Cloudpunk – Review

I want to talk about Cloudpunk, a game where you get to be a flying-car delivery driver in a futuristic cyberpunk city. Its world is an incredible achievement of environmental design, and while the gameplay itself may be basic, the city of Nivalis is a thing of beauty to behold. Nivalis is built out of hundreds of hand-modelled cuboid buildings; there’s nothing procedural about it. Apparently it took 3 years for the devs to design the city, and it really shows.

It’s perpetually raining, so there’s puddles reflecting the neon lights and hologram advertisements wherever you go, evoking classic Blade Runner vibes. You get a rare glimpse of the starry night sky only when you ascend up from the grungy mid-level urban sprawl to The Spire above the clouds – the vantage of the despicable CEOs who dwell where they can look down on everybody else. 

As you cruise around delivering packages, you are free to park up and explore any of the micro-maze-blocks on foot, walking among the populace along sidewalk gangways thousands of feet in the air, with neon-lit skyscrapers filling up the view in all directions. They rise up out of the dark churning sea below, all the way to the roiling electrical pollution clouds in the sky. Freeways weave a path through the buildings, where hover car traffic commutes in a fairly orderly fashion, with occasional high speed police cars chasing down criminals. Driving on the designated freeways gives you a nice speed boost, making it the preferable way to travel if you’re in a hurry, but there’s nothing stopping you from veering out and flying through this city’s equivalent of a back alley or side “road” – you can fly your HOVA more or less wherever you like.

Nivalis is split into a bunch of sectors, each about a square kilometer in size, connected via gateway tunnels that act as transition points. While it feels quite samey at first, the more you explore, the more variety you see, and start to appreciate just how much labour of love has gone into it. There’s Little China, with its traditional ancient temple inspired architecture; Avalon Heights is filled with corporate skyscrapers and prestige apartment blocks; The Ventz are a series of subterranean tunnels underneath the city, where a hardy group of peasants choose to dwell out of sight of the oppressive authority CorpSec.

Midtown is where Cloudpunk HQ is located, your employer, and your ramshackle apartment. It feels grungy and lived in, there’s lots of tall apartment blocks, noodle stands, and everywhere you look are glowing advertisements for futuristic products, tv shows and services. This is one of those games that you can take a screenshot at any time and you’re guaranteed it will look great. I mean just look at this game in action.

The gameplay leans into a chill vibe, you simply cruise from A to B, with A often being your HQ to pick up a package, and B taking you to every district in the city, both high, low, rich and poor, and everything in between. The minimap highlights points of interest in the form of collectibles, vendors and NPCs, the latter of which offer a good range of quirky personalities and requests. The story leans hard into its cyberpunk theme, with many of Nivalis’ residents being androids, fully synthetic humans with problems unique to their nature. Huxley is probably the best of the bunch, a grizzled private investigator with a damaged neural chip in his head that means he can only communicate in the third person, like a cliche film-noir narrator of an old detective movie. Some might find him grating, but I found him hilarious, and his series of quests were some of my favourite in the whole game.

Other highlights include: when a hazardous containment leak occurs in a residential area, you’re hired to go in and rescue some of the survivors, but you only have space for three people – do you take the poor, hard working doctor who can’t actually afford the “rescue insurance”, or the wealthy snob who needs to get back to her butler, the over-educated researcher who may or may not have caused the leak in the first place, or the brand new android who has only been conscious for a few hours when this incident occurred (if he doesn’t get out of there, he will be reset and sent to a new owner before he’s even had a chance to live); a mission that takes you up to the highest point of the city to deliver an urgent package to a CEO, which turns out to be a pizza, emphasising the wasteful and general shittiness of the super rich; or the time you’re asked to deliver a package that starts ticking not long after you pick it up…do you take it to its destination, or drop it down a trash chute?

The game gives you numerous choices as you play, and they sometimes feel quite meaningful. You even get little bonus moments directly related to your choices near the end of the story, as old faces contact you to give a bit of feedback on the repercussions of your decisions earlier in the night (oh, the entire game takes place across a single, albeit long night). These choices are just thoughtful enough to tickle the brain and I enjoyed all of them, including the final decision at the very end, which supposedly determines the fate of the city itself. The writing is generally decent throughout, and while it doesn’t always land with a punch, for an indie game, the voice acting and ideas on display are definitely worthy of praise. Oh, and the synthy soundtrack is pretty on point too.

You can get Cloudpunk on Steam or consoles but the consensus seems to be that the PC version is the most stable and best-looking. I enjoyed the vibes, and recommend it to any fans of the cyberpunk genre who want a chill time cruising through the skies for a few hours.