Ahead of Neverness to Everness’ second closed “Co-Ex” beta, we break down what this test includes, how its supernatural city sandbox has evolved since the first beta, and why its wild mix of slice-of-life sim, anomaly hunts, and gacha progression could either land as a breakout hit or buckle under its own ambition.
Neverness to Everness feels like a pitch scrawled on a napkin after someone binged three different anime seasons and a stack of urban fantasy novels, then asked “what if this was all one gacha MMO-like?” The second closed “Co-Ex” beta is our next chance to see if Hotta Studio can actually pull that sprawling vision together.
With recruitment now live and servers set to spin up in early February 2026 across PC, PS5, iOS, and Android, this test is less about selling players on monetization and more about proving that its paranormal city of Hethereau can function as a believable place to live, not just a hub for combat encounters.
What the Co-Ex closed beta actually tests
The Co-Ex beta is the game’s second major global test, following last year’s more limited closed beta that introduced players to Hethereau’s core loop of anomaly hunting, city roaming, and character collection. This new build is still strictly non-monetized and fully wipe-based. You cannot spend money, and none of your progress or characters will carry over to launch.
Instead, Hotta is using this test to stress the cross-platform infrastructure and see whether its complex web of systems holds up once players start treating Hethereau like a real city. Story content runs up to the mission titled “Deal? Deal!”, which again serves as a soft cap, but everything around that spine has been padded with more side activities, city life layers, and tuning adjustments informed by the first beta’s feedback.
In practical terms, you can expect a decent chunk of the early campaign, a broader sampling of anomaly dungeons, and many of the lifestyle systems that turn NTE from a straightforward action RPG into something closer to a paranormal life sim.
From static curiosity to living paranormal city
The biggest shift from the first closed beta is how Hethereau itself behaves. Where the earlier test often felt like a stylish but static backdrop, the Co-Ex build is pushing much harder on the “urban sandbox” angle.
The official materials highlight an anomaly-filled metropolis where you move seamlessly between supernatural incidents and mundane routines. In the first test, anomaly encounters tended to feel compartmentalized: you would pick up a mission, dip into a themed combat pocket, then drop back into the city with little lasting effect.
For Co-Ex, Hotta is layering events more aggressively into the open world. Paranormal incidents can now surface during travel, in districts you thought were safe, or as follow-ups to choices you made earlier in the story. The goal is to replace a linear mission queue with a sense that the city is always on the verge of something strange.
At the same time, everyday systems like commuting, shopping, and hanging out with other Espers are being nudged closer to the foreground. The developers keep emphasizing that you can choose your own lifestyle, manage businesses, and commit to routines that exist outside of combat efficiency. That matters because it turns the city into a space you inhabit instead of a checklist you clear.
If the first beta was about proving NTE could be a competent action gacha in a cool setting, Co-Ex looks like a test of whether Hethereau can stand alone as a reason to log in.
How the urban sandbox is evolving
Hotta’s pitch for NTE has always been that Hethereau is equal parts dungeon, playground, and social hub. Co-Ex leans into that with three intertwined pillars: exploration, narrative events, and a thick layer of simulation.
On the exploration side, the city is full of traversal-friendly layouts and multiple ways to move. The trailers and earlier test footage showed drivable vehicles, vertical routes, and supernatural movement abilities that make racing between anomalies as entertaining as the fights themselves. Co-Ex doubles down by giving players more incidental rewards and micro events for simply being out in the world, making “just going for a drive” a viable way to stumble into content.
Narrative events sit on top of that explorative skeleton. Instead of locking every story beat behind menu-based mission selection, the game now drops character-driven scenes into streets, shops, and transit routes. Random phone calls, chance meetings, and escalating city alerts all push you toward different corners of Hethereau, blurring the line between scripted missions and free roaming.
Finally there is the simulation layer. The Co-Ex beta expands systems that let you run or work at businesses, take on odd jobs, engage with the city’s economy, and maintain social ties. It is not aiming for full business sim depth, but there is enough there that choices about how you spend your in-game days start to matter. Do you grind anomaly missions for materials and story beats, or lean into running your own shop to unlock different perks and scenes?
These layers feed back into each other. Exploring unlocks new opportunities and events, events can introduce or gatekeep city systems, and city systems in turn affect how efficiently you can tackle paranormal threats. Co-Ex is, in a sense, the first real check of whether that triangle feels cohesive or cluttered.
The board game gacha that runs it all
Beneath the urban fantasy aesthetics, Neverness to Everness is still a full character gacha title. Hotta presents this more playfully than in many contemporaries by dressing the pull system up as a board game. You roll virtual dice, move across a game board, and land on spaces that can include character unlocks, resources, and cosmetic rewards.
