Neo Cab

Paints a picture of a not so far future.

Lina is ready to start a new life. When you meet Neo Cab’s protagonist, she’s en route to Los Ojos, a fictitious city reminiscent of Los Angeles. Her taxi holding the last of her belongings, she sets out to reconnect and move in with her best friend Savvy. When Savvy disappears, Lina is all alone in ‘Automation City’, left to juggle the demands of her job, her mental state, and the mystery surrounding the person she thought she knew best.

Lina has to ferry a certain number of passengers, called pax, to their destinations each night, and keep enough money to herself to find a place to sleep. However, technology plays a huge part in each encounter, as everyone she meets is using or affected by some gadget. The future Neo Cab paints may seem slightly dystopian, but it skilfully speculates that we’re not as far from our very own version of automated cities as we may think.

Over the course of a week you pick up different passengers each night and have a chat with them during the ride. The quality of your talk doesn’t only determine whether you get a tip or not, it’s also absolutely crucial for your driver rating. You have to maintain a rating of four stars or higher or you risk a deactivation warning. Failing to raise your rating theoretically ends the game (though I tried doing as poorly as I could and still didn’t actually hit a game over state). Chance Agency was inspired by the rating real Uber drivers have to maintain, and playing the game you notice very quickly how devastating it can be to get anything but a perfect score from a passenger – though my seeming inability to truly fail undercut that feeling somewhat.

The writing is atmospheric throughout, but Neo Cab’s greatest trick is that I can’t tell whether everything that seems a little fake to me – the overly philosophical conversations, me questioning every kindness – was purposefully designed to feel that way.