Midnight Moments Review — Slice of Life

I am a big fan of diorama building. While I’ve been known to draw and I have an occasional interest in 3D modeling, there is something to be said about the unique creative process of being given a set of pre-made models, be they shapes or detailed structures depicting real terrain, and using them to build a scene of your own, rather than starting completely from scratch or physically modeling the scene itself. It’s fun, relaxing, and is an artistic process all on its own, albeit maybe one that doesn’t get as much attention as others.

Attention or not, creators of games such as Midnight Moments appreciate the art, with this particular title being a fairly powerful tool for creating little dioramas of your own with a cyberpunk theme.

Loading into Midnight Moments, you’re not given a tutorial, or really any instructions other than the bare minimum control scheme, should you go out of your way to find it. You really don’t need them, as the game simply presents you with some basic shapes and decorations and leaves it up to your own imagination to make a little scene in a cyberpunk world of your own creation.

Interestingly enough, Midnight Moments doesn’t categorize its usable parts in a very traditional way. Rather than give you categories like “doors, windows, decorations,” the relatively textless UI lumps everything into shape data. The tab that looks like a square features a bunch of shapes that are vaguely square-like, and so on and so forth. Nothing in the game is titled, which I feel is an intentional choice made to avoid limiting the player’s imagination: you have no subconscious bias as to how a piece must be used because the game doesn’t suggest it to you. If you think a piece looks like a window or a door, you’re right; go ahead and use it that way.

The game’s reliance on shape language can, in certain circumstances, limit player creativity, however. Notably, this happens due to how the game handles snapping, the way pieces decide to place together based on where you choose to connect them. Pieces naturally connect in one way, and the rotation tools aren’t strong enough to really pull them out of that bias. This became particularly frustrating when I attempted to make an interior scene, and the light-up walls I tried to put behind a character simply would not face the direction I needed them to in order to build the scene.

Notably, players going into this game hoping to make huge, sprawling scenes may be disappointed to find that the buildable area is very limited. This is not a game for making huge, cyberpunk cities, but rather small, contained scenes of day-to-day life. You’re building at most a single block, which can go incredibly high, but not very wide.

The game features some simple lighting tools, allowing you to adjust the time of day, ambient color, and brightness to depict your scene better the way you want. While it isn’t very important if you’re looking to take screenshots, I did notice that turning off the rain still played ambient rain sounds, so I ended up just leaving it on.

While the game does have a pretty generous amount of assets available to build with, you’re going to notice that there are no tools for creating scenes of action or violence. I also noticed that the cast of placeable humans really wasn’t all that cyberpunk. They all wore pretty modern clothing, with no cybernetic augments, crazy hairstyles, or really anything to set them apart from someone you would see today.

The biggest strength of Midnight Moments as a diorama builder is in its creative use of shape language. Given the library of generic geometric shapes, you can build almost anything and then make it very cyberpunk with the addition of neon lights and glowing windows. There is strength in the simplicity when it comes to the tools it gives you to build scenes, and it really tests your imagination to see how you use these simple tools to make something greater.

On the other hand, the game is lacking in more precise tools and assets. Its cast of placeable civilians is dull and uninteresting, hardly fitting the cyberpunk setting at all. It lacks any tools to make action scenes, or really anything other than a typical slice-of-life glimpse into a generic cyberpunk city. Should the game receive modding support, I think this particular issue will be addressed over time, but the fact that the game is lacking in that area at launch feels a little disappointing.

Lastly, while the game gives you a lot of freedom, its own programming can be a little restrictive. Snapping and poor rotation tools are areas in which the game can feel particularly restrictive, limiting the way you use the tools and assets it provides for you.

All that being said, for what it is, Midnight Moments is pretty great. It could use some improvement, but for a small diorama-building game, it is fairly impressive, especially in the way it uses shape language and limited assets to create something bigger. I don’t know the game’s price at the time of writing, but I can’t imagine that it would be hard to convince an interested player to make a purchase. If you want to make simple, small cyberpunk dioramas, this tool is for you, even with its limitations.

Try Hard Guides was provided with a Steam code for this PC review of Midnight Moments. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page! Midnight Moments is available on Steam.