Neon Blood review

• Reviews by Pascal Tekaia
• Published:

Slickly illuminated dystopian thriller doesn’t fully shine as a murder mystery adventure/RPG

If games have taught me anything, it’s that the future will be horrible, whether a bleak radioactive wasteland devoid of life or a concrete jungle of perpetual night, rain, and all of mankind’s basest vices. Neon Blood squarely covers both of those bases, telling the story of a police detective trying to solve a recent blood-soaked murder spree while battling his own demons every step of the way. It’s a setup tailor-made for an adventure game, introducing a world you’ll want to dive into and explore, but it breezes by far too quickly to really be savored and short-changes narrative and exploration in favor of half-baked cross-genre gameplay that adds little to the overall experience. There are attempts at world-building, but the final product feels like a proof of concept for what could – and perhaps should – have been a meatier experience.

Neon Blood really only catapults us a short distance into the future. It’s 2053, but despite being just a few decades away, there have been some drastic changes. A third world war has devastated much of the planet, with the remains of humanity now attempting to eke out an existence in the planet’s single mega-city, Viridis. That sounds very apocalyptic, but Viridis itself is the epitome of the classic Blade Runner-esque dystopia, with a population that’s hooked on a debilitating drug (“Spark,” in this case) and all too happy to sacrifice limbs for the latest in artificial cybernetic enhancements.

Enter detective Axel McCoin, himself trying to kick the habit and wracked by withdrawal pains while also suffering from severe memory loss. As the game opens, Axel is sent to the scene of the latest homicide in what appears to be an especially grisly series of murders, believed to be carried out by the notorious Robin Slash. It seems Slash has a particular vendetta, as her recent body count includes nothing but bioengineers working for the mega-conglomerate Nilkcorp, which owns most of the city, including the police force itself. What follows is a somewhat predictable story that sees Axel track down Slash and stumble upon a web of deception and corruption that runs deep through Viridis, all the while trying to uncover his own shrouded past that may or may not tie into the overarching mystery.

To solve said mystery, you will need to explore areas both within and on the outskirts of Viridis, from its graffiti-tagged streets and techsynth-pumping nightclubs to the scorched wasteland outside the city limits, following the scent of corruption as it leads from the grimy subterranean sewers to the highest penthouses of the wealthy upper crust. As a cop, you will need to make use of your vision-scanning technology implants to search crime scenes for evidence and trails to follow (the blood’s bright fluorescence lending the game its title).

For the investigation side of things, Neon Blood certainly resembles your classic point-and-click adventure, though no actual pointing or clicking is necessary. Moving Axel around the screen and interacting with objects are natural fits for your keyboard’s standard WASD key bindings but a gamepad handles environmental depth just as well. Viridis’s streets, for example, are more focused on horizontally scrolling left and right, while the bullpen in the precinct requires navigating its depth by weaving in and out between its maze of desks. 

Conversation partners and interactive hotspots are marked when approaching them, so there’s little to no pixel hunting. Sadly, there is also very little resembling a puzzle to figure out. Analysis of clues occurs automatically, only requiring you to check each hotspot, though occasionally it gets slightly more cerebral, like having to identify where evidence is hiding in locations shown to you in photographs, or computer terminals in the sewer that need to be activated in a certain order to lower motorized bridges across the filthy runoff.

Neon Blood

Genre:	Mystery, Science Fiction
Presentation:	2D or 2.5D
Theme:	Conspiracy, Crime solving, Futuristic, Noir, Political
Perspective:	Third-Person
Graphic Style:	Pixel art, Simulated realism
Gameplay:	Investigative, Quest, RPG
Control:	Point-and-click
Game Length:	Short (1-5 hours)
Action:	Combat
Difficulty:	Low

Instead of a more fleshed-out adventure experience, Neon Blood incorporates some occasional RPG elements, in particular a turn-based combat system. Viridis is full of unsavory types, and sometimes Axel will have to bash a head or two to get his man. While the mere suggestion of turn-based combat may be enough to put some players off, the level of challenge here is truly laughable. Not only do basic attacks often do as much (or more) damage as Alex’s special combat abilities, but as Axel’s health is fully restored between battles and enemy health is already comically low, I went through at least half of the game before I ever needed to heal in the middle of a fight. The most memorable thing about the otherwise very forgettable combat are the QTEs that cap off boss battles, which at least add a little cinematic flair to polish off the game’s biggest baddies once their health has been depleted.

