Nivalis Nights is overwhelming. Intentionally, I suspect, to give me the immersive experience of living in a hyper-capitalist megacity hellscape. It has no map because Nivalis is canonically unmappable, only a HUD compass where my 20+ active quest markers all scuttle over each other, nearly as crowded as the alleyways of its layered, neon city where hundreds of citizens amble between giant apartments and fusion food joints.

One of those joints is mine. Ramen Noir is a floundering noodle bar left to me by a friend named Thaddeus who flees the city for mysterious reasons, saddling me with its complementary insurmountable debt of 50,000 Lims.

Thaddeus also left me a greenhouse. A salty lad named Crabface bequeaths me a boat. Some lady named Ma Gomba wants me to grow her enoki mushrooms. Danny Danetti wants my opinion on his donut recipes. A sentient vacuum needs my help fleeing the human wife of his deceased former consciousness. CorpSec Agent Teleshko suggests, nay, demands that I expand my operation by buying additional businesses. Oh, right, and there's a serial killer at large who's taking out people with massive amounts of debt. You know, like me.

Folks, I am just trying to scrape out a profit serving chicken noodle soup and beer while I hoof it back and forth from the market buying nearly-expired ingredients on the cheap until I can afford to hire a general manager who will free me up to pursue even one of these quests.

My day in Nivalis looks like this:

• 8:00: Fast travel to the Docks district and sprint down the ramshackle catwalks to my greenhouse to pick the onions and potatoes I grew in my farming modules overnight.
• 8:30: Fast travel to Meridian Market to put my produce in the fridge at Ramen Noir for the day before my general manager starts a restock order.
• 8:30 - 11:30: Assist my staff for the breakfast rush by using the food processor station eight times and grabbing a couple plates of food to deliver to customers bellied up to the bar, choosing to "make polite small talk" with new customers and "offer 10% discount" to some returning ones.
• 11:30: Spot my not-really-rival and donut seller Danny Danetti hanging near my kitchen waiting to ask my opinion about a recipe.

• 11:30 - 12:00: Visit the greengrocer and drinks vendor in the Central Canyon district to buy and drop off all the ingredients on my shopping list for my new sake bar which doesn't have a GM yet.
• 12:00: Meet up with my landlord Pilk Dane who wants to accuse me of subletting (read: having any guests at all).
• 13:00: Receive a mysterious communication from an unknown employer demanding I go visit the crime scene of the latest serial killing and have a conversation with my automata digital assistant Ava about whether to comply or not.
• 14:00: Somehow become involved in seeking out the memories CorpSec erased from the past of a large guy calling himself the Miso Baron.
• 14:00 - 17:00: Spend too long fussing with the kitchen layout at the sake bar by putting the sink for dishwashing near the kitchen access door and the drink machine station perpendicular to the bar.

• 17:00: Use the photo mode to take a nice aesthetic shot of my remodel in the evening neon glow.
• 18:00: Fiddle with my staff schedule at Ramen Noir, increasing my waiter's happiness by shortening her shift and compensating by docking the pay for my robot Waiter X5 by 0.50 Lims, sorry.
• 18:00 - 21:00: Help serve cocktails at Sake Bar to turn a bit of profit faster than my staff would alone.
• 21:00 - 24:00: Stumble through the extremely confusing and layered Hive Mall district to find a furniture vendor, thinking I'll buy a couple extra chairs, but ultimately chickening out of spending the money.
• 24:00 - 1:00: Open my quest log, see that I still haven't started the ones related to using my boat and purposefully ignore them because I just really dislike fishing in games.
• 2:00: Stay out past curfew to filch some chairs from the restaurant next to Ramen Noir, dodging CorpSec security camera beams, so I can add them to Sake Bar to serve more customers—for profit!

Just a slice, please

Nivalis Nights calls itself a "slice-of-life" sim, which is a close enough description of what you get when you borrow life sim decorating, shop sim management, open-ish world exploration, farm sim produce production, and bungee cord them all together with a surprisingly story-heavy quest structure.

