So...overall, I'm conflicted on how I feel about this game.

It's a good game. With a good puzzle-styled system that's fun to play. It has great flavor, and is hard enough that you won't be able to beat it in one go.

However, I feel something is missing.

A story mode. A challenge mode. I appreciate all the items it does have, and at least you can push yourself to unlock new buildings by completing certain challenges, but it feels pretty bare bones, especially for a $10 game. You get the same "Game Over" screen every time you fail, and it can start feeling monotonous after a few hours.

It has a good central mechanic, but overall it feels like there should be more. Overall, it feels like a game I'd pick up on the APP store, I appreciate the lack of DLC or microtransactions, but I can't help but feel disappointed from what I hoped it would be. Especially for a Goblinz Publishing game.

Still, I'd recommend it, it's a fun game. And if I considered other items I'd pay $10 for, it doesn't seem too bad.

Overall, an average, and fun, game. Hopefully, they'll expand on the subject in the future. I'd love a story mode where you're trying to build an empire, or a challenge mode with certain sub-objectives you'd need to meet.

Neongarten is a clever but cozy block-stacking strategy roguelite where you build a cyberpunk city on a 3D grid. I've spent hours with the prologue, demo, beta, and now full release, and still love this game.

You have eight (8) weeks to develop a cyberpunk city while paying an ever-increasing weekly tax bill to the Corporate Council. Each "day," you place one of three possible buildings on the grid and then collect protection money revenue from the city. Each block has special properties that increase, decrease, or multiply revenue extorted from surrounding blocks. After successfully paying your taxes, you choose one of three abilities to boost future earnings. A successful round takes ~30-45 minutes.

✅ The 3D block designs are perfect: a little cartoony but colorful, detailed, thematic. As your city grows, the cute blocks start to feel as claustrophobic and dystopian as the stacks from Ready Player One.

✅ There are three grids: Stack, Cube, and Needle. Each grid requires its own strategy, which underscores how differently the various factions behave and interact. As you win games and meet various goals, you unlock new buildings and factions that challenge you to change your strategy once again. Great replayability.

✅ The game does most math for you; when you go to place an item, you can clearly see how much it will score each round and how it will impact surrounding blocks.

✅ Each week, you have a certain number of rerolls and "hacks" that allow you to manipulate your block choices.

✅ Limited chillhop cyberpunk-y soundtrack.

❎ After your first win, it's hard to lose again even on "Dystopian" difficulty. I have lost again, but only because I have no idea how chaining works.

❎ Photo mode is cool in theory, but needs more work; the camera is hard to control with keyboard/mouse, and I personally had a hard time navigating.

❎ This is a personal preference, but I don't care for the new UI. The Next Fest demo and beta had a pixellated font that was admittedly hard to read but appropriately cyberpunk-y. The new UI is kind of bland and so oversized that it takes up a chunk of my monitor (especially the finance tally); it's like the genuinely awesome solo dev was prioritizing Steamdeck compatibility over desktop functionality.

Neongarten does a lousy job of explaining its own rules and sets you up to fail your first round. It actively discourages you from building pretty stacks, and mucks up your entire strategy by tossing shantytowns into your carefully constructed corporate fortress. I still have no idea how chaining works. I love this game.

It's easy to pick up and put down, or play during your lunch break or to wind-down before bed, but still engaging enough to keep coming back to. I've been playing while listening to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, because why not.

I'd recommend this to fans of chill roguelites like Balatro or Luck Be A Landlord, or to anyone who enjoys the satisfaction of tile-placement games like River Towns. I would not recommend it if you're easily frustrated, or looking for super-cyberpunk-y vibes or story; in which case, I'd probably refer you to VA-11 Hall-A.

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I'm giving this game a tentative thumbs down. I really want to like it - it's smooth, aesthetically pleasing, and fun... but it's just missing that depth. It's marketed as a puzzle game, but there's no puzzle, just RNG.
I think there are three key difficulties:
- No endless mode.
- The only challenge is RNG: your draw number is too few and too randomized to make it interesting. Because of this, there's no way to meaningfully differentiate runs from each other.
- Perks do nothing. To be fair, neither do buildings.

Basically, the buildings you draw each night are randomized - and there's no way to really... direct what you're more likely to get? You can have perks unlock certain things (always draw a basic apartment, or rarity chances doubled) but... that still doesn't tell you a specific faction or building will show up.

It makes it hard to form a larger strategy. The thing I like about roguelites (roguelikes? I can never remember) is that once you pull a random chance, you're given the ability to upgrade that random pick and you can improve that build. There's basically NO way to improve buildings you've already put down in this game. You might get a rare perk here or there, but there's only like three perk choices per game.... so there's no real difference. No perk I've seen so far has meaningfully changed the way my buildings function, to the point where I would have to change my strategy.

I think the struggle I have with this is that compared to the options at hand, your draw number is abysmal. I have somewhere around a few dozen building types but only draw 3 buildings per day. I've seen no repeats on perks and I've seen over two dozen.

The RNG also doesn't feel particularly meaningful. Because there's no way to influence it and many of the choices don't actually change gameplay, it's just kind of "whatever shows up I slap in an area and call it good." I've never seen a perk and been like "oh dang! if that showed up in early game it would've completely changed my playstyle!" because none of them change playstyle.

This means that there's no way to differentiate runs from each other. I can't go for a primarily industry build one game, and aim for stacking neon bonuses the next, or play corpo vs illegal. I just kind of have to group buildings and call it good, every single time. You can't affect your draw chances to meaningfully build towards one type of building or another, and you don't get enough perks to meaningfully change your strategies. This is the crux of my issue with this game.