Empathetic androids, elaborate conspiracies, and lots of niche inventory items await in Neon Hearts City, a nostalgic indie point-and-click adventure title set in a retro-futuristic dystopia. Tasking players with finding a missing person across a gritty urban expanse, this game is absolutely one for the Blade Runner diehards.

A young woman, Audrey, has gone missing. Employed by her mother to find her, private detective Elijah sets out into the city to investigate. Pretty quickly, he’s embroiled in a conspiracy much larger than the disappearance of a single human, and must unravel several tangled threads to discover where Audrey has gone and to bring her home. It’s a classic noir premise: grizzled detective, dodgy city, “one last job”. The techno-dystopian setting allows the plot to delve into broader cyberpunk themes such as body modification and the nature of intelligence – though at its heart it remains a detective story through and through.

As a point-and-click adventure, Neon Hearts City provides a solid puzzle experience. Elijah collects an inventory’s worth of obscure objects befitting the genre, and must use them at precisely the right moment to further his investigation. Most of the time, the path to progress the story is fairly straightforward: you’ll find an object, and a few scenes later, it will be needed. There were a few roadblocks where I found myself in that classic adventure game loop of trying every item on every interactable world element. While these were usually resolved quickly, I did find a few of the solutions required some fairly frustrating leaps in logic.

The world of Neon Hearts City is itself traditionally cyberpunk: dystopian, over-policed, and full of body horror and ethical quandaries. There are tonnes of callbacks to classic literature in both its themes and dialogue, with Asimov and Philip K. Dick references fueling much of its worldbuilding. These inspirations never feel derivative or overly referential, serving instead to ground the city in a strong context and allowing its quirky characters to shine. I particularly enjoyed interactions with the surly pizza shop owner and an android who outperforms most humans in empathy tests. The game revels in its moments of levity within a rather sad main story, helping soften its dystopian tone.

Despite its short length, Neon Hearts City is an enjoyable experience that will appeal to fans of classic point-and-click titles. It presents an immersive cyberpunk world to explore and plenty of satisfying investigative hooks to get stuck into. A neat little foray into dystopia for adventure game enthusiasts.