Developer: Cosmic Void
Publisher: Dionous Games
Year: 2025
Genre: Adventure
Neon Hearts City is a short point-and-click adventure game set in a cyberpunk future where you are a private investigator searching for a missing girl, and unfolds into a greater mystery involving androids. I’ve mentioned Cosmic Void’s games on this blog a few times before and how I’m a fan of their games, and I think this is another solid entry in their catalog. It’s just a solid and straightforward point-and-click adventure where you walk around different screens, pick up items, and use them elsewhere to make progress in your story. If you want another one of those in a cyberpunk setting, great, I think this is one worth checking out.
It has great art and music like I’ve come to expect from a Cosmic Void game. It’s what you would hope for in a cyberpunk game, with pixel art of a gritty city at night and the appropriate synth music to set the mood. The voice acting is very nice too and it was fun to see some names I recognize from other adventure games.
Without spoiling too much, I think the mystery itself was good too and even though it does unfold into something bigger, it’s still ultimately pretty low stakes and I always appreciate when games aren’t about you saving the world. The city is being watched by a fascist government that wipes the memories of people they deem criminals, sometimes picking off random people just to fill a quota. I think it’s good that it’s not really about overthrowing them and remains focused on people just trying to survive in that world, and the ending was very satisfying to me.
The game got some criticism in Steam reviews and elsewhere for being too short but I didn’t mind the length at all. It took me two hours to complete and I am perfectly fine with that. I will always support games being shorter if the developers think that is the appropriate length to tell their story. It would have been fun to see more of the world though, since I think the world building was the best part of the game, and maybe more interactivity with the world would have been nice so we could learn more about the setting as we click around and explore. It’s an interesting setting and I wanted to play around in the world a bit more, even if meant more interactions that don’t advance the plot. The game is at its best when it starts to engage more with the world and not just your standard adventure game puzzles. The world building starts to include some weirder stuff towards the end that you don’t see as often in cyberpunk stories, and I hope we’ll get more of this if there’s a sequel or another game set in this world.
If anything, if I did have any criticisms it would be about some of the puzzles. I think the inventory item focused puzzles were fine but you come across a couple riddles and other self contained puzzles that felt like they were there just for the sake of an adventure game needing more puzzles and didn’t really get excited about them.
That said, I enjoyed the game quite a bit and would recommend it to folks looking for a cyberpunk point-and-click adventure, especially if they want one on the shorter side. I don’t know if I need a direct sequel to this game but I’d love to see another game set in this world.