Neongarten - Prologue

"Neongarten - Prologue" is not a game. It's an advertisement for a product called "Neongarten". Neongarten is a simple mobile tier minimalist "city builder" where you just drag and drop stuff on your iPhone to make what looks like a city... not to be confused with city tycoon games like SimCity, it's just a toy, and not a good one. Importantly, the mobile app thing this is advertising hasn't even been launched on Steam yet. But this isn't completely relevant because this is not Neongarten, it's just an advertisment for it, so it's not correct to try to review that completely distinct product. We must instead review this for what it is... an advertisement. If you enjoy advertisements, you can consume them for free on the web or on Youtube without needing to add them to your game library, download them, and then launch the advertising. It's impossible in a general sense to recommend people should do that over playing real, full games on Steam, and that applies here with "Neongarten - Prologue" too. What am I supposed to say to gamers about an advertisement for a poor quality product that doesn't even exist? Obviously this is just wasting everyone's time. This is only free in the same way that adverts on Youtube and banner ads in your browser are. This is a game demo that's been dumped on Steam to advertise another Steam store page in the hopes of raking in some cash. Just because advertisements are free, doesn't mean they're worth your time. It's important to understand there's a formal process to create a demo/page for a game which hasn't been followed here: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/application/demos While it might seem like an inocuous mistake, publishing demos and advertisements as if they are full games is misleading and in some ways harmful. This advertisement is taking up marketing space and visibility that would be better made available to a developer that's done the right thing and created a full game. Instead, that visibility is given over to a demo/advert that's been published incorrectly and is polluting the marketplace. It's unclear if this mistake was made through incompetence or a deliberate intent to mislead gamers. Often developers may choose to incorrectly publish demo/advertisements as separate games as a cheap way to bypass paying Valve for marketing presence on the Steam front page, which may seem clever to them, but it's harmful behaviour and it's not good for gamers. Even though this is "free", it failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 7 concurrent players... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away. Advertisements and incorrectly published demos don't add +1 to your game collector count, they aren't full games. It's impossible for me to recommend this incorrectly published advertising spam to gamers, you deserve better than adverts.

This game tricked me into doing math and liking it. Not sure how I feel about that.

Before anything else is said, I do believe this is the beta version of the game and the full version is still in development to release later. This is a very. Very. Well made game. Nice visuals, really simple, relaxing. Simple cyberpunk inspired block city building game, where you collect money to be able to pay your taxes and continue building up your city. Not to much going into it which I enjoy quite a lot. This is the type of game where you can play in tow ways, either its late at night and you just want a relaxing game to play before bed, while listening to some nice music. Or you can really spend the time and effort for prolonged amounts of time and strategics trying to get as far as possible. For my main con however (keep in mind this is a beta game still), is that there is very poor optimization. For example, I am running an I7 processor, RTX3060, and 16gb of ram (as my basic specs), and i was getting moments where with not very much going on i would have horrible performance spikes from running 60 smooth to all of a sudden 40, 30, and even worse for no reason I could see. (and so no one says "erm well change your graphics settings", i don't believe that is an option yet). Still I am guessing this will be fixed when the full game is released. Sorry if this was a little wordy, however I hope it helped at least someone. I highly recommend trying the game out, its free and like 200mbs, so whats the worst that can happen.

Pretty good demo. Missing some things but has potential, looking forward to the full release

This is one of the best demos I've played this year. Super addictive gameplay loop, nice bloopy sound effects, and lots of numbers that keep going up, up, and up! The luck be a landlord inspired synergies feel interesting and rewarding. I would like to see some stats on what each building is earning. It can be hard to figure out what is and isn't contributing and how to capitalize on certain synergies when you have more than 3 layers and/or vertical synergies. There are some bugs right now (limited to annoying visual glitches and a bit of lag for me), but the concept of the game and the core gameplay loop are already extremely solid.

☀️

An interesting puzzle game, that reminded me of trying to solve a 1980's Rubik's cube - you end up thinking very three dimensionally.