Original verdict
7.8/ 10VerdictThe best urban open world in the gacha space, wrapped in a genuinely generous banner and a charming life-sim layer. A slow story and shaky performance on weaker hardware keep it from greatness.
NTE: Neverness to Everness comes from Hotta Studio, the Perfect World team behind Tower of Fantasy, and you can feel the lessons learned. Launched globally on April 29, 2026 across PC, PlayStation 5 and mobile, it drops the open-world action-RPG formula into a supernatural modern-day city where you work as the Appraiser for an antiques shop that quietly hunts down anomalies. After spending real time wandering its streets, the pitch is clear: this is the most alive urban setting the gacha genre currently offers. Whether that is enough to carry you depends on your patience for a slow start and the state of your hardware.
A city worth living in
The star of NTE is Hethereau, its open-world city, and it is easily the game's biggest achievement. This is not a set of pretty corridors dressed up as a metropolis. You can hop on buses and trains, poke into shops, take on odd jobs, and stumble across small stories tucked into corners. The place feels populated and lived-in rather than staged, and moving through it is a pleasure in its own right. Among gacha open worlds, nothing else feels this much like a real place you inhabit rather than a level you clear.
That density feeds a life-sim layer that we came to appreciate more than expected. Between combat you can settle into everyday activities that give the game texture, a rhythm that pure action-collect games lack. It will not satisfy someone chasing wall-to-wall spectacle, but it is what gives NTE its personality and its sense of place.
Combat and the slow-burn story
Combat is real-time action in the modern gacha mold: fast, flashy, built around swapping characters and stringing together skills. It is competent and enjoyable without reinventing anything, and it is clearly not the reason the game exists. If your only measure of a game like this is combat depth and boss design, NTE will feel middling; it is serviceable rather than exceptional, and hardcore action fans will find deeper systems elsewhere.
The bigger issue is pacing. The story struggles to hook you early, front-loading setup and slow introductions before the supernatural-detective premise pays off. We nearly checked out in the opening hours, and only the pull of exploration kept us going until things clicked. Players who need a strong narrative grip from minute one should know this going in: NTE rewards patience, and it asks for a fair amount of it first.
