Essentially, four new enemies have been added – the Valnakraai, Ostophagos, Noir Monarch and Stalker – which have been designed in collaboration with backers. New spells in the Daryon, Fallon and Ysoris families have been added and the battle interface show displays elements affected by the weather. Nine new side quests have also been added while fights have been re-balanced to be more challenging.

New flowers have been added to boost the speed of the Nekaroo in the world and various bugs and issues have also been fixed. Check out some of the patch notes below with full notes here. Edge of Eternity is currently available for PC but will be coming to Xbox and PlayStation in Q4 2021 along with more new content. Stay tuned for additional updates in the meantime.

UPDATE NOTES:

New Content

• Added nine new side quests
• Eight new party inn scenes
• Added four new monsters in the world (Valnakkrai / Ostophagos / Noir Monarch / Stalker)
• Added new Spells for Daryon, Fallon and Ysoris

Features

• Added Nekaroo boosters, you can now find flowers that can boost the speed of your Nekaroo across the field

Fixes

• Fix overlapping text in Teleport interface
• Fix overlapping arrow and console icon in Shop UI
• Fix Ysoris Barrier causing some spell to not reduce HP to one
• Fix Scan UI will now display the squashed stats
• Fix Creature unable to move to a case to reach an ally
• Fix Dialog bubble that could hide some interfaces
• Fix Arc Selection not working properly
• Fix Klaysha and Borborygm will no longer move when using ejection skills on them
• Fix Big Orokko not having full HP on Highest difficulty when fighting in the camp
• Fix Daryon Special attack costing mana
• Fix Fallon Exploration Attack animation stuck
• Fix some entities spawning at a wrong position
• Fix missing icons
• Fix missing drones during Myrna fight
• Fix soft lock occurring during equipment tutorial if you already have an equipment set
• Fix flamethrower/reactor decor interact that could cause no damage
• Fix passive shield lost when receiving damages blocked by cover
• Fix Tyr Caelym defense game over not occurring when Ysoris and Selene are dead but ally turrets are still alive
• Fix soft lock occurring during battle moves
• Fix Repulse node not triggering case enter event

Edge of Eternity takes place on Heryon which is suffering from Corrosion as the fallout from a war with mysterious aliens. As Daryon and Selene, the player embarks on a journey that will “change the fate of Heryon forever.” 

Support for the game will continue after launch with the developer revealing a post-launch roadmap. Q4 2021 sees the release of Xbox and PlayStation versions, an additional party member, new monsters and quests, extra “special” additional content and more. In January 2022, there will be endgame content, full Nekaroo farm and breeding, secret dungeons and New Game+. Check out the full roadmap below for more details.

Ion Lands’ intriguing cyberpunk adventure Cloudpunk is getting some paid DLC. City of Ghosts takes place directly after the main story and features Rania and Hayse, a new character, exploring Nivalis. With Curzona, the Debt Corps and a killer cyborg after Rania, it’s all she can do to survive.

Hayse, on the other hand, is looking to clear his debt before the next morning and has a CorpSec android accompanying. How these two stories intertwine will be revealed in the DLC, which has a “sequel’s worth of content” as per the developer. Said new content includes street races with the ability to customize one’s HOVA and multiple endings based on decisions made in Cloudpunk and City of Ghosts.

Nivalis itself offers new areas to explore and new characters to interact with. The campaign will be fully-voiced and “as long” as that of the base game. It also seems that other characters will be playable besides Rania and Hayse. A release date for the DLC wasn’t provided so stay tuned for more details in the coming months.

Rania, or 14FC, as she is addressed by her supervisor, a mysterious character known as “Control”, embodies a certain spirit in her character that anyone who’s ever worked a repetitive, dead-end job just to make ends meet will immediately understand and empathize with. She’s not exactly thrilled to be where she is but she’s making the best of it. Picking up and delivering packages as Rania for Cloudpunk is the core of the gameplay. Getting in your HOVA to cross the vast stretches of the cityscape, landing it on the right platforms, and strolling to the package’s destination to hand it off to the recipient is an accurate way to describe the gameplay loop, but to say that’s all Cloudpunk is would be missing the forest for the trees. The real essence of the game is found in the story, it’s characters and slowly soaking in the atmosphere. Over time you get to understand how things work, and while it’s simple on the surface, there is some depth to be found here.

The frame rate, at least on console is best described as reliably unreliable. Interestingly it’s fairly serviceable when you are walking around on the ground but completely takes a nosedive when you start flying around and your HOVA, despite being in the exact same environment. It never quite got into motion sickness territory for me, but if you are particularly sensitive to that sort of thing, it’s probably worth checking to see if it’s been cleaned up with a patch before you purchase the game. At the time of writing this review the PS4 version has not been. It’s a shame that this is an issue for Cloudpunk at this point, but here’s hoping it gets resolved soon.

