I’ve been spending more time with smaller games lately. Part of it is because I’ve been traveling a lot and those tend to play better on my tiny portable devices. Part of it is because I’m a little burnt out on 100-hour games that cost $150 with all the expansions. I value those games! I’ll still buy those games! I’ll disappear into a mist when GTA 6 comes out.

But I’ve been needing something that doesn’t feel like a part-time job in which I forget everything happening if I take two days off from playing. I need something relaxing that’s ACTUALLY relaxing. Midnight Moments is that game, and it’s the most relaxing $3 you can spend. For just the price of a cup of coffee, you can create a rain-filled world of technological opulence which you’ll wish you could walk through while holding a cup of coffee.

If you’re not familiar — and there’s a 99.99 percent chance you aren’t, because this game just came out and there’s like eight reviews on Steam so far — Midnight Moments is a cozy cyberpunk construction game that rides the line between interactive experience and advanced LEGO set. In other words, you’re given a grid and a menu with a lot of building options, and then you go to town making your own retro-future hellscape. That’s it.

Lose Yourself In Cozy Cyberpunk Construction

You pick, rotate, and place walls, stairs, windows, doors, and everything else you’d expect. You want neon signs? Baby, we got neon signs. Yes, this is still a little simplistic. But it’s so pristine and feels so relaxing that it rises a bit above similar games and achieves something closer to the sublime beauty of Townscaper. It’s a builder that wants you to just have fun with it immediately, not slowly peel back layers of a metaphorical onion.

And, look, I know that cozy construction games aren’t for everybody. Some people like their games to have rules and purposes and reasons for you to play. But I’m somebody who ONLY builds structures in Minecraft. I’m someone who’s spent most of Pokopia trying to make apartment buildings for my Pokemon friends to live in. I love creating a handsome farm in Stardew Valley.

Those are the parts of those games I’m there for! I want to design something nice and look at it and turn it around in my hands and feel like I’ve created my own little diorama world. It’s why I was and still occasionally get obsessed with The Sims. I love an experience in which the only things we can min/max are the homes we made along the way.

I’m also aware that Midnight Moments isn’t the first cyberpunk game to be in this subgenre of a subgenre. I know that because I own them. I’m not good at a lot of things, but acquiring small-budget cyberpunk worlds is one of them. But Midnight Moments feels more down-to-earth and personal than its peers.

There’s less space to build, but that space feels more intricate and pliable. There’s more you can do with it, more details you can add. Rather than creating a vast cyberpunk landscape with nearly identical-looking neon lights and skyscrapers, you’re really making more of a city block. You can create complex, strange buildings and populate them with little people. It’s a digital dollhouse, and it does it very, very well. It won’t do the work for you because you clicked “building.”

That said, the tools are pretty effective and intuitive. In fact, there’s no tutorial in this game. You start up a map, and you get the option of having a small example building there to work from. From there it’s simply experimenting with how to use the walls and platforms and windows and signs and people.

This Isn't Your Average Digital Dollhouse

It really does evoke a childhood feeling of messing with blocks. Since there’s no budget and no time crunch and no actual point besides the building, making a mess is calming. Again, this isn’t the only game that provides this feeling. Also, again, it’s one of my favorites that I’ve played so far. And, as I’m going to repeat again and again and again, this is only three dollars. Whatever conversion rate that is for other countries is still cheap.

I’ve always found cyberpunk landscapes relaxing, even for how depressing they can be. The stormy weather, the light rain, the neon lights, the weirdly-shaped cars. My literal favorite part of Cyberpunk 2077 is randomly wandering around and just sitting on the in-game subway as it shuffles around the city.

All I want is to exist in a little cyberpunk aesthetic. Not the world itself because, as the meme says, we’re already in one. But that rainy, bright, chill aesthetic is very appealing to me. Midnight Moments gives me exactly that. It’s all it promises, and it’s all that it delivers. And, for three dollars, it’s more than living up to its end of the bargain.