Nivalis is a game that whenever I see it I just think “oh, that can’t be right, games like this don’t actually exist do they?” Arguable, until it’s actually out, its existence is neither here nor there. But at the very least for the month of February, instead of talking at us lot in their monthly devlogs, developer Ion Lands opted to show off a little snippet of the game’s opening moments to tide us over until release.

As it turns out, the game starts as many often (perhaps too often) do, with you waking up not quite entirely sure of what’s going on, though you quickly learn from a voice in your head called Ava that there’s a serial killer on the loose. Not particularly life simy! But quite cyberpunk, so, it balances it out.

There’s a little look at the kind of finagling you’ll be doing as you set up your restaurant, too, mostly just setting up some tables and chairs. I like the look of the approach to doing so – there’s no grid to place the tables on, so they might not look exactly perfect, but anyone that’s worked in such an environment will know that your tables can never be perfectly placed. To compensate though, chairs do snap to specific spots, so some amount of order is possible to establish.

Mostly I like the tiny glimpses of the weirdo cast of characters the game features. A guy called Thaddeus who just talks at you about making choices, a robot called “Salt Pete” as opposed to “Salty Pete,” an obnoxious IRL Twitch streamer, an android sailor that clearly wants me to ask him about his boat. These are all people I want to talk to (maybe less so the Twitch streamer), and maybe even get to know from just a sliver of dialogue, so that bodes well.

Ion Lands do note that “the footage should not be considered final,” which doesn’t make it any clearer how far away the thing is from being finished (it received a second delay last year), but in the meantime you can wishlist it here.