Who Has The Choice?

For me, 2021 is shaping up to be the year of the well-written video game. The Blackwell Chronicles came through with some quality, pulpish noir. Disco Elysium made a play for the difficult experimental fiction stakes and didn't fall too far short. Along the Edge went for french film blurred and made it home safely.

Standards were set. The bar looked high. Lucky me, I'd left the best for last.

As regular readers may recall, I played Neo Cab's free demo back in October 2019 and reviewed it at some length. I just re-read that post and it covers a good deal of what I thought I was going to say in this one, so if you're interested in trying the game for yourself, something I'd highly recommend, I'd suggest going there first. I'm going to try not to cover the same ground again.

I don't really need to. Now that I've played through the whole game to an ending, there's little in the initial review I'd disagree with. It hits most of the main features I'd want to cover, other than the excellent synthwave score, which definitely deserves a mention. 

Neo Cab is intense. It does play out like an animated movie. The writing is sharp, pulpy, clever. All of that is true but there's so much more.

So much more, in fact, that it's plainly impossible to see the whole of the game on a single playthrough. Even in the demo, which is just the first section of the game excised, there's a clear indication that each choice made occludes another. 

By intent, most likely. When you meet Oona, the quantum statistician, the metatextuality of the game design becomes impossible to miss. I have to wonder. Can you even complete a playthrough where you don't meet Oona? 

Can you blame them?

 

The mechanics suggest you have free choice in who gets to ride your cab but it's hard to imagine how the narrative could function without certain characters and Oona seems like the keystone. Everything she says, does and is seems crucial, not just to the narrative, the plot and the structure but to the game's very reason for being.

I guess the only way to find out is to play the game again. Like she does.

Oona's job is sifting through the timelines to tell the future. Mostly she uses her talent to recover lost passphrases. Quantum computing allows her to observe quadrillions of potential outcomes in seconds. She emblematizes infinite variety. This is overt. Discussed. Context will not be lost.

Here's a problem with narrative-driven games that codify choice: without re-plays it's impossible to tell how real those choices are. In Neo Cab you can literally watch your timelines close down around you when others open up. Every pick-up you take means two or three you didn't and as the game unfurls around you it becomes more and more apparent that it matters.

Or it looks as if it would. Until I play again, though, who knows? I can say with certainty there have to be many more conversations to discover. Every pick-up tells a story and I left plenty waiting by the side of the road for the next driver to enjoy. Whether any of them materially affect the outcome, though? That I can't say without playing again.

I took a second run at Disco Elysium the other night. I wanted to see how things went if instead of going straight edge and career-focused I played things batshit crazy. It seemed like it would be almost a different game that way. It was not. 

Plot in a nutshell.

 

After about two hours I gave up. It didn't seem to matter what I did. The only differences I noticed were the dialogs and even going full Dr. Demento barely seemed to phase anyone. They all found some way to accomodate my insanity into their worldview and carry on dealing with me just the same as when I was straight. Every nodal decision point folded the same way no matter what I did.

I was left with a vague impression that in Disco Elysium a handful of decisions could possibly have long-term implications but the damn game takes over thirty hours to finish. I don't have the time or energy to spare to test whether that impression holds true. Not if almost everything else along the way stays the same.

Testing the timelines in Neo Cab is a much more practical proposition. By comparison the game zips along. Steam tells me my total played time, including the demo (which, after all, is just the first chapter of the full game) checks in at just under five hours. As always seems to be the case, I would have said it felt far longer. In a good way. I'm certain now, subjective time slows down the more intense the experience. And Neo Cab is, that word again, intense.

Once you arrive in Los Ojos, structurally, the way the game works is this: you begin each day with a minimum number of pick-ups to make, a monetary target to hit and a rating to sustain. In theory, if you miss any of these there are penalties. 

What those penalties are I can't say because I never missed any of my marks. I made my pickups, earned my money and never let my rating slip more than half a point below max. And it felt exhausting. Really, it did. Neo Cab has elements of survival game mechanics but they're tied into a commentary on the gamification of the real lives of an increasingly marginalized and disempowered demographic. And it's uncomfortable. 

