Backing Backbone

Earlier this year I bought several games on Steam. It was winter. It was cold. It was wet. I was inside a lot. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Three of those games had very similar settings and themes. They were all variants of the anthropomorphic noir detective subgenre, in which animals talk and act like humans as they go around behaving as if they were starring in a 1940s B-movie alongside Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre. 

There are a lot of games like this. Why, I have no idea. I find it difficult to imagine how the subgenre even came to exist, let alone why it's become so enduringly popular. I mean, I'm a year or so off retirement and the movies that inspired these games had already fallen out of fashion before I was born. And yet here they are, all those cynical PIs with their irony and anomie, trudging through neon-lit streets in the rain, swapping gruff one-liners with hoodlums in leather jackets and swearing never to get involved with another dame, just as they get involved with another dame.

Except now they're all cats and dogs and raccoons and even goddam chickens. Explain it to me. Go on, I dare you.

So far this year I've played four of these games, three on Steam, one on Prime Gaming, and finished three. I guess I must like them. 

Not that they're all the same. Or even all that much alike. They vary from lighthearted spoofs to existential essays but they all have two things in common - talking animals and mystery. 

The game I just finished, Backbone, started out as a Kickstarter. Having played it, I was curious to see what the pitch had been. It was clear a lot of people weren't happy with some of the turns the game had taken in development and I wondered whether they'd been misled by the campaign or by their own expectations.

Having read the details, I do think the complainers might have a point. I should caveat that by saying I loved the game, finding many of the aspects others label as problematic to be among its many strengths. I wouldn't, however, disagree that it doesn't seem to be exactly the game the Kickstarter was selling.

Back in 2018, the campaign funded at $95k over a $63k ask. Canadian dollars. It hit 50%  of its stretch goals. The game was scheduled to release a year later. It actually arrived on Steam three years after the close of the campaign, in June 2021. By Kickstarter standards and given everything that was going on in the world at that time, it seems like a reasonable outcome. 

The question comes not so much with the timeframe as with what was eventually delivered. The pitch promised "a pixel art cinematic adventure with stealth and action elements" in which players would be able to "solve detective cases, interrogate witnesses, explore the intriguing and dangerous world... and sneak your way to safety using smell-based stealth mechanics". 

Further gameplay detail included "No hand-holding - move forward through the game by your own rules. Every case has numerous trails, and it’s up to you to decide which one to follow." There would be "Stealth & Action. In the animal world, smell is the most powerful sense. Hide in multi-level environments, mask your scent in garbage bins, follow suspects and escape the chase. "

Unsurprisingly, given all of that, some people thought they were getting a detective game. That's not really what happened.

Backbone currently has a "Mixed" rating from nearly 1600 reviews. It's Recent Review status is better at "Mostly Positive." I imagine the improvement comes from newer purchasers having already heard the complaints and factored them in before committing. Almost all those complaints revolve around two things: lack of agency and the ending.

Of the former, there can be no doubt. There may be "numerous trails" as promised but all of them lead to the same destination. Different choices result in varying conversations but no matter what you choose, the plot moves inexorably forwards to its one and only conlcusion. There's no option to save. The game does that for you as it sees fit, keeping just one updated copy. You have but one choice at all times: continue from where the game last saved or start over from the beginning.

As for "Stealth & Action", it wouldn't be fair to say they don't feature in gameplay at all but they do seem at best tacked on and even that limited degree of interaction dwindles away as the game progresses. The vaunted "smell-based stealth mechanics", if they even exist, passed me by completely. I don't remember a single instance when smell came into play.

I did read a complaint or two about a lack of puzzles, which seems less fair. There are a couple, near the start, but the Kickstarter pitch never claimed there would be any. Backbone is very much not a Point & Click adventure game. It's much more a visual novel.  

A more reasonable complaint involves the absence of the promised "detective work". While it may be nominally correct to say there's some investigating involved, every clue and every discovery is pre-ordained. Every interactable object is highlighted, mostly only as and when required. "Detection" largely consists of walking through the scrolling landscape, clicking on each prompt as it appears.

