Cloudpunk puts you behind the wheel of a flying car on your first night as a delivery driver in Nivalis, a city built upward on tall vertical structures above the sea. Your name is Rania. Your employer is a semi-legal courier company with two rules: don’t miss a delivery, and don’t ask what’s in the package.
Trailer, via ION LANDS.
Rania and the HOVA
Developer Ion Lands, a German studio, built Cloudpunk around that premise. The player maneuvers a HOVA through the city, collecting and delivering packages and passengers, parking on certain spaces to explore on foot. Upgrades raise the car’s speed and durability. Rania can buy items to decorate her apartment.
The setup carries real texture. Rania is a recent immigrant from the “Eastern Peninsula,” fleeing loan shark “debt corps.” She arrives with her former robot dog, Camus, whose body she sold while moving to Nivalis and aims to buy him a new one. She installs his digital mind in her HOVA.
Her dispatcher, Control, is world-weary and blunt. He tells her HOVA crashes are common and that she got the job because it has a very high mortality rate. It is a sharp piece of writing: the game hands you a vehicle and then tells you the vehicle is the threat.
CORA, Camus and the Choices
Cloudpunk is a story-based exploration game, and its best material sits in the people Rania meets — androids, AI and unscrupulous humans at every level of society. Some missions let the player make decisions that shape outcomes. Optional story items scattered through Nivalis unlock side quests. Rania can, for instance, decide whether to let an elderly street racer continue his dangerous career.
The plot turns on a private investigator android named Huxley, who enlists Rania to save a young girl, Pashta. Pashta’s memory-boosting implant recorded proof of illegal activity by her father, Reoh, who took her to have it removed. He could not pay the surgeon. Debt corps took Pashta. She wrote the proof down and threatened to leak it.
Everyone has a story, and in the course of one night in Nivalis, everything will change.
That line is the game’s thesis, and it mostly holds. The word “CORA” recurs as local slang for chance or fate, and Rania’s puzzlement over it gives the night a quiet throughline. Rania befriends Control and learns his real name, Ben.
The weakness is the driving itself. A game about a delivery service lives or dies on whether the deliveries feel like anything, and Cloudpunk’s third-person HOVA work reads as transport between better scenes rather than the point. The moral choices land, but they are small pivots inside a fixed night.
Cloudpunk released on PC on 23 April 2020, ported by Stage Clear Studios to Switch, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on 15 October 2020, then to PlayStation 5 on 19 August 2022 and Xbox Series X/S on 16 October 2023. It is a mood piece with a strong script and a thin core loop, and the mood is the part you remember.
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