Keep telling yourself that. You'll sleep better.

 

As well as earning a living you have to keep your cab fuelled and find somewhere to sleep each night. There are costs involved and they vary. The places you stay also speak to your mood and your mood is another game factor, measured as it is by your Feelgrid, which in turn has some impact on which dialog options you get to choose.

There's more game to Neo Cab than you might imagine from its reviews, most of which focus on its success as a visual novel. It's really a hybrid, a visual novel with survival-lite mechanics. I never felt I was under undue pressure to perform as a cab driver but equally I was never able to forget I had a job to do, an employer to placate and personal needs to sustain. 

It felt stressful and that's entirely intentional, I think. Your character is under pressure to perform and that bleeds through but there's also direct stress on you the gamer because you want to see all of the game and you know you can't. On multiple occasions I sat back and dithered over a decision, unwilling to make a choice because I could imagine the consequences both for Lina and for me. Not that I always imagined correctly. Neo Cab isn't that obvious. Or predictable. 

In the end you have to make a choice, of course. There's no time pressure. The game's happy to sit still while you angst over who to upset, who to ignore, where to go next, what to do. But sometime you have to step off the kerb. 

I'm focusing on the mechanics a little but the moving parts only move for a reason and that reason is to carry the story. I read a few reviews of Neo Cab after I finished last night and most of them used the word dystopia. That's not what I'd call it. And I wouldn't call it cyberpunk, either.

Motel blues.

  

Neo Cab is a near-future social satire in the direct and quite unmistakeable tradition of Philip K. Dick. The most ironic thing is the way the cab doesn't talk. You'd need to be a passenger, riding a Capra cab, for that. 

Dick was famous for multiple perspective narratives and the way Neo Cab distributes story across character after character is straight out of his playbook. In games we talk about world-building, by which we tend to mean lore and visuals. In literature this is how you do it.

And I would call Neo Cab literature. It has all the hallmarks: structure, intent, style. The more of these kind of narrative-driven games I play, the more convinced I'm becoming by the form. It is something different to other media. The experience is materially different to reading a graphic novel or watching an animated movie, the two most obvious analogs. 

Just how different ultimately rests, I believe, not just on the significance of the choices themselves but in the way the writers and designers are able to integrate the taking of those choices with a coherent vision and purpose. It's one thing to create a slickly-programmed version of a Choose Your Own Adventure paperback, entirely another to articulate and animate the full panoply of unwritten stories that lie between the lines of every good novel.

Whether a game even needs to do that is another question. Perhaps the potentiality is the point. Replaying Disco Elysium looks to have been a mistake. I pulled back the curtain and there was the technician, crouched on the floor with his hands on the levers. The power of a book or a play or a film rests as much on what's not told, not shown, after all. We're left wondering what might have happened. Like life.

Truer words, Savy...

 

I played Neo Cab to an ending. It was a good ending. Satisfying, convincing, meaningful. As Yeebo observed in yesterday's comments, reviewers have commented on the abrupt way Neo Cab ends and I can't argue. It did feel sudden but it also felt right. It was a little like a play where the big battle happens off-stage and all the audience gets to know about it is what the characters tell them after it's over, but, hey, if it was good enough for Shakespeare...

I would have added one extra scene, a final cab ride, one more conversation. I think that would have given some closure. There's a coda, though, that overwrites all of that, makes it feel unecessary. I got exactly the ending I wanted. The ending I would have written. And I felt, with the choices I made, that I had written it.

That's the difference, isn't it? However great you feel at the end of a novel or a film your experience is that of a reader, a viewer, an observer. Immersion and empathy put you inside the text, make the emotional experience resonant and real but without agency you can't feel ownership the way you can in a video game. 

In an odd way narrative-driven gaming is collaborative. No, you didn't write any of the lines. You didn't come up with the plot or create any of the characters. Still, in some scarcely defined fashion, you had a hand in how things turned out. You were active not passive. At least a little.