In the first five-ish hours, I worried that the genre soup of Nivalis Nights was going to ultimately disappoint me. Everything I found to praise about it came with a caveat.

It's a personality hire

What I found after several hours and a couple in-game weeks in Nivalis is that the characters are the star feature. I'll allow myself a heavy-handed food metaphor, given the context: The characters and setting are the eggs of Nivalis Nights. Whip 'em up with those dry ingredients and they become a leavening agent to make that batter rise, baby.

The streets of every district are jam packed with people. Many are unnamed, silent NPCs but a surprising number are fully voice-acted characters with stories and quests, some of whom can eventually work at my shops. Sometimes they don't seem immediately relevant until suddenly I'm five steps deep into someone else's quest and they ask me to find a specific hacker who, oh wait, I know that guy!

Their stories run a full neon spectrum from comedic corporate satire to strikingly earnest stories of people crushed beneath inherited debt:

There are dozens more of them (At least 121, by count of the portraits in the "known characters" section of my menu) all with nuanced stories and genuinely excellent vocal performances that really sell some of the moments when they turn from goofy caricature to gut-spillingly relatable.

The amount of quests and story content that weaves these characters into each others' lives and into the main plot of a debt-chasing serial killer stalking the lower districts is a delight. I'd expected for the shop management and decorating to be the real draw in Nivalis Nights, but instead it's this vibrant, enormous cast of characters who are really motivating me to beat the streets every day, navigating labyrinthine districts in search of the next thread to pull.

Nivalis Nights is an alright shop sim with some okay decorating and a nod to life sim romances, but it's an excellent place. It's a smog-filled techno hellscape full of people with "generational debt" loomed over by advertisements about transferring the consciousness of your pet dog into any body, forced to live in nearly religious adherence to capitalism. I'd eat up a novel set here. Lacking that, I'll probably develop strong feelings on head-canons about its characters and spend hours tooling for new angles in its photo mode long past rinsing the simulation game this world is hiding in.

A tension that will never go away as long as World of Warcraft: Forever exists is how true it is to the 2004 MMO. Blizzard signed up for this by creating an MMO that is trying to blend the old with the new so that anyone, regardless of their experience with WoW, can get into it.

That tension has been at its highest concentration with the new blue elves it debuted with WoW: Forever. The Skyborne have never existed in WoW before; they look almost exactly like the Blood Elves from The Burning Crusade expansion, but their lore tells us they're a faction of High Elves.

Some players love the twist on a race they've been asking to play for years, while others believe they tarnish the authenticity of an MMO that's trying to recreate the joys of playing the oldest era of the MMO. Even though the debate over the Skyborne will probably never be resolved, most players agreed that, at the very least, they looked way too new alongside WoW's crunchy old player models.

Blizzard said it would respond to the feedback about the Skyborne visuals before WoW: Forever launches in November and today it has done just that in a blog post promising to give them a retro makeover.

"Over the course of development, we have been aligning on the right range of fidelity and what feels like it belongs in the WoW: Forever world and what does not," Blizzard writes. "The team has learned much in the process, and that will continue to strengthen more with future content."

Blizzard says the Skyborne "didn't quite meet the consistency and cohesion we are aiming for," and will be tweaking how they look with the "HD" player models setting on. There's an example of their druid forms in the post and you can see how the feathers and fur have harsher lines and shapes that fit much better with WoW's original style. The old version used to look extremely smooth with a bright light blue gradient covering their bodies and now everything is much more muted.

The people who play with the "SD" models on to fully live like it's 2004 will also get visually updated Skyborne, but they won't come until early next year. Blizzard's work-in-progress image shows a bunch of elves who have had their smooth features replaced with jagged, low-poly shapes. They're basically Skyborne on low settings and I think they look great. Blizzard says they'll have another update on the models—and their SD druid forms—when they're closer to being finished.

I wasn't convinced Blizzard would be willing to technically downgrade a race that costs $30 to unlock, but I'm glad it did. It sets a precedent for how close it wants the newest stuff in WoW: Forever to adhere to the classic MMO, and, hey, maybe it'll convince some people to chill out and see how things go when it's out of beta on November 4.