Tales of the Neon Sea | PC Review

If you’re a cyberpunk fan and an adventure game fan, then this is a great time to be a gamer, as there is a boom in cyberpunk. Chinese developer Palm Pioneer and publisher Zodiac Interactive add another game to the ever-growing vault of cyberpunk games: Tales of the Neon Sea. I’m not aware of many games coming from China, as that is a notoriously closed market. This made me intrigued by this title, especially because I am one of those cyberpunk and adventure game fans.

A Droid And His Cat

In this neon-noir detective you play Rex, a cyborg police detective-turned-private eye and his cat William. Yes, you read that right, you play Rex and his cat. Both have an important part to play in this adventure, and they could be considered partners in crime (solving). In this world, robots have become sentient, and are more or less treated as second-class citizens. When a human is seemingly murdered by a robot, Rex is pulled into the investigation. In the process he encounters some ghosts from the past he would’ve rather left behind, both flesh ones and metal ones.

Neon All the Way

The artwork and graphics in Neon Sea are fantastic. It’s all pixel art, and it perfectly manages to capture the look and feel of the cyberpunk genre, focusing a lot on the neon of the title. Compared with the very atmospheric music, they manage to evoke this possible cyber-enhanced future very well. The controls are easy, and you can use either a controller or the keyboard. The hotspots give you options to use or pick up when that is possible. You can investigate quite a lot, even when it’s not shown as a hotspot. That also means that it’s easy to miss something, but in general this works very well and encourages investigating everything.

Logic Doesn’t Always Work

What didn’t work very well, is the massive increase in difficulty at the end of chapter two and the whole of chapter three. The game has three chapters, and the puzzles in the first half make sense. It’s mostly logic puzzles where, for instance, in order to open a door you have to hack the lock, and you do this by getting object A to place B in a specific way that is totally logical. If you’re not into logic puzzles, then this is not the game for you. But near the end of chapter two, the puzzles become very difficult, and that jump is quite large. I got the impression that the puzzles in chapter three were more there to prolong the game play than to add to the story. This is fairly frustrating at times.

Death Becomes Him

Death is present in this game, quite literally sometimes. You can’t save the game manually, but there are save points. If you die, you get back to that save point, which is usually right before the dangerous situation. This makes it easier to figure out how to handle the problem. It also keeps the stakes in the game high without a looming threat of death present in early Sierra games.

Conclusion

There is much to love in this game, and there are some flaws. It’s also only the first half of the story, so the game ends on a big cliffhanger. The developer says:

This release contains about 12-15 hours of gameplay, and features the first three chapters of a larger story arc. We aim to release following chapters of the main storyline for free sometime in the autumn.”

The story is definitely the great positive here, but it gets bogged down by some overly complicated and some nonsensical puzzles in the final half. There are also some spelling errors in the text as well as some Chinese description that seemed to have slipped through the localization. While that doesn’t prevent you from finishing the game, it is a bit sloppy. As the developers are listening a lot to the fans, I expect these to be fixed in a future patch.

If you enjoy roaming through a cyberpunk future with your cat through the medium of point and click, then you will appreciate this. I’m also sure that Palm Pioneer will stick the landing when the final three chapters come out to prove this to us. They show enough potential to be excited about it.

This review is based on a Steam copy of Tales of the Neon Sea provided by Zodiac Interactive for coverage purposes.