The thing is, it feels like the designers had so much more in mind in terms of scope, with a narrative hook that could support a game beyond the four-hour runtime seen here and the combat system to see it through. However, in execution the game feels more like a prelude to a far meatier outing. In lieu of a leveling system, Axel will unlock a handful of additional combat abilities over the course of the game, none of which I ever had to use. Even after Axel finds others party members that accompany him, he continues to fight on his own. Additional characters with their own unique abilities could have led to deeper boss encounters with more well-thought-out strategies, but instead they are as simple as the run-of-the-mill foes, sometimes going down in as few as two hits, while late-game bosses may require a few more turns to whittle down their larger health pools.

The most engaging aspect of Neon Blood is, hands-down, its visual presentation. The future of 2053 is painstakingly created on-screen, with a level of detail that always gives the eye something interesting to focus on while also playing up the sordid living conditions of the unfortunate population. Store signs – of the neon variety, of course – really pop against the purposely drab architecture, with both fore- and backgrounds hinting at a much wider world, even if you don’t get to explore or interact with a ton of it. Particularly praiseworthy are the impressive wide-shot vistas we get to enjoy at times. When up on a skyscraper rooftop, for instance, we can see the nighttime skyline of Viridis in all its dystopian glory stretch on and on for miles. While being enveloped in darkness is a fitting trope for a city like Viridis, a handful of times the sun actually peeks out, gifting us with breathtaking tableaus of sunset hues filtering around skyscrapers and through window blinds.

Character models, by contrast, are presented in blockier pixel art, which is a curious choice given how starkly they are offset against the far more realistic backdrops, but it somehow works. There are some decent animations bringing our main cast to life, and I appreciated the nice visual touch of Axel’s coat being outlined in neon blue, giving it a tech-y, futuristic vibe. As a special treat, there are even a couple of gorgeous hand-drawn animated sequences sprinkled throughout, often serving to introduce important characters, like Ruby Emerald, Nilkcorp’s powerful CEO, when she is shown striding into the police station like a human hurricane in high heels (or platform shoes, at least).

In fact, Neon Blood is served quite well by its diverse characters, with Axel gradually assembling a motley crew of revolutionaries from the city’s various downtrodden societal castes. Drug-addled network hackers, sniper-rifle-toting cyber revolutionaries, and a weary, silver-maned police chief nearing the end of his rope with Axel – we get a little taste of everything. It’s a shame then that here, too, I felt like my appetite was being teased rather than sated, as the game’s drive-through execution once again rears its ugly head, underserving a supporting cast with heaps of narrative potential. Although I didn’t miss more of the bleeps and bloops used to simulate their human speech in lieu of actual voice-over recordings, which quickly become grating.

Otherwise the soundtrack hits the right futuristic notes. There’s nothing outright catchy but what’s here largely fits the setting, particularly early on, with heavy use of synthesizers giving things a futuristic edge. Generally speaking, each of the game’s handful of environments (the streets of Viridis, Axel’s flat, a dance club, the city outskirts, a warehouse, etc.) is accompanied by a specific theme, though none are all that memorable on their own.

Final Verdict

Neon Blood brings a lot of elements to the table that should easily slot it into a respectable sci-fi gaming tier: its futuristic world looks quite nice – gorgeous at times, even – and thought was clearly put into its backstory, politics, and societal structure. Taking on the role of a cop tasked with tracking down a serial killer, even while surviving his own drug-induced demons and a potentially compromising past, is an intriguing story setup. But the fact that the game flies through its four-hour runtime means there’s never really an opportunity for tension to simmer, for the plot to really get its hooks in you. Add to that the fact that, between the overly simple investigating and puzzlingly superficial combat encounters, much of the gameplay feels undercooked and the whole experience becomes less a dyed-in-the-wool techno-crime-thriller and more of a Reader’s Digest synopsis of what it was meant to be. 

Pascal played Neon Blood on PC using a review code provided by the game's publisher.

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