NEON STRUCT

A wonderful cool night breeze of a game, masterfully mixing tense yet doable stealth sections with danger-free nightly wandering intermissions through malls, churches and many, many bathrooms. These make all that hiding in the shadows worthwhile. The guards aren't very clever, and I love that. Bad AI is my gaming lifeblood, I cherish every cheeseable [i]Dark Souls[/i] boss. Thank you for letting me off the hook. [i]Neon Struct[/i] is like a distant half-sister of [i]Deus Ex[/i], without guns and goatees. Instead your character Jill shows deep empathy for nearly everyone she meets while on the run. Don't be fooled by the unassuming visuals. Every space in this [b]is[/b] mundane, but that is the point, and feels REAL, like a Megaten office sprawl. I'm deeply impressed.

I’ll cut this game some slack because I picked it up during a 90% off sale. At that price, I can't really complain. If I had paid full price, though, I'd probably be feeling very differently. To me, it looks and plays more like a free indie game you'd find on itch.io than a premium release. The animations are stiff, the sound effects are extremely basic, and the gameplay leaves a lot to be desired. The enemy AI is very basic too. It's about as bare-bones as a stealth game can get. I came to this game more than 10 years after its release, but I'd had it on my wishlist ever since reading an article back in 2015 that praised it as an incredible immersive sim. As a fan of Deus Ex and the Thief series, I'd always wondered what made it so special. When I finally saw it on sale, I decided to give it a try. I honestly don't understand why it received so much praise. Maybe it was simply a product of its time. In any case, I played enough to never want to touch it again.

Neon Struct, developed and published by Minor Key Games, is a compact first-person stealth experience that deliberately echoes the immersive sims of the late ’90s and early 2000s. Instead of chasing cinematic spectacle or high-budget worldbuilding, it focuses on clean mechanics, player agency, and a subdued atmosphere of paranoia. You play as Jillian Cleary, an intelligence operative who finds herself framed, disavowed, and hunted by the very organization she once served. The game wastes no time establishing its central tension: Jillian must maneuver through a world thick with surveillance and political machinations, relying entirely on stealth and resourcefulness rather than brute force. This premise becomes the backbone for a journey built on infiltration, evasion, and careful planning. The game’s approach to stealth is refreshingly pure. Neon Struct rejects firefights entirely—there are no guns, no lethal takedowns, no fallback option if you’re spotted. Your power lies in staying unseen, controlling line of sight, listening for patrol routes, and manipulating the environment to create safe opportunities. A simple “visibility indicator” communicates how well hidden you are, echo…

A dark world, with mystery. Gameplay is exploration and (easy) puzzles. Very simple programming: a 3D world, but with graphics from the early 2000s. Cons: Not very much there for the money, but I felt it was worth the price. Pros: Didn't crash. Easy controls.

Fun stealth game. The collectible counter kind of ruins it for me, I don't want to have prominent notifications pointing out how well I do or don't explore the world, but otherwise it's well made and enjoyable. Recommended because it's worth a try, decide for yourself.

A pleasant, fairly short stealth game saturated in an aesthetic that's part fluorescent synthwave, part gaudy 80s cinema carpets, and part brutalist architecture. Mechanically it's pretty straightforward, but it does have some nice touches. There's often more than one way to approach at least some of the stages of a mission, and while it never goes as far down that road as a Deus Ex or a Dishonored (which would be an unreasonable ask for a solo developer or small team) it does have enough hints of that approach to make it feel like you have options. As a fun bonus, its hacking minigame is basically Breakout, which I something I don't see very often. It does have plenty of flaws, but none of them are *bad* things so much as just under-developed things: the various consumable gadgets are mostly not super-useful; the prompt to knock out a guard doesn't always appear when it should and responds inconsistently; too many doors are labelled unhackable, begging the question of why they're there at all. These flaws only slightly weaken the experience - they certainly don't ruin it. I enjoyed my time with Neon Struct and can comfortably recommend it to anyone who wants some indie stealth.