NTE: Neverness to Everness Review: A Big, Busy Urban Fantasy Still Finding Its Feet

NTE, full name Neverness to Everness, is Hotta Studio and Perfect World Games’ free-to-play urban-fantasy action RPG, playable on Steam after a run of closed betas. It puts you in a modern city where the supernatural bleeds through the everyday: you drive its streets, climb its buildings and deal with paranormal incidents between story beats, using a rotating party of collectible characters. The verdict up front: this is one of the more ambitious free open-world RPGs you can try right now, and it is still visibly a work in progress on PC.

How we tested

We played around 25 hours on the desktop Steam client, covering the opening arc and a chunk of the mid-game, plus side content, the newer limited-time mode and exploration of the open city. Testing was on a mid-range 1440p desktop and touched both controller and mouse-and-keyboard input, along with the character banners and the in-game shop. We did not test the handheld experience beyond confirming the reported performance issues line up with what other players describe.

The city is the reason to look

NTE’s strongest idea is its setting. Rather than a fantasy continent, you get a lived-in contemporary metropolis with traffic, interiors, rooftops and a day-night rhythm, and the supernatural is stitched into that ordinariness rather than kept in dungeons. You can commandeer vehicles and actually drive, the traversal has verticality, and investigation-style quests send you poking around the mundane world for things that are wrong. When it is working, it has an atmosphere that most of its open-world peers, which lean on rural or high-fantasy vistas, do not attempt.

Combat: switch, swap, react

The fighting is a party system where you swap between characters mid-fight, chaining their abilities and playing off elemental and status interactions. Each character has a distinct kit and role, and the collectible layer means your roster grows through story rewards and gacha banners. It is competent and reads clearly, with dodges, skills and ultimates in the expected places. Whether it has the long-term depth to carry hundreds of hours is the open question, and one this early build cannot fully answer.

Content and structure

There is a lengthy voiced campaign, a spread of side activities, and rotating limited-time modes that give the live-service calendar something to hang on. The open world is dense with things to interact with rather than a checklist of towers. Progression follows genre convention: level characters, upgrade gear and skills, farm materials from repeatable content. It is a lot of game for a free download, and it is also clearly built to be expanded patch by patch rather than experienced as a finished whole.

Tech and access on PC

NTE runs through the Steam client but still requires a separate publisher account to log in and play, which is friction worth knowing about. Performance on desktop is playable but not polished, with the kind of frame pacing and streaming hitches common to open-world games at this stage, and the handheld experience is poor enough that it has not earned a verified badge. A stable, good-looking 60 needs a settings pass on mid-range hardware.

Monetisation: unproven, and that matters here

The model is the familiar collectible-character setup: banners for new units, a battle pass, currencies and a shop. What makes it hard to grade is context. Hotta Studio’s previous live-service game drew sustained criticism over its monetisation and post-launch direction, so NTE’s economy deserves scrutiny over time rather than a snap judgement from its first weeks. As of now the campaign is playable without spending and there is no obvious hard paywall, but how generous the pull economy stays once the launch goodwill fades is the thing to watch.

Who it’s for

Try it now if a modern-day open world with driving, paranormal investigations and switch-based party combat sounds like your thing, and you are comfortable being an early adopter of a game that will change under you. Wait if you want your open-world RPGs stable, optimised and with a proven, player-friendly economy before you invest.

Verdict

Neverness to Everness has a genuinely distinctive pitch and the scale to back it up. The city setting is atmospheric and interactive, the combat is solid if unremarkable, and there is enough content that a curious player will get plenty out of it for nothing. It is easy to see the appeal.

It lands in the middle because it is not finished. The PC build needs optimisation work, the account requirement adds friction, and the monetisation is both unproven and coming from a studio whose past record invites caution. If the concept grabs you, it is a reasonable time investment right now with modest expectations. If you want polish and certainty, give it a few more patches and a clearer picture of the economy before you commit.