Cyber Neon: Core Protocol

Cyber Neon: Core Protocol is a cyberpunk pixel-art roguelike deck-building game. You play as a hired bounty hunter fighting through a city network seized by a rogue AI, navigating an intrusion route to reach the AI Core while corporations conceal the truth and machine legions guard the streets. You build a deck, install cyberware and combine combat protocols as you face enemies and make choices that shape each run.

Choose your mercenary

Each mercenary has unique abilities and signature cards that shape your tactics:

• Viktor Kane — The Breacher: Builds Rage by trading blows and uses devastating melee attacks to destroy enemies.
• Maya Novak — The Daemon Handler: Plants viruses that spread corrosion and system collapse over multiple turns.
• Adrian Cross — The Fire Control: Manages ammunition and precision shots to land consecutive critical hits at decisive moments.
• Céline Voss — The Infiltrator: Uses stealth, phantoms and rapid strikes to execute enemies before they can react.

As you progress, mercenaries earn experience and unlock more exclusive programs, giving each character a more developed growth path.

Plan your route

Every run generates a new intrusion map. Choose between combat, elite enemies, shops, events, rest stops and cyberware clinics; each node can offer an opportunity or bring your run to an end. The route you take, your tactics and your build all affect whether you reach the final node.

Build your deck

Combat rewards and events provide new cards, while upgrades let you shape your deck over the course of a run. Cards use attacks, block, buffs, viruses, corrosion, vulnerability and other special effects, which you can combine to find synergies. Choose whether to pursue burst damage or wear enemies down with defense and sustained damage, and adapt each turn to your hand, energy and the enemy’s intentions.

Use combat protocols

You build Sync during combat to activate powerful combat protocols. Pair them with your mercenary’s abilities and trigger Overclock at a critical moment to unleash burst power that can turn a fight around. Overclocking is not free power, so you must decide when to commit and when to conserve resources for the threats ahead.

Install cyberware

Cyberware from black markets, clinics and boss fights adds lasting effects to your combat system. It can boost card draw, Sync, block, attacks, status effects or resource cycles. Installations across different body slots can complement your deck and help define your combat style, though they may also make you more reliant on a particular strategy.

Fight through five zones

Your route leads through five escalating zones, from rogue machines and corporate defenses to digital phantoms:

• Neon Slums
• Mech Foundry
• Corporate Labs
• Cyberspace
• AI Core

Each chapter has its own mix of enemies, elite encounters and a final boss. Bosses change phases as their health falls, altering their attack patterns, summoning reinforcements, empowering themselves or unleashing a lethal termination protocol. Read enemy intentions and attack rhythms to defeat them before the system wipes you out.

Progress between runs

Failure does not end your progress. Completing battles, defeating bosses and collecting cards and cyberware unlocks content and progression options that can help you get further on your next run. Mercenary experience and content unlocks carry across runs.