"The real essence of the game is found in the story, it’s characters and slowly soaking in the atmosphere. Over time you get to understand how things work, and while it’s simple on the surface, there is some depth to be found here."

Speaking of walking around you can do it in three different perspectives most of the time. A fixed camera angle from far away, a more traditional 3rd person angle that you can control, and a first person view. Cloudpunk never really does much to make one camera style preferable to another, so it’s really just about your preference. I appreciate the options, but I mostly found the regular 3rd-person angle to be the best balance most of the time.

The two main hemispheres of Cloudpunk’s gameplay are somewhat unbalanced in their importance, and not in the way you might suspect at first. Flying the HOVA is fine, and serves as a nice excuse for the game to give you little drips of exposition, but the game is actually far more interesting while you’re on foot, picking up objects, observing the tone of the world, buying things for your apartment, and interacting with the slew of fascinating characters. Cloudpunk’s NPC’s go a long way towards building this world with unique designs, great writing, and mostly fitting into one of three categories; Taking advantage of society’s shortcomings for their own gain, being victims of it, or doing their best to hold things together with duct tape, hopes, and dreams. All of these character archetypes shine a light on many of the destructive attributes we see emerging today and the growing uncertainty fueled by economic deterioration.

It doesn’t really provide any sort of overt commentary or judgements on those things, but it does a tasteful job of depicting an eerily believable future stage of them. The one character that sort of defies the doom and gloom is Camus, Rania’s dog. He rounds out the cast of characters nicely and provides some much needed levity in the game. Despite being written and performed, distracting similarly to Doug from Up, I rather enjoyed him and how he actually gives Rania something to personally care about. Overall, the writing, the voice acting, and the context behind the game’s many seemingly mundane deliveries is what really drives the experience forward and keeps it interesting. Many times, Rania is faced with morally grey choices that you decide on by how and where you deliver a package. These moments are some of the best in the entire game. They force you to consider options, perhaps go back and forth a bit, and ultimately make a call. Before you know it, you’ll be hanging on every one of Rania’s lines and genuinely worrying about the ramifications of whatever choice you made.

"Overall, the writing, the voice acting, and the context behind the game’s many seemingly mundane deliveries is what really drives the experience forward and keeps it interesting."

Meanwhile, the other side of the game is driving you HOVA around, which controls more or less like a floating tank, this isn’t helped at all by the bad framerate on the PS4, which I imagine isn’t any better on the Switch. Using the right stick to control elevation and the triggers to control going forward and backward is instantly easy to get used to, that said, the driving does suffer a bit from depth-of-field issues. I found myself hitting things that I had no idea I was close enough to come into contact with more often than I should have, and I think they could have been a little more generous with how close I needed to be to a parking space to land on it. That said, I never found it to be agonizingly bad, it just happens to be the weakest element of the game overall. Managing your damage and gas do help a bit with fleshing this part of the game out on paper, but I mostly felt like these things were just distracting me from Cloudpunk’s better half; the story.

To describe Cloudpunk as a delivery game with a good story, wouldn’t be entirely accurate. That’s more of a description of Death Stranding, whose gameplay is mostly focused on the adventure of the delivery itself. Cloudpunk doesn’t quite do that. It’s not really a delivery game with a story as much as it is a story-driven adventure game that just happens to use a delivery system as a device to propel its narrative. It’s not so much about figuring out “how” to make a delivery as it is about asking “why”. Cloudpunk’s world wants Rania to think it’s simple and straight up. But it’s characters and it’s story force you as a player to realize it’s anything but.

It pulls this dichotomy off with such elegance, that it’s ultimately a little disappointing to see that it doesn’t have much else up its sleeve. It goes out of its way to constantly remind you of the interesting world you’re in, yet ultimately, only uses what it has created to remind you that it exists. Some players may find that to be perfectly fine, and that to have some sort of singular moral grandstand on one perspective or another would ultimately subvert the games underlying theme of choice and consequence, and I don’t necessarily disagree with that. But at the same time, I would be lying if I said I felt totally satisfied after being shown such a well-crafted series of quandaries over and over without ever seeing it lead anywhere other than to more reminders of its own profundity.

"Despite its flaws in the technical department, which are, at times fairly egregious, Cloudpunk does a pretty good job of making you forget about that with a surprisingly good story most of the time."

Despite its flaws in the technical department, which are, at times fairly egregious, Cloudpunk does a pretty good job of making you forget about that with a surprisingly good story most of the time. Once the story reaches the bottom of it’s bag of tricks however, you might start to notice its untapped potential becoming more noticeable as the game wears on. Depending on the player, the momentum created at the beginning might be enough to carry you through, but for most, I suspect, the ceiling created by its own unpolished gameplay and it’s inability to conclude in a satisfying way, will just barely keep it from achieving actual greatness.