... truer words.

 

Neo Cab integrates active and passive engagement better than anything I've played probably since Doki Doki Literature Club. There's none of DDLC's confident deformation of form but as I've said already Neo Cab has its own metatextuality; effective, subtle, satisfying.

I'm conflicted over whether to lean into that vortex or pull away. I'm increasingly beginning to feel that peeling back the layers to reveal the musculature beneath these narratives is damaging to the whole. The ending you get is the ending you got and there's an end to it, or should be.

But Neo Cab sidesteps such concerns by making the narrative all about possibilities. Oona rides the timelines and once I knew there was a chance it could happen, my whole focus shifted to seeing Lina through to an apprenticeship in witch science. If Lina gets to see her other selves take the turnings she missed, why shouldn't I?

I've given myself permission to try again but maybe I'll take a few days off before I get back behind the wheel. I could do with some downtime. This game is intense. 

Did I mention that?

Cab It Up

 

If I was on Twitter this would be a tweet but I'm not so it's a really short blog post instead. 

Neo Cab is the best game I've played in a long time. And I want this picture on a T-shirt.

Full review tomorrow. Maybe. 

Depends which timeline we're in.

Next Cab On The Rank

One thing about playing mmorpgs that hadn't really occurred to me until recently was just how incredibly self-sustaining a hobby it is. I mean, I knew... I just hadn't been confronted by the evidence in such a personal fashion until now. Of late it's become something I can't easily ignore as I find myself spending more time and money on single-player titles.. 

There's been slippage, for sure. I didn't plan it but there's a lot of it going around. As Syl put it in her comeback post today, "the star of MMO gaming has also waned for me these past years as it has for many". 

Okay, maybe "waned" is a stretch. I'm not convinced I'm even spending less time playing mmorpgs than I was five years ago. I just have more time to play them. I've been at home an awful lot these past two years. Even I can only log so many hours in the same old, familiar games, week in, week out, year after year.

Circumstances certainly don't help. I have been feeling more than the occasional craving for novelty. Not so surprising, given I can't have travelled more than a couple of miles from my front door for the best part of eighteen months. If there was a constant stream of fresh mmorpgs to try I'd most likely have been happy to stick with those but as we know only too well by now, mmos take a hellishly long time to bring to market. Even early access can't get them to us fast enough. 

In common with just about everyone with a blog that used to focus on mmorpgs, of late I've been playing and posting about games in other genres. The newfound desire of gaming platforms to act like pushers in some 1950s exploitation flick, with their "just try a taste - the first one's on me" has had the hoped-for effect. 

Hoped-for by them, that is. What they don't tell you is just how fast you'll burn through these things. After two decades of mmo gaming it's a shock to the system. 

We're not three weeks into the year yet and already I've started and finished five single-player titles (Disco Elysium, three of the five chapters of the Blackwell Chronicles and Along the Edge which I never even got around to posting about) plus a couple of one-act demos. I've also tried several other freebies from Amazon and Epic, including two I'm still playing, Anna's Quest and Darkside Detective.

That's a hell of a lot of games to get through in eighteen days, especially when you consider there have been times when a lot fewer than half that many mmorpgs would have kept me fully occupied for eighteen months.

I'm beginning to see now why I've read so many people complaining about backlogs. Once you realize just how fast you get through this stuff it must be tempting to panic buy. I mean, what if the supply dried up? You need a massive stash just to feel safe.

With mmorpgs you don't have that problem. When you're deep inside one there's always more. The big fear is keeping up, not running out. 

And there are a lot of mmorpgs. In the past I've handled any moments of ennui by just downloading another. I'm still doing it. This morning, after yesterday's post and comments, I re-installed Allods Online. (Geez, that My.Games portal is annoying. I remember now why I uninstalled it last time.)

The thing is, after two decades I feel I've all but exhausted the supply of mmorpgs that interest me. Everything now's about taking a second look. Or a third. Or a tenth.

