NTE: Neverness to Everness: our verdict

NTE launched worldwide on April 29, 2026, on PC, PS5, Mac, iOS, and Android with full cross-progression, and it's easily one of the more distinctive open-world releases of the year — an urban fantasy sandbox that borrows GTA Online's life-sim sprawl and points it at a supernatural mystery city instead of a crime story.

The essentials

Hethereau, the city at the center of NTE, is the star of the show. Built on Unreal Engine 5, it draws visibly from Tokyo, Seoul, and San Francisco, and the presentation leans hard into reflective, rain-slicked streets, a working day-night cycle, and weather systems that actually change how the city looks and feels to move through. It's the kind of urban open world that rewards just walking around — something too many "open world" games promise and few actually deliver.

The premise layers "Anomalies" — supernatural incursions — onto otherwise mundane city life, and the Ghost Train system, which lets you jump instantly into pocket-dimension "Anomaly space," is a clever way to keep the fantastical stuff from feeling bolted onto a realistic setting. You're not just fighting monsters in a normal city; the city's rules bend around the anomalies in ways that feel considered rather than arbitrary.

The experience

What impressed us most in our time with NTE is the sheer breadth of side content that doesn't feel like padding. Racing, fishing, and tile-matching minigames sit alongside fuller RPG systems, and unlike a lot of open-world filler, most of what we tried had its own small loop worth returning to rather than being a one-and-done checklist item. If you liked the "everyday life plus escalating chaos" tension that made GTA Online's non-heist activities weirdly compelling, NTE scratches a similar itch with a very different tone.

Combat and character-building sit on solid if unspectacular foundations — competent action combat with skill trees and gear progression that gets the job done without being the most innovative thing here. The city and its systems are doing the heavy lifting on charisma; the RPG chassis underneath is there to support that, not steal the spotlight.

The limits

NTE arrived with baggage. Ahead of launch, the game faced real backlash after some promotional and in-game assets were identified as generative-AI output, a controversy that cut deep with a playerbase already sensitive to AI use in games they're being asked to pay into. Hotta Studio responded by removing the flagged material, which defused the immediate fire, but it's the kind of story that lingers in a game's reputation longer than the fix takes to ship — worth knowing going in, even if what you'll actually play no longer contains the offending content.

The other honest caveat is that ambition this broad comes with some thinning at the edges. With racing, fishing, minigames, combat, exploration, and a full social/anomaly narrative all competing for development attention, a few systems feel like they exist to round out the checklist rather than because they're each individually best-in-class. None of it is bad — it's more that the city itself outshines most of what you do inside it.

Who is this for

NTE is for players who want an open world they can genuinely live in rather than just clear objectives across — fans of GTA Online's sandbox sprawl, urban fantasy anime aesthetics, or anyone who wants a modern city rendered with unusual care. It's less suited to players who want tight, focused combat systems as the main draw, or anyone still put off by the pre-launch AI controversy regardless of the fix.

Verdict: 8.0/10. NTE: Neverness to Everness is an ambitious, largely successful urban sandbox that earns its open-world label better than most competitors, even if a few individual systems feel like scaffolding around the city's genuine star power. The AI-asset controversy is worth knowing about, but doesn't reflect what ships in the final experience.