Neon Blight is a roguelike where you sell guns to cyberpunks

Want to run a glowing gun store in the future? Like Recettear and Moonlighter, Neon Blight is split between shop management and action-RPG adventures. To get new stock to sell to gun nuts, you need to go out and find guns, most of them seemingly from the corpses of fallen enemies.

It’s in early development, but you can download the alpha from Itch.io. There’s not much to it right now, though. The shop management stuff isn’t present and the town only has one NPC, but you can head out into the forest and relentlessly murder people with guns. The forest is an odd setting that doesn’t exactly scream cyberpunk. That said, maybe the genre needs a bit more greenery.

The forest contains a shop where you can get new guns and test them out. Pretty quickly, you and your enemies will fill the place with bullets, spraying them out of comically over-sized weapons. There’s the hint of a bullet hell shooter, and I’m looking forward to seeing what sort of chaos the randomly generated guns will cause in the full game.

It's not clear how the roguelike elements are going to interact with the management stuff. In the current build, death just unceremoniously kicks you back to the menu, but you also don't have much to lose. Hardcore permadeath and management don't immediately seem like a comfortable fit. Moonlighter made it work by making the consequences for death less brutal—you lose all of your items—so maybe we'll see the same here, once the shop opens its doors.

Developer Bleeding Tapes promises multiple characters, randomly generated weapons, NPC quests, bosses and a full town that you can explore when it’s finished. There’s no release date yet.

Fraser is the UK online editor and has actually met The Internet in person. With over a decade of experience, he's been around the block a few times, serving as a freelancer, news editor and prolific reviewer. Strategy games have been a 30-year-long obsession, from tiny RTSs to sprawling political sims, and he never turns down the chance to rave about Total War or Crusader Kings. He's also been known to set up shop in the latest MMO and likes to wind down with an endlessly deep, systemic RPG. These days, when he's not editing, he can usually be found writing features that are 1,000 words too long or talking about his dog.