And doing that doesn't scratch the novelty itch. Not the most appealing metaphor but let's press on. 

The worrying thing is how moreish I'm finding the single-player titles. Finish one, you want to start another. It's chain-gaming and I'm not sure it's healthy.

Last night I began playing Neo Cab. I'm not going to give it the full first impression treatment because I kind of already did that back when I played the demo just over a year ago. I already have a lot to say about it, though. 

I'll get around to posting about it in detail when I'm further in but for now I'll just say it's excellent. Also it plays suprisingly differently than I was expecting. You get out of the car more than I thought you would. I find it quite stressful, but that's something I was expecting. The demo made me sweat.

The question is, how sustainable is single-player gaming as a pastime? For me, that is. For a start, there's the potential cost. One of the best things about playing mostly mmorpgs for twenty years is the money it's saved me. Even allowing for subscriptions, expansions and new games it's been incredibly economical and that's mostly because mmorpgs go on forever.

Single player games don't - at least the ones I enjoy - and that's the real problem here. The kind of single-player games I like don't just end, they end before I'm done with them. A long time before. All of them, pretty much. It's annoying. 

I could replay them but mostly I don't. The plain fact that there's an ending and I've seen it tends to put a cap on the experience. Maybe I could revisit it in a few years but first I have to build up that buffer.

Mmorpgs, as Kaylriene was saying, though, those you can keep on playing even when you're not sure why you're doing it. I can whittle away the afternoon or the evening just doing dailies, sorting inventory, dyeing my armor. It's not exciting but it passes the time. Literally. 

Best of all, there's almost never a point where it feels like you've reached an ending. And that's relaxing. It takes the pressure off. Mmorpgs, the way I play them at least, are relaxing. Sometimes I get so relaxed I fall asleep. Single-player games, they keep me awake. Make me think. Concentrate. Even, in the case of Neo Cab, make me a little scared to log in.

Hmm. That's the question. (Good! I was wondering what it was!). Do I want to feel relaxed and have it cost me next to nothing or would I rather pay money to be stressed? Put that way, it sounds obvious but it's not as easy as a choice as you might think. 

I'm pretty sure if I was working, not sitting around at home under lockdown, I wouldn't even be having this conversation (with myself). When I get home from work or I'm on a day off it's relaxation I'm looking for but after weeks of sitting about at home I find I'm in need of stimulation. Also new things to write about. And I don't mind paying to get them.

I'll probably keep on doing both, then. For now, anyway. 

Later in the year? 

We'll see.

Disco Potential

After mentioning in yesterday's post that I was on the fence about buying Disco Elysium I went and read a few more reviews. Then I looked at some screenshots. Then I bought Neo Cab. It was also on sale but for only about a third of the price. And anyway I'd been thinking about getting Neo Cab ever since I played the demo over a year ago. 

Neo Cab's reviews are every bit as stellar as Disco Elysium's. Both have "Very Positive" ratings on Steam, recent and all-time, but Neo Cab's are from fewer than a thousand people while Disco Elysium's are the aggregate of almost twenty-five thousand responses, because Disco Elysium is a niche phenomenon and Neo Cab's just niche. 

After I'd added Neo Cab to my basket I had another think about Disco Elysium. It seemed profligate to buy two games at once but I did get some unexpected money for Christmas that I hadn't made any plans for so why not? At least with some enforced hometime in my immediate future there was a good chance I'd play both, not just leave them languishing in my suspiciously overstuffed Steam library.

Really? You went there?

Remember when I didn't use Steam at all? Or when I installed it but couldn't see the point of it? Or when I was smug about not even knowing when the sales were on? Yeah, I could link to posts about all of that but I'm not going to. I have tags if anyone wants a laugh at my expense but I don't see why I should make it even easier.

So here I am in 2021, buying stuff in the Steam sale because... well, because it's on sale, I guess. I mean, I could have bought either of these games at any time but I didn't. Am I buying them now because I want to play them more than I did before? 

