish. The city will flood your eyes. Freaks in plastic clothes roam the plazas, bright adverts are reflected in rainkissed slabs, little delivery robots zip around at knee height, hovertaxis thrum overhead, the walls are plastered with signs and graffiti and posters and aircon units. The sky is... god, is it boiling? Why didn't you see all this before? Well, it's easy to miss when you're blinkered by small business chores.
At any time almost a quarter of the screen in this flashy life sim is covered by a long to-do list full of objectives like "restock ingredients" or "buy a houseplant". Not only does this homework menu take up more real estate than the highrises towering over you, it also acts as a constant reminder to go go go, do do do, quest quest quest! It was only when I learned to make this journal disappear and ignored my workload that Nivalis' biggest strengths beamed through the smog. It's a wet cyberworld built for pedestrian ambling and for chatting to random strangers. In other words: quit your videogame job. Forget about your bank balance, for once in your life, and go for a walk in the neon rain. You won't regret it.
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Living In Sim is our monthly column about simulation games, and the frequently stupid misadventures they inspire.
On your very first day in Nivalis some guy you barely know gifts you his rundown ramen stand, and kindly includes all the debt that goes with it. To pay that off you'll need to find ingredients, source new soup recipes, hire waiters, and get more bums on seats (seats sold separately). From here, the game spirals out into other life sim territory - supplement your noodle stand by going fishing, try your luck at wreck hunting, start an urban farm, buy an apartment, decorate the apartment, abandon the apartment for a nicer, more expensive apartment. Have you too grown immune to the paradox that home ownership is achievable in dystopian videogames but not in reality? Cool. Let's move on.
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Thousand Hells review
Other hell is people
As readers in the UK will know, there are many hells, and you can and should put together a team to rob powerful figures within them. And such a team would of course be not a spreadsheet of optimal (ugh) builds, but a guessing game of hedged bets and approximate ideas.
Thousand Hells has you lead this team on a journey, first to reach hell at all, then to find and retrieve something, or get agonisingly close before making one too many mistakes and losing everything. But this isn't the arbitrary, timewasting death of the roguelike. This is just that story. It can be dissatisfying, and parts of it can not really make sense. This is at times its big flaw, and at others, where it feels most successful. Are we still saying "same"?
Each game is an adventurous journey followed by a heist, then a shorter but still fraught journey back. Each is also a named plot with a specific target, and could take you to one of four hells (the "thousand" are scene-setting) this time. It's also a new team, including you, the leader.
The Lie-In
Links worth clicking
Good morning, videogames. Thanks for all your responses to last week's question about which reviewers have a definable aesthetic taste. My personal opinion is that I don't think there are many good answers to the question, because the realities of modern games media don't provide opportunities for writers to work as critics or with editors long enough to refine their taste and their voice. I'm taking the number of commenters that named designers rather than writers, or writers long-since retired, as a sign you all agree. Don't correct me. Thank god for Sin though, eh? Let's move on to another week of links to articles you might enjoy.
I've wanted to read something in-depth about the booming Pokémon fangame scene for a while. Ana Diaz delivered just that for Fansplaining this week.
The popularity of the fangames themselves attests to the central role they play in the Pokémon fandom, which is massive: Pokémon is estimated to be the highest-grossing media franchise in the world. Fangames have huge audiences; Pokémon Uranium, for example, has reportedly been downloaded more than 1.5 million times. A quick search on YouTube reveals that video
Jank Mail: Oh no, another algorithm
This week in PC gaming
It’s been another week of finely crafted words about PC games on Jank. Graham spoke the hard truth that VR still just doesn’t work, most of the time.
John Wick doesn't have these kinds of problems. John Wick has never died because he was unable to access the gun on his belt because his belt was clipped through the floor while he was crouched. Jack Reacher neither. Jack Reacher has never died because his reality phase-shifted to a living room because his head strayed too close to a Ikea Strandmon footstool.
In the Lie-In, he topped his list of links worth clicking with a plea for favourite critics, which prompted some interesting discussion in the comments and on BlueSky.
