The project formerly called Nivalis is now officially Nivalis Nights. ION LANDS says nothing fundamental about the game changed with the title: the new name and logo arrived after a third-party legal matter that had kept the studio from making major announcements since October 2025 was resolved.
Publisher 505 Games will release the game through Steam on September 29, 2026. An Epic Games Store release is also planned for a later date.
The same city is being used for a different kind of story
Cloudpunk was built around employment. Its version of Nivalis was filtered through delivery routes, passengers and the experience of moving continuously through a city that rarely felt interested in stopping for anyone.
Nivalis Nights deliberately slows that down. A player can run a noodle stand, expand into restaurants and nightclubs, hire staff and source ingredients, but business management is only one way to spend a day.
Apartments can be bought and decorated. A boat opens the waterways for exploration and fishing. Relationships develop across a cast of more than 100 voiced characters.
There is something unusual about making cyberpunk mundane
Cyberpunk cities usually exist to make people feel small. Nivalis Nights is interested in the opposite scale as well: furnishing a room, serving dinner, talking to someone who lives nearby or deciding that fishing is a better use of an afternoon than expanding a company.
The architecture has not suddenly become friendly. CorpSec crackdowns remain part of the setting, a serial killer hangs over the narrative, and curfew changes what the city allows once the streets empty.
That produces an odd but deliberate mixture of cozy-life-sim routines and the social pressure already associated with Nivalis.
Running a restaurant does not make everyone civil
Business competition can cross into outright sabotage. ION LANDS allows players to interfere with rivals during curfew, while warning that competitors can respond in the same way.
Food connects quieter systems. Ingredients can be bought, grown or caught while fishing, then fed back into restaurants and other venues. Homes, businesses and relationships all compete for the same daily schedule.
The title change is less important than the date attached to it
ION LANDS first revealed the project in 2021. Creative director Marko Dieckmann says the five-year production brought challenges the independent studio had not dealt with before, while the more recent legal issue added another delay to public communication.
That period now has a clear endpoint. Nivalis Nights launches on Steam on September 29, with the Epic Games Store version following later.