Nah. Not going to stand that one up, am I? So much for "I buy what I want when I want it and I pay whatever it costs". Guess I'm going to have to fall back on Emerson yet again. God, I'm glad I picked that as my life motto back in college. It's like the ultimate Get Out of Jail Free card for personal responsibility.

Plus, I always said I liked a bargain. Who doesn't? And even if video games need to cost more to cover their costs, to me anything that comes in over £20 is ridiculously overpriced. Unless it's the expansion for an mmorpg I play. Or a new mmorpg I want to play. Or Early Access to something that's going to close down in a couple of years.

Emerson!!! Get in here!

Anyhoo...

I wouldn't get too comfortable there, ma'am.

 

What I wanted to do before I wrote about either of my new purchases was to play through both of them. That way I could compare and contrast and pretend like I was still in higher education, which was the last time stuff like that mattered. Only the problem is I'm already sitting on several ideas for posts that rely on me getting to the end of things, like the Blackwell Chronicles series and at least three tv shows I'm working my through. And for me sitting on posts is about as uncomfortable as it sounds.

So, first impressions, eh? That's a legitimate thing. Let's have at it. Disco Elysium, you're up. According to Steam you've had one hour and forty-four minutes to impress me. Let's see how you did.

Let's start with the positives:

• It looks great. I love the art style. It's all pastels. Rainwashed pastels. The color palette is tight, mute. It reeks of sanitoriums, overcooked vegetables and claustrophobia.
  

• The UI is intuitive, handy. Jarring in a way that unsettles. Jittery and gauche. Clever trick, making the controls feel awkward without making them awkward to use.
  

• Set design is deep without being daunting. Or not too daunting. The way the environment breaks into rooms without necessarily being bound by walls feels organic and natural. Many games don't pull that off so well.

• Highlighting items that mean something saves a lot of wasted time. The way thoughts and feelings suggest themselves alongside objects seems original. At least I don't recall seeing it done before.

• The skill system is proper and something I have seen done before. Probably not as well. The names and descriptions are muffled. The concepts struggle to breathe. So much better than having them shout.

• There's an xp system! Games like this never have one of those! I love getting xp for things my character does. He even levels up! What is this, an rpg? Oh, it is, isn't it? I was thinking it was an adventure game because it feels like one. Or a visual novel. All the reading!

I like her already.

 

• The writing's competent, which is lucky, given what I just said. It manages quite a lot of show don't tell for a game that's basically all tell. Several reviews I read mentioned that if you don't like reading text you maybe should buy something else and they were not kidding. 

• The plot is interesting, involving, intriguing, all the adjectives it needs to be to draw you in. There's plenty of text and subtext. I imagine it gets deep then deeper again. That's how these things go, isn't it? 

• The characters have personality. Some. Not some of the characters. All the characters. All of them have some personality. Maybe some of them have all of a personality or most of one. Too early to tell but there's promise.

• Oh, and the music. The music's not bad. It's by British Sea Power and it was Bafta-nominated. Don't think it won.
  

Enough positives. These are first impressions. This is not a full review. Bring on the bad stuff.

Oh, and there's bad stuff, alright. Let's get that out there. If I had to sum up my first impressions of Disco Elysium in a single word that word would be irritating. Or possibly annoying. Maybe infuriating, I don't know.

• Let's begin at the beginning with character creation. Remember all those proper skills with funky names? Yeah, I bet those are great on a second playthrough or if you maybe, I dunno, came at it like a research project and read them all up online before you got started. You get to pick stats from presets or half-ass your own before you're faced with a slew of mostly-meaningless icons and cryptic one-line mouseovers for skills. One point to spend on one of them to be your key feature for the rest of the game. That's fun.
  

• 

  Yeah, you're not selling me.
  

  Your character? You get to play a filthy schlub who looks like the third-prize winner in a Peter Wyngarde lookalike contest. After a night in the drunk tank. Make that a week. Actually, maybe after you fell in a canal and drowned and bloated up then got raised in a dark ritual and now you get to look like that all the time. 