Who are the videogame reviewers that, to you, have a definable point of view? I don't mean that you like their work, or that you agree with it. I mean, tell me the writers who have a coherently expressed set of aesthetic principles that they apply, resolutely and consistently, in their work?
Marsh Davies reviewed Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy, and found it much more surprising than its appearance or predecessors suggested:
It is a
Three for a tenner! Come get yer games. Three for a tenner!
Here's how to recreate the bargain buckets you remember
Consider this: you've just been handed a tenner from your grandmother. She doesn't know what the hell she's doing. She thinks you'll spend it on sweets, or put it in your piggy bank. What a fucking idiot! No, you're going to rummage through the bargain bucket at your local game shop.
Except, oh no, all the game shops are dead. That's okay, Steam is having a sale this week. The correct way to find proper deals in a Steam sale is to create your own bargain bin by fiddling with the dials and sliders of the store's search page, like a coked-up rodent messing with levers in a lab experiment. One of these has got to open the cage, right? No. The cage is capitalism. And you are trapped. The best you can hope for is for cheap videogames to come sliding down the tubes. Let me aid you in this by taking ten pounds (British, valuable, suspicious) and seeing what we could buy in the Steam Autumn sale with granny's cash.
First, let's go to the Global Top Sellers list and crank that price slider all the way down
Total Playtime: Delivered in the tone of Igor
It happened again
Total Playtime is the official Jank podcast, funded entirely by our paying subscribers (and formerly our backers on Patreon). This week’s episode is free, but subscribers get additional episodes every other week. You may join them by subscribing here, and you can find all previous episodes here.
Alice and Nate are away this week, possibly because we're talking about layoffs again, chiefly those at Microsoft again. Still, this does spare us from having to tell Nate live on air that an unrevealed Age of Empires game has been cancelled.
Otherwise it's a bit of a bad-news rundown through the extended Xbox universe and into Bungie's recent decision that it's going to spend time on Destiny 2 after all, before Brendy brightens things up with some chat about the cheerily implausible fighter-plane-based fiction of Ace Combat 8. There are also some important tips about carrying car batteries, thus cementing our position as providers of service journalism.
You can listen to the episode right here, or find it in your podcasting app of choice.
Our art is by God Ribbon, our art is by Marsh Davies, our editing is by Alix Attenborough
What you could play this weekend
And what we're all playing
Earlier this week I tried to install Ace Combat 8, only to discover that I didn't have space for its 140GB girth on any of my three hard drives. This is a signal that I should play some of the games I've already got installed, many of which were downloaded months ago and never touched. So this weekend I shall be playing a lot of games for 15 minutes and then deleting them forever.
What about you? I humbly petition that this article's commenters are not sufficiently numerous. Tell us what you're playing down below, and then tell all your friends to do the same.
Dicevaders
I had some fun with StarVaders, a turn-based tactics game about buildcrafting against robot enemies that trundle onto a single-screen grid. Dicevaders is set in the same universe but injects dice into its name and systems, with all your build craft and tactical manipulation focused on adjusting your dice and their odds. Starvaders deserved more attention; hopefully Dicevaders gets it.
RetroSpace
There have been a handful of BioShock-inspired immersive sims this year, and I confess that a phrase like "disco-punk" makes me want to run a
Knytt remains a classic
And Brendy is a rockist snob
TVTropes is a malicious force in storytelling, but it occasionally puts a name to something it's useful to name. I like "Flanderization", which is a fun word to say, and the process by which a character, often in a sitcom, becomes a parody of themselves. Named after The Simpsons' Ned Flanders, who warps across seasons from a relatively normal, albeit improbably perfect figure of envy for slothful oaf Homer, into an absurd Christian fundamentalist whose niceness is a pathological disorder.
I find this word useful because I think the same process happens to videogames. Brendy's "self-playing games" can be understood as being at the extreme end of the process: parodies of the entire medium of videogames, mimicking the structure of upgrades and progress in order to deliver dopamine without the fullness of complexity of their original genres.
But Knytt, originally released in 2006, represents an earlier stage of much the same process. Knytt is Flanderized Mario.
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In a brief opening cutscene, the nameless and
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