A ride worth catching

New Neo Cab is video game noir at captivating best

Neo Cab Developed by Chance Agency Available on IOS, Mac, PC, Nintendo Switch

Mercurial characters? Check. Moral compromises? Check. Emotionally nuanced endings? Check. By any reasonable measure, Neo Cab is the most captivating video game noir that’s drifted into my life in the Trump era.

This visual novel, set in the futuristic city of Los Ojos, delivers a smart, socially-conscious tale about a woman trying to scratch out a living as a taxi driver in a gig economy that’s tilted against her.

Neo Cab’s vision of a future in which technology has become even more physically invasive packs the punch of a classic science-fiction warning — heads up, big data is coming to get you.

Lina is a driver for Neo Cab, an app-based taxi company.

Almost broke and hankering to start a new chapter in her life, she moves to Los Ojos at the invitation of her friend Savy. There, she chafes at the domination of Capra, a tech company whose driverless cars dominate the streets.

Lina once worked for Capra until she and her fellow workers were downsized when the company updated its cars so they would run on a driverless network.

Soon after Lina gets to town she gives Savy a lift to an engagement. Savy makes Lina drop her off a few blocks from where she is going because she doesn’t want the people she is meeting to think of her as “pro-car.”

As Lina later comes to discover, Savy is involved with a grassroots political faction in Los Ojos that contends that all cars, whether human operated or driverless, are “death machines.” To their way of thinking, cars are unnecessarily dangerous vehicles that would be better replaced by public transportation or biking.

Before Savy disappears on

Lina, she gives her a Feelgrid bracelet. Feelgrids are a line of wearable tech that reflect your emotional state to the world by reading your blood flow. So, when Lina is feeling depressed, her Feelgrid lights up blue. When she is angry it turns red, when elated, yellow, when content, green.

Conversational options are tied to Lina’s emotional state. If you select a response that doesn’t jibe with her mood a rationalization will appear on the screen to explain away her aversion. By pushing Lina into certain emotional states assorted conversation branches become available.

Neo Cab’s narrative neatly wraps itself around the ethics of biofeedback monitoring by considering how an unethical corporation might leverage such data for its benefit. The game also cleverly weaves in a subplot involving one of Lina’s passengers, a “quantum statistician,” who dedicates herself to exploring divergent timelines spread across parallel universes.

I found myself so taken in with the statistician’s story that at a certain point I felt a metaphysical chill creep over me as I dithered between choosing different options.

The statistician’s words made me idly entertain the possibility that in another dimension I might be choosing my responses differently. Considering that the game is interested in the concept of suggestibility, I commend the developers for pulling off one good narrative beat after another.

I loved Neo Cab’s story, characters, and simple though thoughtful game mechanics. Emphatically, this is a ride worth catching.