Neverness to Everness: Don’t Fall for the Gacha

Hotta Studio, the same studio that got famous with Tower of Fantasy, has recently released a game that mixes a supernatural Grand Theft Auto style with a gacha system. It’s free-to-play, and if you decide to play it without reaching for your wallet, you will find some surprisingly fun mechanics. However, Neverness to Everness wants your money and will do its best to pull you in by giving you just enough that you feel like you have no choice but to start dancing to their tune.

The Neon-Lit Hustle

In NTE, you fight weird monsters. Then you brew yourself a nice cup of joe and drive yourself directly into jail.

If you’ve played Genshin and all the clones that have popped up over the years, then you know exactly what you’re getting yourself into. The fighting is fast and uses a four-person squad that you can swap on the fly. You build up a meter by attacking, but if you land a perfect parry, that meter fills up right away.

Once it’s full, you swap characters to set off huge elemental chains. You can mix elements like Cosmos and Anima to spawn a shooting turret. You also have to break an enemy’s stagger bar before you can really hurt them. Parrying and dodging are the fastest ways to do that. It all feels very reactive but combat is just one small piece of a much bigger picture.

Welcome to the Tycoon side. The game splits your energy, and we loved how it encourages us to use a separate weekly stamina pool just for city life. In the moments where the dust has settled, we ran businesses.

We treasured those times when we actually bought ingredients, set the menu, and assigned our characters to work shifts. It adds a nice slice-of-life break between the action. But it’s not all just mindless, boring fun.

As we’ve said, the game reminded us of GTA. So, naturally, we stole a car and had the police chase us across the city. We thought we could escape easily, but we ended up in a dead end and they took us to jail.

This is where the game pleasantly surprised us. The jail is an actual playable area. Of course, you can just pay a fine to leave. Or, you can play the long game and be a good prisoner until you decide to escape à la Shawshank Redemption. For a penalty system, the devs came up with something insanely complex. Just for being there, you can farm special prison rewards. It honestly makes you want to get caught. We were having a blast exploring everything the city had to offer, until we hit that monetization wall.

Finally, we have to talk about the gacha. We hate gacha, and that’s the only reason why we aren’t going to be playing the game anymore. Gacha is a cancer and represents everything that’s wrong with monetization in gaming.

We remember a time when we drained our account pulling for wishes in Genshin. It broke us completely, both financially and psychologically. We thought we had learned our lesson, and then we did the same thing with Honkai.

Getting new characters here is like playing a board game. You roll dice to move a piece around a board, picking up upgrade materials on different tiles. One small mercy here is that there’s no 50/50 coin flip. If you hit an S-Rank on a limited banner, it is 100% guaranteed to be the featured character. You might think that takes away a lot of the usual frustration, but it’s still hard pity on the 90th pull.

Trust us when we say this: this is a game that you simply can’t enjoy unless you’re willing to spend money. A lot of it. We strongly recommend against it. Those free rewards that the devs are giving are just meant to make things worse.

ID Card:

• Developer: Hotta Studio
• Publisher: Perfect World Games
• Engine: Unreal Engine 5
• Platforms: PC, macOS, PlayStation 5, iOS, Android
• Release Date: April 29, 2026 (Global)
• Genre: Supernatural Urban Open-World RPG