• I mean, I get that that's what they were going for. Only I don't like to play characters like that. Ever. Could I get some options? Please?

• Also some agency. This is my big complaint. Read up about this game and it's all how you can be whatever kind of detective you want to be. It's right there in the promo material: "Unprecedented freedom of choice". Except if you want to not smoke, or drink, or take drugs.

• In the first few minutes I was faced with supposed choices over whether to do those things and I wanted to say no but the game wouldn't let me. I tried all the available options and whatever I did I ended up with a quest in my book to get some cigarettes and smoke them or to have a drink. Now I imagine I can just not do the quests but if there's a way to delete them I can't find it so I know the game expects me to smoke and drink. I'm sure it has all sorts of smart outcomes from that, some of which may well end up with being a tee-total non-smoker but apparently I can't choose to start out straight-edge, which is what I wanted.
  

• Which is fine (he says, passive-agressively) since I'm clearly not playing a character of either my choosing or invention, only if that's so then why sell the game to me as one where I not only have that unprecedented freedom of choice but can also "do almost anything". Do? Sure. Not do? Not so much.

• Also, the unpredictabilty of outcomes, when the game does let you do what you think you want and it turns out to be something else altogether. I get that it's a feature. Choices don't just have meaningful consequences, they have unexpected ones. When you're offered the option of slipping away from a conversation so as to avoid paying a bill, however, it's a bit more than just "unexpected" to see your character run full speed across the room before turning mid-run to double-flip the bird at the guy he was supposedly sneaking out on and falling backwards into an old woman in a wheelchair.

• Following that little performance with a freezeframe where your character soliloquizes about how he doesn't know why he did it doesn't make the whole thing feel any less forced. It gave me the feeling someone had heard of Beckett's affection for slapstick and figured "If he can get away with it..."

Do you kiss your probation officer with that mouth, son?

 

• Then there's the swearing. I like swearing. I swear. I watch movies where people swear and read books where people swear. Swearing doesn't usually bother me. About an hour into Disco Elysium I damn nearly closed the game down because of one scene that's nothing but relentless, psychotic verbal abuse. I get the idea but the psychological effect is not dissimilar to having an actual person actually verbally abusing you. I'm paying money for this?

• That scene is partially voice-acted. The whole game is partially voice-acted. In a few months there's going to be a free update in which the entire game will be upgraded to having voice-acting for every line of dialog. Only the voice acting is not really a highlight. It's intentional, I'm sure of that. The voice acting closely replicates the color palette. It's muted and vague and somewhat toneless. I kind of like it but it's not really anything I feel we need more of. Less of, maybe.

• What about the writing? Up in the positives I called it "competent" and it is. It's very much in that well-trodden niche where you'd find games like Fallen London and Sunless Seas and anything by Failbetter Games. There's a barrel of ennui and a bucketful of emptiness and someone's read Viriconium Nights while drinking absinthe and listening to Tom Waits one too many many times. The thing is, this is a thing I like. I like this kind of thing. And I do like this. Only, I have seen it a few times now. Quite a few times. It has to be better than a competent pastiche to hold my attention any more. May be this is. We'll see if it holds up. 

I feel there's a bird joke here I'm missing.

And that's probably enough for a first impressions piece. I'd guess I'm maybe five per cent into the game at most and it's a game that's famously replayable. What I think of Disco Elysium after fifty hours is not going to be the same as what I think about it after an hour and three-quarters. I'd be willing to bet now that I'll end up coming back and eating at least some of my unfavorable words. 

But first impressions count... I was going to say double but a lot more than that.

When I played the demo of Neo Cab, which is just the opening of the game, so effectively the same first impression you'd get if you bought the whole thing, I mentally tagged it as something I'd like to finish one day. A year and a quarter later I did buy it, albeit at forty per cent off. 

If I'd played the first couple of hours of Disco Elysium as a demo I'm not at all sure I'd have wanted more. I don't like the characters or the setting much. Nothing about it feels unusual, let alone original. It seems extremely well-done for what it is but what it is is something I'm beginning to get a little tired of. 

