When I first saw Cloudpunk I was instantly drawn to the cyberpunk inspired art style. Taking a closer look I saw not only did the game's visuals look cool but it appeared that there might be quite an interesting plot to gel everything together. It took me awhile to finally pick the game up but I'm so glad I did. Everything I had imagine about the art and story held up to my expectations and honestly left room to wow me. Although I do enjoy taking in the city it was the superb writing that really sucked me right in. This heavily narrative driven game has some of the funniest and most heart warming dialog I've experienced in a videogame. Come take the journey to Nivalis with me and experience one night in the life of a discreet delivery driver.
In this game you play as Rania, a young woman who has just left the country side to find work in the mega city of Nivalis. Rania takes a job with the delivery service Cloudpunk where her mostly-friendly dispatcher expects to deliver goods no questions asked. This puts her in a lot of awkward positions as she often doesn't know if she is handling something dangerous or maybe she can't morally stand by the cargo or it's recipients. What ever the cost her job is important to her as she had to sell everything to get to Nivalis including the body of her robot dog Camus. Rania quickly installs Camus' AI to be her interface for her car which results in endless laughs as you get to see everything through a dogs point of view. Fun and games aside Rania gets mixed up with some powerful people and the whole city, in a certain sense, is waiting to see how she'll handle the situations thrown at her.
Much of your time is simply spent flying from one place to another in your HOVA. Flying around this is massive city is quite enjoyable even if the building structures are occasionally a bit repetitive. Thankfully your mini-map with keep you on track otherwise it would be incredibly easy to just lose yourself in the city. Once you arrive at your destination you can explore on foot. The areas you get to walk around vary quite dramatically in size but there is almost always interesting things to occupy your time. You can trade with vendors to buy various knick-knacks including clothing used to dress Rania in your favorite styles. Restaurants offer food to give you a little boost and drug dealers offer another sort of fix. More interesting are the unique characters you encounter who may just want someone to discuss their troubles with or may attempt to entice Rania into a little distraction from her job with Cloudpunk.
As you explore the different parts of town you'll find all sorts of stuff just laying around the ground. Lots of it is just junk like power cells, magazines, and cybernetics' which you can pawn off to vendors to make a quick buck. Some of the items are worth keeping one or two of on the occasion you find a use for them. Most interesting of these items are a series of punch cards which you can collect to help your neighbor restore her lost memories. Your android neighbor is great example of what this game does best. Its all the little stories and relationships you build that are the highlight of this experience. This can take the form of meeting and android gang that wants to cause trouble by building playgrounds or encountering a strange elevator that thinks of itself as a monster which is eating it's passengers.
It is hard to go into too much detail about the plot and characters as I wish for you to experience the joy of this delightful story for yourself. I was blown away by how fun and genuine the writing was. Even just the banter between Rania and her dog Camus is often down-right laugh out loud silly. The gameplay holding the story together is fairly simple but services the game well enough. The flying is quite relaxing and every time you land somewhere new it can be fun to meet a new local and collect all the stuff laying around. I want to guess it took me around 12 hours or so to complete this game and considering the quality of the overall experience I'd say the price of entry is very reasonable. So if you enjoy cyberpunk stories or your just open minded to something different definitely take the trip to Nivalis.