Nirvana: Ari takes on the god Raj in a temple some players clear in minutes

Between the players who finish without really noticing the clock and the ones who spent eight hours inside that same temple, Nirvana's length is the first surprise waiting inside.

One temple, one god, one lone survivor named Ari

One player cleared Nirvana's sacred temple with the Steam counter still short of an hour; another, eight hours logged on that same page, was still describing the corridors of the god Raj in detail. You step into Ari with no say in the matter: an ordinary Earth woman dragged against her will into a mystical world, who wakes up with powers she never asked for after a flaw in the very system holding her there lets her absorb the consciousness of several entities. Those powers are what open the secret areas and bring down steadily tougher enemies, on the way to the reckoning with Raj.

It is a fast first-person shooter played under a constant downpour of projectiles: every second counts, and the enemies climb in difficulty within a single run, mixing combat styles. Mastering what Ari can do — shooting, yes, but dodging just as much — is the only way across the sacred halls and the forgotten crypts without drowning in your own flood of gunfire.

The store page credits the game to ESMA - Écoles Créatives, and the credits reveal a team split into specialties: one person on nothing but enemy behaviour, another on nothing but the cutscenes, separate teams for the characters and for the environments, a soundtrack with its own credit inside the audio team. Even the names spoken on screen — Ari, Simon, Anna, Diana, Blaise — each have a voice of their own. Nirvana reached the store on February 1, 2025, built to be played alone.

Minutes for some, hours for the ones who stayed

Most of the people who wrote about Nirvana never even filled a whole hour on the Steam counter — and they still came away praising the same thing, how well the game flows. In July 2025, a player with two hours logged singled out the stage where you climb a wall while fighting off a pack of enemies as the stretch of the campaign that sticks longest, and credited the soundtrack with being the right complement to that near-hypnotic state the game takes its name from; in November of the same year, another pointed out how neatly the fight against the previous boss blends the bullet-flood elements into the rest of the run. The reservations, where they surface, are technical: the starting weapon misses at the range it seems to promise, some enemies snag on the scenery, and that same boss leaves you unsure whether to dodge or to shoot — none of these players reported feeling any real danger in the ordinary fights. As early as February 2025, one of them signed off recommending it all the same, in the spirit of quality not being measured in hours.

The yardstick for length, though, is not the same for everyone. In September 2026, a player with eight hours logged was still describing the temple's halls and crypts in detail — the energy coursing along the walls, the level design that invites you to poke into every corner of the temple, saving the reckoning with Raj for last. In October 2025, another, after an hour, found the experience so good that a sequel would be welcome. The more critical voice, also in September 2026, judged the result close to a well-made coursework project: little more than a showcase for nimble movement, with few weapon types, combat that stops being fun after the second fight, no dubbing and no subtitle option, and a stretch of dialogue right at the opening with no fighting at all — just the wait for the conversation to end.

Across the whole picture — and in the reviews posted on Steam itself — players come away recommending it; the voices against are a frank minority among those who choose to write. If your spare evening is a short one, Nirvana will probably fill it end to end; if the flood of projectiles grabs you the way it grabbed the player who stayed for eight hours, the temple still has corners left to explore.

For the player with one session to spare, not a campaign

Nirvana suits anyone after a single session of pure reflex inside a setting that carries the mystical weight its premise promises, and who walks away satisfied without demanding a rematch. It also suits anyone who likes following the first steps of a small, specialised team — the kind of production where every credit carries one name and one job of its own, the way it goes in a graduation project rather than a big studio.

It does not suit anyone after a range of weapons, full dubbing with subtitles, or a campaign that eats a whole afternoon: that, according to the players who went deepest, is not what the game has. And it does not suit anyone who mistakes length for worth: here, the reckoning with the god Raj fits into a short session as readily as into a long afternoon, depending on who is holding the controller. If your spare evening is a short one, you can see it out and close the game satisfied; if it runs longer, nothing in the game stops you from staying — the only question is whether the flood of projectiles still thrills after the first boss.