Neo Cab's malevolent tech-noir is a vehicle for exploring, and ultimately surviving, the tenacity of its passengers and the ambivalence of its driver. As a narrative adventure Neo Cab is full of conflicted, enigmatic, and sophisticated characters all vying for validation in a tortured world. As an opaque lens on social responsibility and morality, it's as distressing as it is compulsive. Neo Cab's tech-addled dystopia functions a travelogue to the pain and purpose of being human.
I enter the city of Los Ojos as one its last human cab drivers. My first passengers include a quantum physicist with eccentric curiosities, a worm-worshipping leader of a burgeoning pain cult, and an anarchist revolutionary who despises vehicles like mine. My world is dominated by Capra, a massive oligarchy masquerading as a vital corporation. My guide is Savy, my estranged best friend, who inexplicably disappears shortly after my arrival and leaves me to the machinations that sustain Los Ojos. I’m lost, but I have to survive. I need to drive.
Neo Cab is a cyberpunk-adjacent narrative adventure through the futuristic Californian city of Los Ojos. Modeled on the logical endpoint of gig economy driving services like Uber or Lyft, Neo Cab follows Lina Romero as she pilots one of the few remaining human-operated cars in Los Ojos. As Lina automatically drives, the player has agency to direct Lina’s conversation from a selection of prospective dialogue options. Depending on Linda’s mood, available responses can be inquisitive, acerbic, judgmental, and empathetic. Neo Cab has more in common with visual novels and latter day Telltale games than, say, another cab-to-destination game like Crazy Taxi.
Lina’s passengers, referred through Neo Cab’s parlance as “pax,” tell the story of a populace on the brink of a revolution. The emergence of automation and its effect on the personal relationships, economic displacement, and emotional health of Lina’s pax are meant to influence the selection of Lina’s dialogue. Everyone is experiencing some kind of personal or professional hardship. Neo Cab is exceptionally skilled at drawing this conflict in shades of grey. There wasn’t a single passenger (except maybe Charlie) whose plight I outright rejected or completely accepted. Through their dialogue and disposition, everyone felt complicated and sympathetic.
Neo Cab plays with morality through some inventive initiatives. One pax was a couple on a first date. I sold my soul and agreed with a person who was being a jerk because, in the end, they were controlling my driver rating. When I picked up Agonon, an odd looking masochist, I tried to poke fun at his desire to start a cult and his need to worship a subterranean god worm. Three Agonon rides later, however, I took him seriously and I was prepared to join his cult of the worm. Everyone is an adventure and I eventually found it better to indulge a pax before I started to lecture or criticize them.
The same is also true for Neo Cab central point of conflict, the lapsed friendship between Lina and Savy. Lina moved to Los Ojos with the expectation of moving in together, but Savy ghosts her after the first night and destabilizes all of Lina’s plans. Lina has nowhere to stay and her only option is to hustle through her Neo Cab while Savy remains elusive and alienating. Savy’s behavior is a constant point of frustration, and an external battle measures the amount Savy’s shit the player is willing to put up with on behalf of a relationship that seems extremely important (and useful) to Lina.
Both the player and Lina become strangers in a strange land, focused on self-preservation. The only option is to drive three or four pax around before calling it a night. In Neo Cab’s corporate hellscape, Neo Cab drivers are only as good as their star rating. Early on I found myself pushing Lina toward responses I did not agree with because I knew (hoped) it would get Lina paid and get her a five star rating. When I failed and got a one star rating from Klaus, it tanked my average to 2.5 stars despite my stellar five-pax streak of five stars. I perceived this as unfair in a game but completely believable in terms of terrible corporate behavior. Like any cruel measure of success, you’re only as good as the last thing you did.
Other aspects of Los Ojos weave their way into Lina and Savy’s relationship. Capra is positioned as Amazon (or Google, or Facebook, or whatever’s) final form, having completed its domination of checks and balances and completed it integration into society. Lina depends on Capra recharging stations for fuel and, if times get tight, Capra micro hotels for a night’s rest. Avoiding Capra’s service is virtuous in theory but impossible in practice. Worse, the line between selling your soul and doing your best isn’t especially clear. Stuck in the middle is Savy, who, from the perspective of your pax—Savy is quite popular—appears to be on both sides at the same time.
