NEON GARTEN

Hubert Spala
May 7
4 min read

Who said that Cyberpunk aesthetics must always go hand in hand with a grim dystopian future? I do not marry the concepts in my mind, and I can sure as heck enjoy the softer side of it. Vibrant neons, slick designs, shiny and chrome. NEON GARTEN might lack the glistening metal part, but it is still set in a nondescript and not-so-distant future of grand cities covered in colorful fogs of industry. Let's not ask what makes the smog purple, we might not like the answers we get.

Your mission? Design a tight block of a functional city, growing from the bottom, from dwelling slums to the high spires of the rich and influential. Well, at least on paper, because in reality, it is your will alone that will shape the growing structure, so if you want to slum it up to the very top, you're more than welcome to do that. As long as you pay your bills, that is. See, this is still a corporate world with tight bottom lines, KPI's and other corporate lingo that, ultimately, narrows down to 'pay us or perish'. Each week, your growing district better provide enough cash to satisfy your corporate overlords, or your whole assignment will fail and you'll be forced to start anew.

NEON GARTEN is a puzzle in tight confines. You are stacking up blocks of various buildings to create a variety of synergies that will provide you with maximum income. In that way, the commentary here is very much on brand for the Cyberpunk setting - the ever-hungry capitalist reality will not cease until it has all of the money! And week after week, they will ask for more, lifting up the ceiling as you proved in the past week, you could satisfy the previous goal. And so, your task is not simply to build something functional or aesthetic, but rather a streamlined money-making machine.

A constant race against the unyielding, corporate clock of taxes keeps you on your toes.

This is where the game shines, in its core concept. You have a pretty robust selection of buildings that provide various abilities as well as possess some intrinsic properties that other buildings might be looking for. They can belong to one of the factions - corporate, illegal, Volt, or government. They might be lit or dark. They might generate power, offer multipliers to adjacent constructions, steal their income, or siphon it somewhere else. The options are quite vast, and the possibilities to earn are robust, to put it lightly. It is a shining part of the experience. You should never feel shoehorned to repeat one working strategy, as there are many, many options to achieve your victory. And satisfy your corporate overlords at the same time.

One time, I got a steady flow of Volt cult buildings, creating a vast chain of them, that got further empowered by some lucky draft of multipliers to get me mondo moolah. Another time, I invested heavily in parks, and while I struggled mid-game, suddenly, with a couple of perks I earned each week, their income skyrocketed. Another time, I created an industrial stack of machines, refineries, and factories that kept feeding each other for ever-growing income. Damn, even at some point, a toxic spire of waste burning stacks and temples of toxic-loving fanatics secured my victory. There are quite a few unlockables to get to, which further diversify your runs, making it a fun game to try over and over again. Constantly looking for new ways to break the game.

There are a few hiccups. First, the RNG can be ruthless. You only ever draw three buildings per turn, and the ability to reroll them or hack them is fairly limited, with sparse ways to get more. This means that a few turns of bad drafts might quite screw your plans up, especially on early stages, where chasing up the new taxation goal might be a struggle. No way to reroll perks also means that sometimes your reward for completing a week is completely useless. It would be great to get at least a single reroll or ability to swap one perk for a random new one - anything to get a chance to get something fitting your current build.

You can check all your unblocked buildings to better learn what combos you can try to run.

And a second issue is strictly personal - lack of goals. The game comes with just a few achievements to chase, and this type of game could greatly benefit from having a whole bucketload of them. Might be my EUROPA UNIVERSALIS addled brain, but once you have such a fun system in place, it would work great, at least in my mind, to give players tangible goals to chase after. Win only using unlit buildings! Achieve victory with Organ Harvester at x300 multiplier! Win when the majority of your buildings are Corporate, or with the VOLT chain of 20+ buildings. Anything really... I could write down like a dozen plausible achievements, and I believe they would greatly improve the game's longevity, as the core loop is well-made.

Nonetheless, NEON GARTEN is a little gem, an absolute steal for its low price tag. It's a tight, compact game, with a very clear formula that it wants you to have fun with. And at the same time offers just enough toys and blocks to make the fun diverse enough to not grow stale, to find new ways to overcome the challenge. It is safe to assume you'll squeeze a decent amount of hours out of it - especially if you'll aim to 100% the game and score some of the more demanding achievements, even if there are just a few of them to play around.