I've been reading and watching stories set in cities at the end of the world or time since I was a teenager. And as for neo-noir, I'm not sure how many more downtrodden, drugged-up, drunken cops trudging through garbage-strewn, rain-soaked streets in torn trenchcoats I can take. Okay, it's a sports jacket this time but the point holds.

I'm bound to keep playing, nonetheless, and not just because I've paid twenty quid for it, either. It's the name, isn't it? I mean, "Disco Elysium"? 

I can spin a million post titles out of that!

Saturday Night In The City Of The Eyes: Neo Cab

Around eight-thirty last night I'd about had enough. I'd started maybe twelve hours earlier and I'd been at it ever since, with the usual breaks for food and excercise.

I'd been thinking about blogging but I'd come up empty on ideas again so I decided to give myself a day off. No reason to force it it if the feels aren't there but before I gave up for the night I flipped down the roll to see if anyone else was feeling more inspired than I was.

There was a post by Bhodan at Backlog Crusader that caught my eye: Neo Cab (PC) Review – A Dystopian Uber Simulator. That's a header just packed with hooks. "Neo" and "Cab" are triggers for both cyberpunk and noir and I already consider the real-world Uber to be one of the four motorcycle outriders of the coming Dystopian Apocalypse. This might be something.

I read the review and my intrigue, already piqued, spiked. It would be redundant to repeat Bhodan's detailed take on the game, not least because they've played the damn thing and I've only seen the demo. If it's true that "When you meet a new face, they do feel like a pastiche of a stereotype: a doomsayer, rebellious teenager, chill sage, mysterious lady – you name it. Meet them for more than once, however, and you will begin to see behind their mask", well, I wouldn't know, would I?  In the demo you only get that first face-off.

What I will say is this: it's a hell of a demo. For a start it hangs on and won't let go. I guess you can close the app to get away but if there's any kind of Pause or Save or "Come Back and Finish This Later" button, I couldn't find it.

The demo downloads in a minute or two via Steam and plays perfectly. I say "plays". It does feel more like an interactive graphic novel than a game. Not that there aren't gamelike elements. There aren't many but if I have a criticism it would be that even "not many" is too many.

There's this thing called a FeelGrid that you end up strapping to your wrist. It's like a 1970s Mood Ring only it works. Lina, the protagonist, gets it as a gift from Savy, her quondam and to-be-again BFF and the game presents it in glowing, positive terms. I thought it seemed like something the STASI would have used.

I found it ironic that Lina and Savy would willingly submit themselves to 24/7 unrestricted public exposure of their emotional state at the same time as decrying the intent and will of corporations to subject the population to something not at all disimilar but that may well be wholly intentional. Cognitive dissonance is endemic under neon lighting.

Leaving the ethical and philosophical subtext in the box, the thing is a damn pain when it comes to gameplay. The main effect it has is to block you from taking some of the listed options when you talk to your passengers (aka paxs).

The idea is you can't deviate from Lina's emotional state and the FeelGrid tells you what that is. If she's angry the game won't allow you to back down or make peace or just put on a professional face, keeping all your seething inside so as to protect your rating. Which would all be well and good if it didn't also leave the alternate replies on screen for you to click on in frustration, trying to dial the situation back a notch, before you realize you don't actually have a choice.

That's about the only thing I didn't like. Everything else was spot on.

The tone is perfectly judged. There's a brittle edge to everything from the beginning. Lina doesn't know what she wants, Savy, her friend, is clearly lying out of both sides of her grim little mouth, every pax has an agenda they're not revealing even though you can clearly see it sticking out of their top pocket...

The visuals are muted, spare, typical and effective. There's a deal of less being more going on here. I took over forty screenshots in ninety minutes and honestly I could have taken twice as many. Not because of anything that happens on screen but for the dialog.

The writing is sharp, pulpy, clever. There's nothing original here but someone knows what all the parts are and where they fit. You can see the gears moving. I like that. The story, what you get to learn of it in the demo anyway, is intriguing. Not unexpected but enticing.

