But one that could maybe also do with a tad more punk

Image credit: Happy Volcano

I'm finding the relatively recent trend of supposedly calming diorama builders in games to be an interesting one in that there's a clear desire amongst creatively inclined folks to be crafting something in virtual environments, just not necessarily at scale. Just this week I wrote about Sandcastle, a literal sandbox game where you build sandcastles, and of course there's Tiny Glade too which good ole Christian Donlan loved. And now there's Midnight Moments, a cyberpunk diorama builder that has me thinking about the function of these games.

For starters, a bit about how Midnight Moments, out now, appears to work. It is not just as simple as plonking down prefab buildings and calling it a day, it gets a lot more granular than that. You are presented with a grid-based space upon which you can place blocks of buildings and other decorative pieces such as streetlamps, people, trees, cars both flying and not, graffiti, and of course a cyberpunk staple, glowing neon lights.

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Like most of the cyberpunk scenes we envision in our minds' eyes, it's set at nighttime, a steady drizzle of rain hitting the tiny section of a city you've built at every moment. There is a comfort to be found here, I'm just uncertain of the kind of comfort that's being put on display. An all too common issue within the cyberpunk genre is the eradication of the second part of the word, the punk element, the slightly more revolutionary part.

This isn't a complete knock on the game, as there's certainly an interesting friction to be found there. And given that it's a building game, I wonder if you can lean into that tension by carving out a cyberpunk city that is somewhat hostile to its environment, that beneath the neon-soaked streets is something a bit grimier. Is it possible to bump heads with Midnight Moments and move away from the cozy atmosphere it describes itself with, and into something a tad more confrontational? I don't know! I'd need a bit more time to figure that out, but even with my reservations it's an interesting little game.

You can pick up Midnight Moments on Steam right now (for less than a cup of coffee, I should add).