Midnight Moments has me thinking about time. Specifically, how I increment it: I often find I allow myself an hour of rest between work or assigning a day for a specific project. Happy Volcano’s meditative, if somewhat limited, interactive doll’s house is a game of minutes. That may not sound impressive in an industry so invested in scale. But, as I wrestled with a punishing schedule, I came to rely on the small, disposable periods of time I spent with Midnight Moments.
There isn’t much to do within. Midnight Moments has no grand aim and no endpoint beyond one you decide for yourself. It joins a trend in diorama games that revolve around constructing small visual vignettes as an act of digital mindfulness.
Midnight Moments is an especially minimalist entry into that field, owing in part to its stark Cyberpunk setting. Options for placing trees, for instance, include large and small. Everything else is just as Spartan; in service to a world built from concrete and neon, and perpetually made reflective by unending rain. If there’s one thing in which Cyberpunk futures delight, it’s moisture.
The first thing you’ll notice about Midnight Moments is that nothing is labelled. Tiny, often unclear, previews of what you may place appear in a menu on the left of the screen, but figuring them out is mostly trial and error. This could be read as a fault. It certainly makes some of the environmental sliders that appear on the right side of screen, that control natural light levels and the volume of rain, difficult to parse. I wonder, however, if it’s not deliberate: an invitation to grow familiar by playing and experimenting.
You’ll do so by arranging concrete blocks on a 10×10 grid – the absurdity of being in my thirties and playing with digital toy blocks is not lost on me. Concrete cubes that come in a handful of flavours but are functionally the same. Some have patterns, others are metal, some glass. The latter took me a while to realise if only because there isn’t enough ambient light to see that clearly. These are midnight moments, after all.
If that sounds too much like a daunting blank page, Midnight Moments begins each build with a prefabricated structure. This serves as both a reference and a starting point. I found myself choosing to start from scratch rather than build out from a default construction. There are only so many ways one can place square objects on a 100-square grid and that initial preview felt too focused.
There doesn’t appear to be a limit to the height to which you may build, at least outside of the occasionally difficult to manoeuvre camera. Where you are limited is where you place blocks. Possibly to protect us from ourselves, Happy Volcano employs a snap-to-grid system. This does limit errors but also subtracts from the freedom of placing a restricted array of more decorative items in interesting ways. For elements like posters and graffiti that should give vignettes more character and colour, they often look too organised to feel like they’re fighting the power with any real alacrity.
The real nitty-gritty of Midnight Moments is, like so many Cyberpunk worlds, light fixtures. Yes, you can slather your builds with vents, wiring, and aerials. You can line your streets with piles of discarded cups and fast-food containers – amusingly, you can place bins but cannot place anything inside them. But Midnight Moments offers the most variety within a broad selection of lit objects.
Streetlights, illuminated rails, signage, neon lights; even piles of junk appear to give off a faint glow. A host of lit squares and blocks that slot onto the sides and tops of buildings alone offer magnitudes more choice than what is, frankly, a limited selection of objects otherwise. I wasn’t sure whether these were supposed to represent windows, given what that would mean for scale in the game. They do contribute immensely to making a composition hum with a suitably grungy glow.
As someone who spent hours in Fallout 4 trying to make objects snap together, placing all of this is handled surprisingly well. Generally, if you point your cursor at a point, that is where it will land. Where things start to get a mite unintuitive is in accessing variations. Selecting some objects won’t give you the same variant each time. Signs may be patterned with abstract, vaguely futuristic, symbols or appear with words like “Warning” and “Caution.” Clicking again will change the variation, but it does not cycle through a set list: it’s random. You’re just as likely to see “Warning” five times in a row as something new.
Randomness extends to the tiny animated people Midnight Moments allows you to place; the dolls in this doll’s house. There aren’t many poses: they mainly stand, talk on their phones, and occasionally change clothes. Concerns that are unlikely to bother, given they are set-dressing. They do offer some welcome motion to otherwise static builds. But when you begin illuminating your vignettes, you may start to notice how, perhaps appropriately for the setting, robotic they appear.
I admit, having explored all of this, I wondered what the point was. Looking at Happy Volcano’s slate, I noticed it released another game in 2025, Modulus, that featured a similarly industrial vibe and grid-based structure. The cynical side of me did wonder if Midnight Moments was an attempt to ride the tails of games like Tiny Glade and Townscaper using repurposed assets from that game, in an industry in which everything is now required to be like something else. Midnight Moments is that: “Cyberpunk Townscaper” is not an unfair description of what it offers.
Yet, that comparison made Midnight Moments click for me. These are small, relaxing, and undemanding games that resist the intense scrutiny and structured playtime with which we, as reviewers, are forced to address the games we evaluate. Arguably, it’s an unfair way to judge a game built on the meditative idea of doing something by doing almost nothing.
As I fell deeper into an unsustainable schedule during my review period, craving small moments of peace between interviews, in a busy and loud house, and amid mounting fatigue, I found myself increasingly turning to Midnight Moments. Not as a game, but harking back to a time when we understood video games for what they are: toys. Beautiful, occasionally revelatory, toys.
Haunting menus for informative screenshots is not the right way to play these games. Midnight Moments is, instead, a space in which to float when you need to interact with something – anything – but cannot bring yourself to do so. A place of pure play. For that, both the freedom to create what you want (so long as it’s bright, garish, and square) and its constraints are perfect. As I slipped in and out of Midnight Moments during breaks from other work, it began to cling to me. I realised how vital its low-stakes interaction had become as I grew more jaded with my work elsewhere.
Once I’d realigned my thinking on what this game should be to me – and despite the ability to zoom and rotate – curiously, I derived most joy from Midnight Moments by treating it like a 2D canvas. I’d pick an angle and see how striking an image I could create from it: experimenting with lighting, background and foreground colours, and piercing bright facades with shadowed alleyways. Then I might rotate and repeat from another angle, before discarding the whole thing – you can save three dioramas at a time.
I built highways hemmed by sardine-can housing, lonely dive bars spanning the entire grid and lit by hideous blue neon, and winding systems of alleys piled with rubbish in which people were perpetually glued to their phones (so, Peterborough).
Midnight Moments has a definite shelf-life. It is limited, in scale and scope, and you will likely grow bored with its lack of variety even if you connect with it to the level I did. But I don’t know that Midnight Moments is supposed to provide hours of enjoyment. What toy does? Granted, it’s been a spell since I was a child. But I recall moving back and forth between toys and outdoors, games and books, company and alone time as my interests waxed and waned. Midnight Moments may cling to you as it did me, but it also lets go. That, I think, is the best way to engage Midnight Moments (and games like it): as something to move in and out of at need, within a broader suite of activity.
Nothing in Midnight Moments is novel. It’s quaint, chilled, with a soundscape that resembles white noise. But in an unforgiving period for a journalist like me, it might have kept me – relatively – sane. In an increasingly unforgiving world, it might do the same for you. If only for a moment.
