It’s an unexpected dichotomy—tranquility isn’t the sort of evocation expected of extremely topical police-state paranoia—but one that Neon Struct dispenses with plausible seeds of insurrection. Colorful symmetry is the expected outcome but Neon Struct surprises with plenty of shades of grey, too.
It’s difficult not to get swept up in Neon Struct’s presentation. Flat-panel foliage, monstrous architecture, binary office buildings, and a penchant for purples, pinks, and electric-blues dominate the visual pallet. It’s all wrapped in flat-shaded, deliberately simple polygons reminiscent of Gouraud Shading techniques used to give Tobal No. 1 and R4: Ridge Racer Type 4 their distinctive features. Neon Struct’s lookeffectively wraps 90’s technical proclivities around an 80’s cultural aesthetic (and, interestingly, operates it all under the duress of a modern narrative).
It helps that the entirety of Neon Struct is supported by a dynamic, unquestionably 80’s-inpsired soundtrack. Usually when a game tries to indulge 80’s pop music it either goes overboard with irony or embraces the rock-hard murder music of crunching synths and nervous keyboards meant to accompanying some sort of dying cyberpunk apocalypse (Power Glove did this perfectly with Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon). In the rare instance where it’s not either original approach, a licensed pop radio hit is subtly employed for mop-up duty. There’s rarely any sort of appreciation for the nuanced, melodic compositions that defined that goofy-yet-lovable decade of computer-assisted sonic domination.
In any case, the music powering Neon Struct was composed by original and licensed tracks from the band The Home Conversion. In my admittedly unqualified opinion, The Home Conversion’s work in Neon Struct sounds like the fuzzy guitars of My Bloody Valentine’s Sometimes combined with the entirety of M83’s Saturdays = Youth and Before the Dawn Heals Us albums. If one were looking to make a Venn diagram of my favorite music, this would be it. The cost comes with originality (and I’m convinced the opening riff of The Home Conversion’s Holding Destruction is directly lifted from M83’s We Own The Sky), but its service to Neon Struct’s tempered atmosphere, and the well timed clip at which it operates, covers lost ground quickly. Its influences are clear, but in the gaming space there’s nothing quite like it.
Neon Struct’s rich presentation is ultimately in service to its narrative. Jillian Clearly begins as a covert, oddly non-violent operative for an agency interested in opaque information. Her cohorts bend to stereotypical norms and set her up for a (predictable) fall from grace, forcing Jillian to go on the run and use any available resource to clear her name.
Narrative threads of rogue spy agents all kind of follow a certain model and, while Neon Struct doesn’t escape these trappings, it does manage to make a few statements inside of them. In modern American culture, issues of surveillance and privacy are a red hot controversy. Watch Dogs tried to tackle similar issues with the grace of an ape wielding a sledgehammer, but Neon Struct handles its volatile material as a vessel to ask questions. The potential benefits of the populace, the slippery slope into a surveillance state, the blindness of ego, and the lure of massive financial windfalls all compose Neon Struct’s twisting morality.
Tension only arrives in Neon Struct’s means of operation; it’s a stealth game. Of course it’s a stealth game. Stealth harmonizes well with the themes of always being watched or The Man always knowing what you’re doing. Physical threats in the form of armed guards, police, other agents, or machine sentinels comprise the entirety of your opposition. You observe their patrol patterns, stay out of their line of site (observable in a meter in the middle of the screen), and hopefully progress through each level untouched. If alerted they can sort of be evaded with a bit of careful running and line-of-sight breaking, but most of the time you’re hit with some sort of volatile projectile, issuing a quick death and a last-save respawn.
Enemies can actually be dispatched and discarded by sneaking up behind them and pushing a button, but doing so seems to violate an unwritten agreement between the game and the player. Along with setting off alarms or being seen, it’s a mark against your results at the end of each level. It also looks weird as you down an enemy, invisibly carry their body, and then crudely deposit it in the location of your choosing. There are difficulty options that remove the stealth elements entirely, which is great if that style of game isn’t your thing, but it does occasionally feel awkward when practiced in the proper game.
Neon Struct’s stealth mechanics are, for lack of any better word, a bit primitive. Stealth 101 is staying in the shadows and out of the way, and the game rarely efforts to challenge the player with much else. Along with it are a free range of choices on how you want to enter a building and carry out your objectives (find a ladder to the roof, sneak around back, or brazenly march in the front door?), but all can be accomplished with a minor amount of diligence and environmental exploration. Most every mission involves breaking into a daunting complex, flipping a switch or collecting an item, and then making it out unscathed.
It’s easy to stay out of the way, but Neon Struct does provide a handful of tools to make it even easier. Speed Stims boost your movement speed while Silence Stims reduce the audibility of your footfall. Hacking stims remove the need to spend time hacking doors, alarms, or security cameras (which is otherwise done by performing a mini-game of Breakout). There are a myriad of ways to evade, confuse, or escape your opposition but they’re all more or less trumped by the ability to save progress anywhere. Is this the wrong way to play the game? Possibly. If I didn’t want to be bothered with the stealth mechanics I should have opted for the included challenge-free mode Neon Struct offers, but I wanted to see how it was intended to perform under default settings. Much like Beyond Good and Evil, the stealth segments don’t necessarily interfere with the game, but their quality isn’t up to the standards set by its more admirable traits.
Interestingly, Neon Struct allows for a significant amount of agency inside what would traditionally be a series of cut-scenes. In between recognized missions, Jillian will either find herself meeting up with confidants, returning back to headquarters, or milling about at a local mall. Minor objectives are still present, but you’re allowed time to visit vendors for health or Stim pickups, chat-up the locals, look for hidden geocaches, or simply peruse about the Spartan environments. These sequences were usually relaxing, and made for excellent pallet-cleansing sessions sandwiched between the high-tension stakes of Neon Struct’s stealth antics.
There’s also something more to Neon Struct than its interior narrative. Literally in that I believe there’s enough evidence for an entirely separate, parallel story on top of the existing exposition, but also more in that Neon Struct resolves to be better than the sum of its parts. Its greatest sin, pedestrian stealth mechanics, withers in the light of what else its level design attempts to accomplish. The architecture composing its levels seems crude at first, but emotionally advances to an uncomfortable, dominating force of exaggerated definition. It makes for an otherworldly, not-quite-sci-fi not-quite-cyberpunk not-quite-retro sophistication that’s as interested in effective level design as it is in relaying an uncanny sense of dread. Combined with a neon nightmare aesthetic and the fraught plausibility of a surveillance state and Neon Struct’s finer detailshave the potential to evolve into an entirely different beast.
But what if it doesn’t? Depending on your affection for stealth, Neon Struct may feel like a standard action/stealth game with a progressive narrative and stylish visuals. One that also happens to have an impressive fusion of licensed and original music adequately positioned alongside its responsive visual counterpart. One also can’t forget the neon aesthetic permeating every fiber of its being, working as a perfect complement to—see what happens? Even when I try and find a reason not to like Neon Struct, I think of ten more that tag any bases it might have missed. Unless you have a violent aversion to stealth mechanics, giving six hours of your time to Neon Struct shouldn’t be a difficult proposition.