The Co-Ex test does not include real-money purchases, but the underlying structure is there. That makes this beta vital for seeing how often the game asks you to interact with its gacha layer and how integrated it feels with daily play.
In the first beta, some players came away worried that the gap between free acquisition and optimal teams might grow wide over time, especially with the game also expecting you to invest in cars, outfits, and lifestyle systems. Without monetization switched on, Co-Ex cannot answer the long-term generosity question, but it can show whether the basic cadence of earning pulls and upgrading characters feels rewarding or stingy.
Hotta’s recent move to strip gacha out of Tower of Fantasy’s reworked “Warped” version hangs over NTE as a kind of industry cautionary tale. This time around, the developers need to prove they can balance a flashy, character-driven city with a monetization scheme that does not choke off experimentation.
Why the Co-Ex beta could make NTE click
If Co-Ex lands, it will be because Hethereau finally feels like more than just a pretty stage. The fantasy of Neverness to Everness is that you are not only an anomaly hunter, but also a resident of a weirdly alive city.
Exploration is already one of its strongest cards. Urban open worlds are still uncommon in the gacha space, especially ones with proper driving, verticality, and a mix of cozy hangout spots and cosmic horror pockets. When the first beta clicked, it was usually in those moments where you casually turned a corner on the way to a café and found a reality-warping event bleeding into a crosswalk.
The narrative scaffolding is also promising. Rather than siloing all story content into chapter-select menus and static dialogue screens, NTE seems intent on making narrative events something you bump into while you live your virtual life. That suits a paranormal premise where anomalies are supposed to be unpredictable.
Finally, the city life systems give the game somewhere to go between big story drops. Running a business, maintaining friendships, tweaking your home base, and choosing which districts you frequent all help convert what could have been a straight mission grind into something more like a ghost-hunting slice-of-life series. It is easy to envision players logging in not just for new banners, but to see how their favorite neighborhood has changed or what new side stories have appeared at their usual hangouts.
Combined with smooth cross-platform support on PC, mobile, and PS5, Co-Ex is positioned to show NTE as a daily-driver game rather than a strictly appointment-based gacha.
Where the whole thing could collapse
Ambition is both NTE’s selling point and its biggest risk. The Co-Ex beta may expose some structural problems that were easier to ignore when the game felt more linear.
The first obvious danger is bloat. A city filled with businesses to manage, anomalies to chase, social links to maintain, and systems to upgrade can easily feel like noise rather than richness if the game does not prioritize well. If every activity throws currencies and upgrade paths at you without a clear sense of progression, players may bounce before they ever see the good stuff.
There is also the pacing question. Paranormal incidents need to feel surprising, but not so frequent that they turn every walk into a chore. City life needs to matter, but not so much that combat-focused players feel forced to partake in cozy side hustles just to stay efficient. Finding that line is notoriously difficult, and Co-Ex will be the first time Hotta has a large enough cross-section of players to test where the friction points are.
Then there is the simple reality of technical stability. A dense urban map full of simultaneous systems is tough to keep performant across PC and phones. The studio has been clear that this test is as much about cross-platform performance and network stability as it is about content. If frame rates tank in busy districts, physics get flaky during vehicle sections, or urban events desync in co-op, the fantasy of a living city will evaporate quickly.
Finally, the gacha economy is a looming question mark. Even without payment enabled, players will be able to feel how often they gain pulls, how meaningful individual characters are to their success, and how aggressively the game nudges them toward optimal compositions. If the board game wrapper cannot mask a harsh underlying economy, no amount of urban charm will fully offset the fatigue.
What to watch for in the Co-Ex test
Going into the Co-Ex closed beta, it is worth treating Neverness to Everness less like a standard action RPG beta and more like an early trial of a live service city.
Pay attention to how the city feels on a quiet day when there is no new quest marker in sight. Do you still feel pulled to log in, drive around, and see what is happening? Or does Hethereau revert to being just another mission map when the story is not pushing you forward?
Watch how frequently the game asks you to engage with its meta systems. If you can play for an evening mostly following your whims and still feel rewarded, that is a good sign. If every twenty minutes brings another tutorial pop-up or complicated upgrade submenu, the design might be fighting itself.
And, of course, take stock of whether the paranormal and the mundane genuinely mesh. The promise of Neverness to Everness is not simply that you can fight cool monsters and roll for cool characters, but that you can clock out of a shift at your own business and accidentally walk into a hole in reality on the way home.
If Co-Ex can make those transitions feel natural, Hotta Studio may have something special on its hands. If it cannot, this second beta will still be valuable: it will show exactly where this ambitious paranormal urban sandbox needs to be cut down or clarified before its planned 2026 launch.