Indie Game of the Week 419: Tales of the Neon Sea

I think I'm just a sucker for a cyberpunk aesthetic. Palm Pioneer's Tales of the Neon Sea has been a middling adventure game so far, not to get too ahead of myself here, but its visuals are definitely on point. Set in the fading glory of Starlight City, long since supplanted culturally and economically by the fancy floating majesty of Sky City, it follows the cyborg P.I. Rex as he takes on a series of murder and missing person investigations around his neighborhood that are unexpectedly all linked to a serial killer he once defeated and left for dead back when he was part of an elite police squad. Adding to his woes is the dire state of his funding to the extent he can't even repair his century-old assistant robot, the occasional odd hallucinatory feedback from the cybernetic parts he was hurriedly integrated with as a last-ditch effort to save his life after a terrible case went awry, and the politically charged backdrop that is the city's first human vs. sapient robot mayoral election.

Like most good cyberpunk there's plenty of worldbuilding to be uncovered but most of it is optional: the game distinguishes hotspots in its vicinity with a white outline if it's important for the current mission, though there's far more that can be examined for a bit of background detail (it took me a little while to realize this). Noteworthy lore is added to a glossary of sorts, which is also where important puzzle clues are kept if you need to refer back to them, so the game is at least meticulous in keeping track of these details for you. The game has fully 2D movement and a simple interface for interacting with the world, making it suitable for both controller and keyboard+mouse controls (though the latter makes some of the puzzles a bit more palatable), and breaks up the usual inventory hotspot adventure puzzles with the more abstract Layton-style types whenever you might need to hack or lockpick your way past a barrier. The game also has its moments where you play as William, a precocious stray black cat that frequently crosses paths with the luckless private dick, which tend to be a bit more puzzle-heavy.

The game uses an in media res device to set up its stakes and the dangerous path the protagonist's inquiries will lead him down, as he eludes a masked pursuer in the sewers with two of his limbs broken, but lets it stew by zooming back a week and having you investigate the murder of a local landlady. The body/crime scene examinations are slickly done but don't have a whole lot of depth to them, as the protagonist is quick to piece everything together as soon as all the clues have been found: the player's only contribution is a metaphorical "putting the gears in motion" as you take the cognitive cogs of Rex's abductive reasoning and arrange them in a typical gears puzzle where each of them has to connect to the rest in sequence. Actually, the game uses devices like this frequently, to the extent where it feels less like you're actively involved with piecing together a solution to the mystery and instead watching events play out on their own while being shuffled into a corner and given a Rubik's cube to keep you distracted.

I can sympathize with the developers' blight somewhat: adventure games have come so far since their temporary death in the FMV era and resurrection in the modern Indie scene, where it feels like only Wadjet Eye can get away with a straight graphic adventure throwback because of the effort they put into their stories. Tales of the Neon Sea, conversely, tends to like its jokey asides and abstract brainteasers a little too much to maintain any effectively suspenseful pacing. Add to this a localized script that is replete with typos, though they're more evident in the bonus lore notes which tend to be larger walls of text, and an odd... feature? bug? where dialogue overextends in some boxes and there's no button I can find to make it appear—the normal interaction button just skips to the next line instead. The game does have that common VN affectation where it lets you consult a "dialog log" to see the lines you missed, but it feels like the equivalent of slapping a poster over a big crack in the wall and hoping no-one minds.

Tales of the Neon Sea definitely has the style down and I do enjoy poking around its detailed pixel world for nuggets of backstory but it is losing me a little with its legion of minor imperfections. I'm curious enough about where the story might be going, and its thematic examination of self-aware robots struggling to find acceptance in a human society instructed by its biased media to fear the distrustful androids in their midst and with Rex's place in the middle of that conflict as someone with a foot in both worlds, that I'm thinking of seeing it through to the end. And, honestly, some of the stuff that bums me out most about this playthrough of Tales of the Neon Sea isn't even the game's fault: I'm playing the EGS version since it was given away for free some ways back and it lacks both achievement support and what I imagine are several important patches its Steam and console ports are no doubt enjoying. EGS is pretty terrible about keeping its older games up to date in that fashion, unless they're something major like Fortnite, so it's frequently dispiriting playing games on the platform even if I can't really grumble about something that's free all too much. Watch this space for updates once I've finally completed it: I've not heard promising things about its later chapters but there's always a chance it could turn around for me.

Rating: 3 out of 5.

Post-Playthrough Edit: Well, things did not improve too much—the text runover bug remained as prevalent as ever—but I respect the bold choice of having incredibly elaborate environmental puzzles in lieu of anything related more to actually solving cases. Like if the sci-fi thriller The Dig didn't have much of anything about deciphering alien languages and piecing together the mystery behind your sudden abduction and instead had you spend hours reassembling tortoise skeletons, if you could imagine such a ridiculous thing. One significant puzzle in TotNS just before reaching the villain's secret lair involved dismantling a decommissioned ship's parts in order to repair and power up its morse code telegram device to send a signal that would open a different ship's cargo bay. So much walking around activating devices and combining components into useful gadgets than I was anticipating from a whodunnit procedural. The game was memorable, I'll give it that.