Remember a couple of years ago we talked about a cyberpunk city-builder called Dystopika? A game where you only made things, and didn't have to worry about any of the money or resources or unhappiness you expect from the genre? Midnight Moments is like that, but for just a single block instead of a whole city.
The chill, sandbox building genre has been one of my favourite niches to emerge in video games over the last few years, simply because it narrows its focus to the one thing I (and a lot of people) love most about city-builders: the building. While I am an enormous fan of city-builders that are full of networks and challenges, I don't always have the time or emotional bandwidth for that. Sometimes I just want to experience the same kind of joy I felt as a kid with some wooden blocks, to let my creativity run wild in the pursuit of building something for nobody's sake but my own, numbers and tax rates be damned.
Midnight Moments ticks all those boxes. Giving the player enough of a landscape for a few streets and buildings (or one, or none, you can do what you want!), it provides a toybox full of blocks, lights, people, windows and graffiti and just lets you have at it. There's no campaign mode to railroad you, no complex tutorial to overwhelm you; you're given one example building (if you want) and then just left to it.
Which is fine! It takes about 30 seconds to get the hang of this, because all you're doing is dropping blocks, rotating them, adding some toppings to the textures (like windows and signs) and changing the colour of the lights. Which sounds very simple, and I guess it is if you're interested in weighting this game by the quantity of its city-building features. But know that despite its seeming brevity I played this all weekend long, the entire time spent on just the one city block, and I'll go back to it tonight and play some more.
There's a simple elegance to it all. The rain comes down no matter what, the sun never comes up, the people and cars never move, so you're not so much building a city block as you are a moment in time. And the building itself is as rewarding as it needs to be: Everything snaps and pops into place with satisfying thuds, and I could spend entire days just playing with the lighting tool, which only offers a handful of colours but which breathe life into every corner.
Every time I look at my own little cyberpunk diorama, I find something I can add, move or redesign, as though I was hovering over a bonsai tree with tiny scissors and making the most minute--but also transformative--cuts. What's more, the more I build, the more little stories emerge. There's a club around the corner with long lines but the food is worth it, there's a nature park near the office building entrance for the employees who need some time out, there's a city worker near a construction site who's having the worst night of his life.
These aren't stories for you, or a campaign, or a multiplayer lobby. They're just my little stories, for my own little snowglobe city, which I built one block and lightbulb at a time, and which I am incredibly proud of.
