NTE: Neverness to Everness Review (2026): Worth Playing?

From the Tower of Fantasy Team, on a Bigger Canvas

Hotta Studio didn't come out of nowhere for this one. The same team built Tower of Fantasy, and after spending real production time on that game's most city-dense region (Mirroria), they used what they learned there as the starting point for something new rather than a sequel. Neverness to Everness launched worldwide on April 29, 2026, built on Unreal Engine 5 (a jump up from Tower of Fantasy's UE4 base) with DLSS and RTX support baked in — the studio's first game actually built around current hardware instead of scaling down for it.

The pitch: you're an unlicensed "anomaly hunter" in Hethereau, a city where supernatural Anomalies are a fact of daily life, and the job is equal parts investigation, combat, and just living in the place. It's a stranger, more grounded premise than Tower of Fantasy's sci-fi setting, and it mostly earns that shift.

What Hethereau Actually Feels Like to Play

Official character trailer — Enter Hethereau →

The reason this holds up past the first few hours is that Hethereau doesn't feel like one open world stretched thin — each district has a distinct visual identity and its own reason to explore it, which is the detail most gacha open-world RPGs skip in favor of one big generic map. Combined with companion recruitment (the game's gacha layer), a genuinely deep housing system, and city-management mechanics layered on top of the usual exploration-and-combat loop, there's enough going on that boredom sets in later here than in most games built the same way.

The free-to-play economy deserves a specific callout: it's unusually generous for the genre. Players who don't spend a cent still see real progress on companions and gear, not the token drip that makes most gacha RPGs feel adversarial toward anyone not paying. If your main hesitation about trying a game like this is the monetization model, Neverness to Everness is a better-than-average place to test the waters.

Six months post-launch, the numbers back this up without needing to take Hotta Studio's word for it: Steam reviews sit at "Very Positive," with 82% of over 2,700 total reviews positive, and 80% of recent reviews still landing the same way — a live-service game holding its reception steady rather than fading after launch hype wears off.

Where the Game Falls Short

The honest gap is combat. It's functional and looks the part, but it doesn't have the depth or the technical ceiling to compete with the genre's best — there's not much reward for mastering it beyond what a competent player figures out in the first hour. For a game you're expected to keep playing for dozens of hours, that's a real weakness, not a nitpick.

The story has the same problem in a different shape: version 1.0's pacing takes too long to get moving, and the companion cast introduced along the way hasn't left much of an impression yet. In a game structured around collecting and growing attached to those companions, forgettable characters undercut a system the whole game leans on.

Who This Is Actually For

If what you want out of an open-world RPG is a world worth getting lost in — distinct districts, a housing system worth investing in, city management that isn't just decoration — Neverness to Everness delivers that more convincingly than most games in its genre right now. If what you're actually looking for is a combat system with real depth to master, this isn't it, and no amount of exploring Hethereau's better districts changes that.

It's cross-platform (PC, PS5, Mac, Android, iOS), free to start, and the generous economy means you can reasonably judge it for yourself over a weekend before deciding whether the long-term systems are worth your time. Grab the official client here if Hethereau sounds like your kind of open world.

The Verdict

7.3/10. Combat won't blow you away and the story takes a while to hook you, but Hethereau is one of the best-looking, most systems-dense open worlds in the genre right now — and since it's free to play, that's an easy one to find out for yourself.