If you play ATLYSS for the parts between the fights — standing around Sanctum comparing dye jobs, running the same dungeon with the same four people because the company is the point — then the game you should have on your wishlist is not another action RPG. It is a noodle stand in the rain.
Nivalis Nights is a cozy cyberpunk slice-of-life sim from ION LANDS, the studio behind Cloudpunk, published by 505 Games. It lands on Steam on September 29, 2026, with an Epic Games Store release to follow. The fan site nivalisnights.org tracks every trailer, screenshot and district reveal on the way there.
What Is Nivalis Nights?
Most cyberpunk games hand you a gun and a grudge. This one hands you 1,000 credits, a noodle stand, and a rainy street full of people who are hungry.
You arrive in the district of Lowtown with almost nothing and the city opens up around you. From there the whole design is a clock: every in-game day you decide whether the hours go into the business or into the people and places that make a city feel like home. There is no wrong answer — only the life you end up with.
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Title | Nivalis Nights (announced as Nivalis, renamed in 2026) |
| Developer | ION LANDS |
| Publisher | 505 Games |
| Release | September 29, 2026 |
| Platform | Steam at launch, Epic Games Store to follow |
| Genre | Slice-of-life sim · Management · Adventure |
| Players | Single-player |
| Languages | 11 at launch, including Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Japanese and Korean |
The Daily Loop: Business, Boat, Apartment, People
Run a business, from stand to empire
You start at a noodle stand serving a street full of commuters. Keep the queue moving and the broth hot, and that stand becomes the seed of something bigger — full restaurants, then nightclubs. Eventually you are not cooking at all: you are hiring cooks, waiters and cleaners for a place with an actual name over the door.
Grow it, or catch it
Ingredients come from three places. Grow your own in a garden before the city wakes, buy what the garden cannot give you yet at the market, or take your boat into the canals and fish for it. Night fishing in Nivalis — a rod out over black water, a glowing bobber, neon breaking up in the wake — is the single most on-brand thing this game does. Tonight's special is whatever the water gives you.
Build somewhere to come home to
Apartments across the city are for sale and every room in them can be decorated. Outgrown your first place, or want a better angle on the skyline? Go shopping for a new one. If you are the kind of ATLYSS player who spends twenty minutes in the character creator before touching a quest, this is your section of the game.
Know people
At 22:00 the neon comes on and the social layer takes over. You run the club, meet the townies, and get pulled into friendships, rivalries and romances. There are mini-games threaded through it too, including a chess tournament that plays out in the back room while the front of house does business.
A Day on the Clock
| Time | What's happening |
|---|---|
| 06:00 | Tend the garden before the city wakes, or hit the market |
| 09:00 | Fire up the stand and work the morning rush |
| 14:00 | Take the boat into the canals and fish |
| 18:00 | Decorate an apartment — or go shopping for a better one |
| 22:00 | Neon on. The club, the townies, the chess board |
| 03:00 | CorpSec curfew. Get home before the rain turns cold |
That last row matters more than it looks.
Cozy Does Not Mean Safe
This is where Nivalis Nights separates itself from the wave of gentle farming sims it will inevitably be compared to. The city has teeth. CorpSec is cracking down on the district and enforces a curfew, a serial killer is loose after dark, and business rivals play dirty.
None of that turns it into a combat game. It just means the cozy has an edge on it, and how much of the city's trouble you take on is a decision you make rather than one the plot makes for you.
The City and Its Districts
Nivalis climbs from the ocean to the clouds, governed by a realistic weather system on top of a full day-night cycle. Rain empties a street; neon fills it back up. Crowds, mood and your daily plans all shift with it.
The city opens on a pixel-art map of the skyline, each district tracking its own storefronts, quests and secrets. Four appear in the release date trailer:
- Meridian Market — where every run begins, with half a dozen storefronts within shouting distance
- Central Canyon — a deep cut through the middle of the skyline, storefronts stacked up both walls
- Metro Hub — rail lines cross the whole map here, and the foot traffic is what a restaurant owner dreams about
- Hive Mall — a dense block of shops in one building, with more quest lines than any other district shown so far
Details may still change before launch.
Do You Need to Have Played Cloudpunk?
No. Nivalis Nights is set in the same city as ION LANDS' 2020 cult classic and is built to stand alone. If you drove those streets in Cloudpunk or its City of Ghosts expansion you will recognise corners, signage and small connections — the pleasure of seeing at street level a place you only ever saw from a HOVA. If you have never touched Cloudpunk, you need nothing but an appetite.
The two play nothing alike: Cloudpunk was a narrative delivery-driving game across one long night, Nivalis Nights is a life and business sim across many days.
System Requirements
As listed on the Steam store page. 64-bit Windows only; Steam Deck compatibility has not been verified.
| Minimum | Recommended | |
|---|---|---|
| OS | Windows 10/11 (64-bit) | Windows 10/11 (64-bit) |
| Memory | 16 GB RAM | 16 GB RAM |
| Graphics | Dedicated GPU, 6 GB VRAM | Dedicated GPU, 8 GB VRAM (GTX 2070 or newer) |
| DirectX | Version 11 | Version 12 |
| Storage | 30 GB | 30 GB, SSD recommended |
The 16 GB memory floor is the line most older machines trip over — worth checking before you plan a launch-day evening around it. ATLYSS runs on far less, so do not assume your ATLYSS rig clears this one.
Official Nivalis Nights Links
Every channel below is listed on the official Steam store page or run by the developer and publisher. Wishlisting is the single most useful thing you can do before launch — it is what drives store visibility on release day.
| Where | Link |
|---|---|
| Steam store page (wishlist here) | store.steampowered.com/app/1488490 |
| Epic Games Store | store.epicgames.com/p/nivalis-nights |
| Steam Community Hub | steamcommunity.com/app/1488490 |
| Steam news and updates | Nivalis Nights news hub |
| Release date trailer | YouTube |
| X (Twitter) | @NivalisNights |
| facebook.com/NivalisNights | |
| @nivalisnights | |
| TikTok | @official_505games |
| Discord | discord.gg/ionlands |
| YouTube — ION LANDS | @ionlands |
| YouTube — 505 Games | youtube.com/505games |
| Reddit — the Cloudpunk community | r/Cloudpunk |
| Developer's other games | ION LANDS on Steam |
| Publisher | 505 Games on Steam |
| Fan information site | nivalisnights.org |
Should ATLYSS Players Be Watching This One?
The overlap is real. ATLYSS is a game people play for atmosphere and company as much as for loot; Nivalis Nights is aiming at the same instinct from the other direction — a to-do list you built yourself, in a place you like being, with rain on the awnings. It is single-player, so it will not replace your Friday night group, but it is exactly the thing to have open on the nights nobody else is online.
The ION LANDS pedigree makes the city itself the safest bet in the package. The open question is whether the business and relationship systems have the depth to carry dozens of hours. We find out on September 29, 2026 — until then, wishlist it on Steam and keep an eye on nivalisnights.org.