Most great adventure games get away with shallow gameplay because of how satisfying their stories are. Cloudpunk gets closer to that than I thought it would, but still stops short of it. This particular adventure game does deliver the goods, just not quite enough of them, or in a consistent enough manner, for me to overlook it’s issues. In Cloudpunk, the good and the bad are simply a package deal.

This game was reviewed on the PlayStation 4.

"We’re 80s kids where ninjas were everywhere and pretty big, including video games. Once the opportunity came to create a beat ’em up game, it was an obvious choice to make it based on Ninjas and their origin, ancient Far East."

Why did you choose to go with an ancient Far East theme?

We’re 80s kids where ninjas were everywhere and pretty big, including video games. Once the opportunity came to create a beat ’em up game, it was an obvious choice to make it based on Ninjas and their origin, ancient Far East.

Can you speak to us a bit about the game’s mini-games and how these will be integrated with Clan N’s beat-em-up action?

Ah, of course! From the beginning, we thought we should give some small gaps to the action in order to provide variety and break the repetitive feeling of beat em up genre. Remembering our mobile game background, we thought we should explore the well known casual game mechanics and see whether we can bake them into the overall game. As it turns out, we could! All the minigames have a seamless transition from the main gameplay to their own mechanics and complete the overall main story.

For example- at a point you reach an edge of a cliff with no visible path to walk. As a coincidence, you come across sleeping dragons on the same place where you hop on them to flap into the next walk point while dodging the hill blocks. Another thing worth to mention is that all these minigames will support multiple players as well as the ability to play separately from the main gameplay when wanted.

Are there any classic beat em ups that you looked at in particular for inspiration?

Not any particular one but as a whole, late 80s / early 90s beat em ups were a huge inspiration for us, like Final Fight, TMNT, The Punisher, etc. On the other hand, we didn’t refrain from referencing some of them in Clan N!

Can we expect to see much variety in boss and mini boss encounters?

Each boss will be quite different with it’s own character and will also reflect the theme of the level. I believe there’ll be some surprises in there the players are going to like a lot.

"We are a little off from our initial target date but it won’t be long to deliver the game into the gamers hands and we’ll provide the exact release date soon."

Similarly, how much will the game’s levels differ from each other? Are these going to be aesthetic changes, or can we expect elements to change and affect gameplay as well?

The additional features you see from the beginning, compared to the traditional beat em up games, won’t change in a revolutionary way in the later levels but you’ll see a big transition in enemy types and even specific enemies on specific levels. Each level has it’s own unique theme and this will also reflect the design of the levels as well ranging from horizontal to four way. We even have some small platforming sections as well!

Is Clan N still scheduled for a 2019 launch- do you have any updates on that front?

Yes, indeed. We are a little off from our initial target date but it won’t be long to deliver the game into the gamers hands and we’ll provide the exact release date soon.

As an indie developer, what is your take on the Nintendo Switch, which seems to have become a haven for ambitious indie titles?

As you said, it’s a haven for indies, especially when you look at the sale numbers of titles on the platform. It’s such a good fit for indie games, which targets to a medium gameplay-session in between the mobile and AAA console titles. Especially it’s mobility fits to that purpose very well and this is noticed but other as well where you can see from Apple’s latest Arcade lineup. We believe that it’ll continue to rise as the kingdom of indies in the following days.

Will the game will feature Xbox One X specific and PS4 Pro specific enhancements? What can players expect if they are playing the game on those systems? Is 4K/60fps on the cards?

We’ll support 4K/60 fps on both.

How is the game running on the original Xbox One and PS4, frame rate and resolution wise?

Again a solid 60 fps, but with 1080p this time.

"The Switch is a haven for indies, especially when you look at the sale numbers of titles on the platform. It’s such a good fit for indie games, which targets to a medium gameplay-session in between the mobile and AAA console titles."

What resolution and frame rate does the game run in docked and undocked modes on the Switch?

For docked we have 60 fps/1080p, where on undocked mode we have again 60 fps, but with 720p as the resolution.

What is your take on Sony’s reluctant policy on cross-play with Xbox and Nintendo?

We can understand that from a platform owner’s perspective, this is a threat for the exclusivity of that platform but the trends shows that this will become a norm in the near future and we believe all platforms will meet on common ground, similar to the support of indie games on consoles which was nearly non-existent a few years back.

Do you think cross platform will be one of the defining features of next-gen consoles?

Yes, with the ongoing transition from product to services, it seems that the platform experience will matter rather than the hardware itself in the foreseeable future.