Taking a Ride with ‘Neo Cab’: A Review
I took my first cab ride in Guilin, China, in 2015, and I quickly realized somewhere between the radically sharp 90 degree turns, the language barrier, and choking cigarette atmosphere that I was more comfortable driving myself around than hitching a ride with other people. But at the same time, I feel a deep solidarity with those who earn their living from the driver’s seat, having delivered pizzas for nearly 3 years while I was in college. The premise of Neo Cab – scraping a living together while driving people around a vast city, having to endure the woes of people-pleasing politeness in customer service while balancing one’s own urge to speak up politically and morally – appeals to me in a way that I never realized I wanted from a video game. Neo Cab brings to life a world that makes me deeply empathize with people whose jobs we often belittle or take for granted.
Neo Cab takes place in a fictionalized city in California known as Los Ojos. It is a city dripping in silicon valley tropes: elitism, homelessness, wage suppression, political activism, and the denial of each respective way of life. Your controllable character, Lina, seeks a new life in Los Ojos, after leaving a place she has known for many years, known as Cactus Flats. As Lina enters Los Ojos, she begins to make a name for herself as a first class rideshare driver. It becomes clear from the moment her first passenger, Liam, enters the car that Lina balances the impossible task of kindly investigating the lives of her passengers and moderating her own social and political opinions. Voicing too much can cause her to lose her driver rating, while voicing too little can leave her guests feeling like they’re being ignored or riding with a robot.
Los Ojos is a beautiful neon city that never fully reveals itself. There will be no sweeping aerial shots, nor in-depth looks into the day-to-day lives of its inhabitants. Rather, the story of Los Ojos is entirely told through the rearview window of Lina’s car and the conversations she has with her passengers. The city itself carries a cyberpunk mystique with its neon lights, urban mythology, and endlessly interconnected street pattern that encourages all kinds of exploration throughout the city. The soundtrack ties nearly everything about this world – the synthy, cyberpunk, gritty noir, neon aesthetic tones – together and makes everything feel cohesive. Small details like needing to sleep in a hotel rather than in a Capra-owned lodge – an evil corporation that, though cheap, is notorious for Orwellian technofascism – bring this city to life and made me quickly realize that there are several ways to play Neo Cab.
Lina travels to Los Ojos to move in with Savy, her long-time best friend who, though they recently ended things on bad terms, has invited Lina to stay with her. From your first night in the city, it becomes apparent that Savy is flighty and aloof, willing to ditch you for some people you have never met. Instead of inviting you to join along when you first arrive into town, Savy ends up using Lina as her taxi for the night. Then she disappears, ghosting you for the week. Instead of the cozy bed in Savy’s apartment, Lina has to grind toward her quota of 3 passengers a night, earning Lina just enough to recharge her car’s battery and rest for the night.
Neo Cab is a blend between a survival game and a visual novel, which I found to be a stunningly effective combination. The bulk of your time with Neo Cab will be spent speaking with the passengers you pick up and drive to their respective destinations, but resource management – namely the relationship between your car’s battery charge and your available coin to pay for it – becomes the focus of the gameplay itself. This resource management quickly combines with the Feelgrid, an emotional radar for your character that serves as an indicator to you, your character, and your passengers – almost like a health bar – how each conversation you’re having makes you feel. Getting angry can cause your passenger to either apologize or taunt you. Feeling sad can cause you to connect with someone or reject them entirely. But most of my time spent monitoring the Feelgrid ended up with Lina feeling good about the way she handled each interaction. Part of the survival mechanics are quite literally emotional.
Neo Cab’s greatest strength is the agency it offers players when making dialogue choices. Both in terms of Lina’s cab customers and her personal relationships, Neo Cab branches its narrative at many opportunities. The most obvious way this branching manifests is through Lina’s star rating. Like Uber and Lift, customers rate their drivers in terms of the quality of their experience. My first several passengers all rated me 5 stars, safely securing me above the 4 star threshold for employment. If Lina consistently drops below that threshold, she is terminated. From the very first passenger, it becomes clear that the way you talk to people influences how they rate you, so the choice often becomes being honest versus being polite. Sometimes you have to stomach a hollow or problematic passenger to earn your star rating. