Several months have passed since the rather memorable first night on the job for Cloudpunk delivery driver Rania. She is still ticking along, doing her thing, when another crazy night starts. Before sunrise, Rania will become an illicit street racer, renewed her contacts with the movers and shakers of the city, and become the target for a relentless assassin.
City of Ghosts is the expansion to the 2020 indie hit Cloudpunk. "Expansion" may do the title an injustice, as it is about as long as the original Cloudpunk storyline and expands on some of the ideas presented in the original game. However, the title does not bring enough new to the table in terms of locations or gameplay features to warrant being a full sequel. Instead, it's an impressively large slice of new content, even if it does nail that expansion pack feel of "if you liked the original, you'll like this, if you didn't, there's nothing here to change your mind."
Once again you're controlling Rania, the protagonist of the first game, as you navigate the airways and streets of the futuristic, ocean-straddling city of Nivalis. Nivalis is divided into airways where you can fly your HOVA (hovercar) and neighbourhoods where you can land, get out of the car and walk around on foot. Only a relatively small part of the city is explorable on foot, divided into a couple dozen areas on the map, but this gives the illusion of the city being open-world even when it's not. As with the first game, a lot of your time is spent picking up packages and occasionally people and driving them to a destination. The on-foot areas do have some collectibles to find (some play a role in the story, but most are there to sell to make money), and very rarely important NPCs and quest-givers you can stumble across, but these are few and far between.
More than the first game, City of Ghosts also likes to shake things up, at least a little. The very start will confuse the hell out of veterans as the first game as you get to know a new protagonist called Hayse, before he abruptly vanishes and you go almost the full length of the game before he shows up again. At another key point in the game you get to take control of Rania's pet AI-dog Camus, recently installed in a new body, and this is fun as Camus can run around at much greater speed than the human characters. A rather creepy section set deep in the bowels of the city benefits from turning into a Resident Evil game, complete with fixed cameras and tank controls, as you try to find keys and ways of moving deeper into a deserted (or is it...?) neighbourhood in search of answers. The game also gives you a few new options, such as being able to buy new HOVAs with different characteristics and swap between them as needed (including fast-but-fragile models for racing).
These improvements are muted by being limited. You only control Hayse and Camus for relatively brief periods, and can't swap between them at will. The Resident Evil section is cool but maybe lasts half an hour, max. Buying new HOVAs is fun but ultimately the game is still completable no matter which vehicles you have. As with the first game, the narrative is the key draw and you can make choices at various moments in the game which have an outcome on the finale, although sometimes the consequences of the choices you make are so vaguely defined it's hard to make a well-informed choice in the moment, not helped by the game's stingy save system.
Still, Cloudpunk was a serious vibe back in 2020 and it remains so now. Driving around the rainy city streets listening to the superb, chilled-out synth-driven soundtrack is quite fun, even if the driving controls remain a bit janky. Walking around the neon vistas may wear out your screenshot button. The Minecraft-ish voxel aesthetic is starting to wear a little thin here, but when the game looks as good as it does, complaining about it would be churlish.
The story is pretty good, and the side-vignettes are often quite compelling. Being contacted by a cryogenic "time-skipper" in deep space who gives you the first clue on just how far in the future the game is set is a hairs-on-the-neck moment. Rania trying to work how to respond to a client with a crush on her is funny. The voice work, the weakest link of the original game (Rania thankfully excepted), is improved here, even if it's not as consistently strong as most players would like. The tonal shift from dystopian semi-comedy to tragedy is repeated here, maybe more successfully than in the original game.
Cloudpunk: City of Ghosts (***½) adds another eight to nine hours of fun adventuring to the original game. The core gameplay loop - pick up something, fly across the city, drop it off whilst the characters engage in exposition voice-overs - remains fun but also remains limited. There are attempts here to freshen up the formula and these are successful, but also not as extensive as you might wish. If you want a varied and action-packed game, this is not it. But for a more chilled-out narrative adventure game, City of Ghosts fits the bill nicely. The expansion is - somewhat incomprehensibly - only available for the PC version of the game, despite the original also launching on Switch, Xbox One and PlayStation 4.
A semi-sequel called Nivalis Nights, allowing you to run multiple businesses in Nivalis, will be released on 29 November this year.
