The city of Nivalis feels alive when you're unemployed

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.

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.