Tales Of The Neon Sea
PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One
Palm Pioneer’s sci-fi point-and-click adventure follows the recipe for a classic detective noir. Its protagonist is a hardbitten, heavy-drinking private investigator. Its world is one of faded glamour and corruption, all rundown buildings and gaudy neon. There is, inevitably, a grisly murder that needs solving. But Tales Of The Neon Sea has a secret ingredient all of its own: cats. And not just any old cats, but playable cats. Talking cats. Cats whose social structure and hierarchy seems to have been as carefully thought through as the game’s human world.
We first encounter William, a black cat with blazing orange eyes, in the cluttered apartment of Mr Mist, a retired detective who now pays his rent as a PI for hire. He also happens to be an android, and one on the verge of falling apart, as his assistant – a Johnny Five-like robot – is only too keen to tell him after an impromptu body scan. The two are soon pressed into investigating a strange noise coming from another room; alas, the lights are out and Mist must rearrange a circuit to fix them, via a fairly straightforward rotational puzzle. When the lights come back on, he’s facing what appears to be a haunted suit of armour. Time, obviously, to retrieve a claymore from his bathroom and tackle the spectral intruder – which of course turns out to be William, trapped inside and desperately mewling and wriggling to get out.
If that particular puzzle would seem to have the loveable incongruousness of a vintage point-and-click, then the process of solving it is very different to the LucasArts greats. Any objects Mist can pick up or interface with are highlighted with an icon as he passes by them – and he’s free to make pithy observations about his environment elsewhere with the tap of a button.
In other words, it’s a pleasant change from dragging a reticle across the screen, pixelhunting for critical items. And then suddenly we find ourselves doing something very much like that when Mist stumbles across the corpse of a woman who’s been savagely beaten to death. With no sign of the police, he takes it upon himself to investigate. At which point we’re asked to painstakingly scrutinise the body, moving a magnifying glass over
wounds and torn clothes, with two scan settings highlighting superficial observations and deeper insights – such as the precise nature of the woman’s injuries and the condition of the corpse.
Individual clues can be combined into inferences, which in turn need to be connected to earn a replay of how the victim died (the why, at least so far, remains tantalisingly unanswered). This comes in the form of what can only be described as a playable metaphor: a minigame where you physically place cogs representing Mist’s thought processes inside a pocket watch. Once the wheels are turning, you get to see the cause of death. Lucas Pope, eat your heart out? Not exactly. There’s no real deduction called for on the player’s part; it’s merely a matter of finding all the pieces and, well, slotting them into place.
Then finally it’s back to the real star of the game, as William seeks a cat of high standing for permission to move through his current environment. Passing through vents and hopping onto balconies, he’s tasked with removing a simple obstruction – a tangle of sparking wires – and then rearranging a triptych of neon signs, while engaging in extensive feline dialogue with a variety of furry locals. For all the cats you encounter, Tales Of The Neon Sea could be accurately described as a mongrel of a game, and whether it succeeds will likely depend on how well it manages to knit together those disparate elements. That’s hard to divine from a build designed to show off its multi-faceted approach to storytelling – in the finished game, the tonal shifts might not seem quite so stark – but if nothing else, Palm Pioneer has crafted an adventure with more than its fair share of surprises. If it can keep us on our toes for its supposed eight- to 12-hour duration, then consider us ready to set sail.
Individual clues can be combined into inferences, which need to be connected