Complaints about the ending and particularly the major change of direction taken by the plot in the latter part of the game seem to me to be far less justifiable. The Kickstarter page clearly describes a world that "combines the visual and social contrasts of film noir with anthropomorphic animals, retrofuturistic technologies, and dystopian fiction". No-one should really be surprised by the strong science fiction elements when they appear.

The storyline lives up to its billing as "challenging" and "thought-provoking". Unsettling and disturbing would be two other adjectives I might use. It's easy to see why backers, already irritated by the absence of the kind of gameplay they expected, might bridle at the discomfitting nature of the narrative as it reveals itself.

And so to that ending. Without spoiling anything more than the illusion that this might be a cosy, comfortable game full of cuddly animals who talk, I'll say it's bleak, uncompromising and depressing. I loved it.

It's also - and I think this might be the real reason it's proved so unpopular - wholly incomplete. It leaves the player with that unpleasantly familiar sensation of coming to the end of the final season of a series that's failed to renew. There are more plot threads left dangling than were there when it began.

Unlike a cancelled TV show, however, I have the strong impression this is entirely intentional. It's certainly consistent with the stated desire to tell "a tale about how our environment shapes us, and how we influence it in return." Given that Eggnut, the developer, went on to release not a sequel but a prequel, "Tails: The Backbone Preludes", it seems the original game ends in just the way they intended. 

Within those constraints, the game they made is excellent. It is, indeed, as they also said it would be, "a pixel art cinematic adventure". The art lives up its billing as "a modern take on the classical retro adventure look", filled with "contrasting silhouettes against the setting sun, dust particles, neon signs and steaming sewer hatches". It's one of the most visually appealing games I've played for a good while, with enormous depth of detail that richly repays long moments spent studying the background of every scene.

The writing, which gets plenty of praise even from some of those who dislike the game as a whole, is, for once, almost as good as people say. True, noir tropes do provide a safe scaffold, but here language expresses itself with an unconstrained fluency, not limited by the expectations of the form. As the visuals are cinematic, so the writing feels novelistic.

While the plot maintains a steady throughline, numerous diversions add considerable tonal variety. As anticipated, world-building is to the fore, matching the claim that there's "A rich, living and breathing world waiting to be explored". It's a world whose depth and detail we'll most probably never get to see but isn't that always the way of these things?

As for the music, described as "combining jazz and electronic music to create a viscous soundtrack that feels like a dark, enveloping veil of bebop and cinematic soundscapes"... well, judge for yourself. Suffice it to say, every time a song started up in game I stopped whatever I was doing and listened to the end and I'm writing this post to a backdrop of the soundtrack right now.

All in all I can heartily recommend Backbone to anyone who doesn't develop a twitch when they aren't in control. It may not be that much of a game but its a hell of an experience. In tone and range it reminds me most of Disco Elysium, a comparison Steam itself seems keen to promote, although it's flatter and less nuanced. Still, it would be a high bar to reach. Even to challenge it is praiseworthy.

I've wishlisted "Tails" to pick up when it goes on sale. It's currently rated "Very Positive", strongly suggesting the original game found its audience. I would be among them.

Street Life

I wasn't going to post today. I thought about it. I didn't have anything I particularly cared to say. Then, it was getting along around nine, I decided I didn't want to skip a day, after all.

I've been playing Backbone since I wrapped up Nine Noir Lives and I've taken a few shots. It's an extraordinarily beautiful world. I thought maybe I'd share.

It's not just a rainslick surface gloss. Each city block reels with depth. Whole lives pass in the glimpse of an open window. Every shopfront tells its story.

Paging through the shots, I wish now I'd taken more. I was too busy watching this world go by. These streets. Filled with life. The city pulses with it. Start taking pictures, you might never stop.

Behind the doors there's more. Much more. Lives lived in the evidence of their own, thick past. If I could I'd show you but I let it all wash over me. I followed the story down and now it's all gone, washed away.

On the strip, everything is neon. Reflections gleaming in the rain.  So bright.