Lina has a tool to help her (and her pax) measure her character inside her cab. Her “Feelgrid,” a bracelet that accurately measures her current mood and reflects it with different colors, is always present. It drives some passengers crazy while it makes others easier to talk to. Your own dialogue options are limited (or expanded) by not only the color of Lina’s mood, but also the intensity of her present feeling. It’s not a moral right or wrong, Neo Cab is free of the binary morality systems that defined late-aughts games, but whether you want to sink your teeth into something, or just…let it slide. Neo Cab doesn’t necessarily reward the player for indulging in more intense choices, but it certainly responds to their action and uses it to direct the disposition of certain pax.
Every pax has a story and each story, somehow, costs Lina more than her time. I let one pax charge their equipment from my car’s battery, draining my fuel. I let another off the hook for the ride fare out of the immediate necessity of their travel arrangements. I loaned another one money, even though that financial hit guaranteed I would be sleeping in my car that night. In the spirit of empowering Los Ojos’ populace and creating solidarity with those in need, I tried to do what felt right instead of what felt safe. At the end of my run in Neo Cab I never completely ran out of money or fuel, but I have to imagine the game would have let me. I don’t know what would have happened and I felt like I got lucky.
Every pax I met was fascinating. All of them, even the pax I upset or rated me poorly, were also available for subsequent rides on later nights. Meeting them again felt like I was adding another chapter to a story I loved reading. There were a few pax’s I never met, some I met three or four times, and others I wish I could have spent more time with (and one, Sam, who I am convinced Neo Cab bugged out and skipped the middle part of a story). Neo Cab’s characters dive into the surreal, sublime, and sanctimonious with equal measure.
There’s a careful amount of restraint inside every passenger. Fantastic and attractive technology (AR displays, synthetic limbs, make up I don’t understand) is all around Neo Cab’s futuristic world, but its inherent problems feel like they could belong to ours. It’s a nightmare future full of social and corporate issues we never solved. It’s depressing because it’s relatable and relatable because it’s depressing. Lina is allowed to exert some measure of control over her circumstances, but, by the end of Neo Cab, I wasn’t sure how far it would let me go. I didn’t accomplish what I intended for Los Ojos, but I was able to come to terms with how I felt about Savy.
Neo Cab’s depiction of Lina and Savy may be its only material weakness. No reasonable person would put up with Savy’s behavior, but we have to empathize with Lina’s position. We’re asked to think globally and not personally and challenged to put aside character issues in pursuit of a greater social good. Action taken could hurt Savy, Lina, or Lina’s pax, and this creates difficult choices. At one point Savy looked at Lina and pleaded, “this isn’t us,” and it wasn’t clear if Neo Cab understood the irony that this is exactly who these people are. They felt doomed, unable to escape fate. But so was everyone else. I don’t think Neo Cab is cynical but I also don’t believe it’s entirely optimistic.
When’s the last time a game relied on its characters to tell the bulk of its story? Pax build the surrounding world, Lina’s night time soliloquies set a surreal tone, and Savy disrupts everything with frustrating chaos. I feel like I know everything about Los Ojos without ever really getting out of Lina’s cab. I don’t know where I’m going—Neo Cab’s ending, or at least my ending, wasn’t what I was expecting—but I trust my driver enough to take me there. It felt like a two way relationship.
Neo Cab’s malevolent tech-noir is a vehicle for exploring, and ultimately surviving, the tenacity of its passengers and the ambivalence of its driver. As a narrative adventure Neo Cab is full of conflicted, enigmatic, and sophisticated characters all vying for validation in a tortured world. As an opaque lens on social responsibility and morality, it’s as distressing as it is compulsive. Neo Cab’s tech-addled dystopia functions a travelogue to the pain and purpose of being human.