The characters are key. Lina is floundering but struggling hard to stay afloat, Savy is... I hated her! Okay, hate may be too strong but I wouldn't trust her to open a jar of pickles, something she spends most of the time looking as though she'd just eaten. The last thing Lina said to Savy when they fell out years before was to call her selfish - on the evidence I've seen that would count as a compliment. I'd say she was self-obsessed, bordering on sociopathic.

Evidence? What would you think if your ex-best friend got in touch out of the blue, after never speaking to you for years, to invite you to move cities to share an appartment with her. Then, when you arrived just before midnight, tired after the long drive, she strung you out with a load of excuses about what a bad day she'd had before leaving you to drive around the city while she went clubbing?

Plus she has a sour face and talks like the worst kind of hypocrite. Compared to Savy, all three of the paxs Lina picks up are joy unconfined. And they really aren't.

What they are is convincing, compelling and in two out of the three cases laugh out loud funny. I found the Neo Cab demo to be one of the best laughs I've had for a while. 

The first pax, a would-be photographer on a year's sabbatical from his "real" job (which he doesn't explain and about which the game doesn't allow you to ask) just seems like a nice guy. When Lina picked him up by the side of the road in the middle of the desert I was getting ax-murderer vibes but he's cool.

The next two pick-ups are your choice. There are several calls but you only need to make a total of three for your quota. I picked Gideon, who turned out to be a teenage girl with a boy's name, locked in a spacesuit called a Kiddiemech (I think it was...). Her mother, Yancy, put her in it when she was four years old after a car hit her and she can't get out of it until she turns eighteen. Not even to sleep.

She is, understandably, pissed. She made me laugh out loud more than once. She reminded me of me when I was about sixteen although I was neither rich nor sealed in a spacesuit. I did want to set the world on fire just to see it burn, though.

When Gideon gets into the car in her suit Lina hopes she's going to turn out to be a robot, which is some gorgeous ironic foreshadowing right there. Her final fare turns out to be two German "tourists" who appear to have stepped straight out of a Blade Runner parody.


They've heard that American taxi companies are starting to use robot drivers and they don't believe Lina can be human. They insist on putting her through a hilarious version of Phil Dick's Voight-Kampff empathy test. Theirs even has a soundalike compound name, the exact detail of which escapes me but the first name was Higgs.

The questions become increasingly surreal and sexual. I was quite surprised that Lina took it all as well as she did. I was expecting her FeelGrid to lurch into the red at any time but it stayed solidly in the green chill out zone. She seemed to find the whole thing as amusing as I did.

I guess after the pax that she had before, the one that just jumped into the backseat without going to the bother of using the Neo Cab app, then started ordering her about, a couple of nerdy Germans with an AI fetish must have come as light relief.

The demo wraps on something of a cliffhanger. It also leaves Lina alone in Los Ojos with nowhere to sleep and no news of Savy's current state of existence beyond her smashed phone, found in an alley.

I am in two minds whether to buy the game. It's very well done and I enjoyed the demo a lot. But boy, was it intense. After an hour and a half I felt drained. There's a lot of moral decision making and I don't find that much fun. I like everything to be nice and I place a huge value on politeness. I find games that only give me dialog options that I consider aggressive or rude to be trying and Lina's FeelGrid sometimes pushed me down that road further than I felt comfortable with travelling.

Still and all, I managed to score a maximum five-star service rating from all three paying customers and the freebie liked me even though I yelled at him a lot. That did feel satisfying.

Chances are I'll buy Neo Cab eventually. I'd recommend it to anyone who likes this kind of "moral decision" gameplay although I do get the feeling that no matter what choices you make the whole thing is going to play out like an animated movie anyway. I think I'd prefer it was a movie. I'd definitely watch it.

The demo is worth an hour and a half of anyone's time, though. I might play it again, if that's allowed, just to see what the paxs I didn't pick have to say for themselves.