Everywhere, dreams for sale. In plush seats. In smoke-filled bars. In paper twists. Secrets and lies, promises and horrors.

Behind the lights there's a darkness. Broken parks, bleak alleyways, lost hopes, empty bottles, hard times. And in that darkness, only chance and circumstance. Not choice. Never choice.

After what I've seen I need some air.

Feel the wind across the water. Let it clear my head.

Soon enough, it'll all start over. The city never sleeps.

But I do. 

Sweet dreams.

I Feel Like Chicken Tonight

Chicken Police - Paint it RED! is a compelling game, comprising a short, introductory tutorial and four chapters. I've just finished Chapter One. Unlike Steam, Prime Gaming doesn't keep a tally of how long you've been playing but with a session last night, another this morning and a third this afternoon, I guess my time on ride-along with the Rooster Cops adds up to three or four hours at least.

If the game reminds me of anything other than the many anthropomorphic, noiresque point&clicks I've played before, it's probably Disco Elysium. The similarity isn't so much in the gameplay, the visuals or the writing as it is in the atmosphere. There's a seedy, down-at-heel, fin de siecle feel to the world, which comes freighted with a wealth of - mostly unexplained - history and politics. You get the perpetual sense that there's a fully-developed world behind the stagey sets, a world of which you're seeing the merest sliver.

Even more so than with Disco Elysium, which does have an actual novel somewhere in its development history, I'd love to read some fiction set in the Wilderness, the world of the Chicken Police. Someone's taken a deal of trouble to sketch out the problems inherant in a society of animals, the racial/species tensions, predator/prey interactions and the dificulties of understanding that must arise so inevitably between sentient beings as different from another as cats and cockroaches.

Like Disco Elysium, the product of Za/Um, an Estonian studio, Chicken Police also stems from Eastern Europe, the studio behind the game, The Wild Gentlemen, being based in Hungary. According to one source, the studio was originally named King Fox, which would certainly tie-in with the political structure of Clawville, the city-state where the action takes place, ruled as it is by Hector III, an actual fox king.

Excellent voice acting by an experienced cast of native English-speakers does a great deal to smooth the edges of what frequently comes across as a somewhat arch translation. I noticed this in Disco Elysium at times although I think it's more obvious in Chicken Police. 

Far from getting in the way, the very slightly off-kilter nuances of the text serve to heighten the otherness of this strange world, populated by creatures who refer to themselves as "animals" but who present as human beings with animal heads. Theeir hands strike me as peculiarly disturbing. 

Humans themselves are known only as mythical creatures, often portrayed as angels. I imagine there's subtext.

Dialog loops from pragmatic, prosaic and cliched to highly abstracted. Numerous conversations disappear unexpectedly down eliptical culs-de-sac, wherein the meaning becomes occluded or altogether lost. Similarly, the many cultural references, pop and not-so-pop, are doled out like workhouse dumplings, to be taken and digested - or not - as they come. Don't expect any gravy to help them slip down easily.

Surrounded by the richness of the metatext, the noir narrative itself tends to fade into the foreground. As Chris Lawn says, in what seems to me to be a very fair review of the game at Player2.net.au, "A detective noir story is cool but is such a small slice of what could be." 

Like Chris, I too would love to learn more about Predation, the Meat War and the divide between the Royalists and the Separatists. I want to delve more deeply into the systemic racism of Clawville, expressed in its most extreme and virulent form by the trade in larvae, whereby the children of impoverished insect mothers trapped in the barred ghetto of The Hive, end up on the plates of rich diners in upper-class restaurants. 

Shocking though that is, perhaps the frequent, casual racist comments of Marty, one of the two protagonists and a serving police officer, represent a more insidious malaise. His unthinking, denigratory wisecracks suggest a level of intolerance within the justice system that must go bone-deep.

If the narrative is evenly distributed across all four chapters, many more hours of revelations lie ahead. At times it's an unpleasant journey but, as I said at the start, it's a compelling one. 

Next stop The Sweltering Nile. a high-class brothel, run by a crocodile. 

Let's hope it doesn't all end in tears.

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.