Hotta Studio doesn't do small. Tower of Fantasy, their first open-world RPG, launched hot and burned through player goodwill almost as fast with aggressive monetization and a content drought that sent its community into open revolt. Neverness to Everness, their second swing at the formula, launched globally on April 29 across PC, PS5, and phones — and early signs suggest the studio actually learned from its mistakes.
Set in the fictional city of Hethereau, NTE casts you as an unlicensed Anomaly Hunter investigating supernatural events in a modern urban setting. Think Genshin Impact meets Ghostbusters meets a Japanese light novel — it's weird, it knows it's weird, and it leans into the weirdness with a confidence that makes the whole thing work. The city itself is dense and vertical in a way that rewards exploration, with rooftop shortcuts, underground passages, and environmental puzzles tucked into alleyways that most players will walk past without a second glance.
Combat That Respects Your Thumbs
On a phone screen, the hack-and-slash combat is significantly better than it has any right to be. NTE uses a tag-team system where you swap between characters mid-combo, and the touch controls are responsive enough that the swap feels like a fighting game mechanic rather than a menu selection. The dodging is tight, the hit feedback is punchy, and the skill animations are short enough that you're never locked into a three-second cutscene when you need to be rolling out of a boss telegraph.
The NVIDIA RTX launch trailer showcased path-traced lighting and DLSS 4 on the PC version, which means NTE is one of those rare cross-platform free-to-play games that actually scales from flagship phones to high-end desktop GPUs without feeling like it was designed for just one of those targets.
The Gacha Question
Yes, it's a gacha game. Character pulls follow the standard pity system, and premium currency exists. But Hotta has been noticeably more generous with launch rewards than they were with Tower of Fantasy, and the early content — roughly 30 hours of main story across the first two regions — doesn't hit the kind of power walls that force free players to either pull or grind. Whether that generosity survives the first six months of live service is anyone's guess, but the launch window is the most player-friendly version of Hotta's design philosophy we've seen.
Neverness to Everness is free to play now on all platforms with full cross-save and cross-play support. If you bounced off Tower of Fantasy and wrote Hotta off entirely, NTE might be worth a second look — it's a fundamentally better game in almost every way that matters.
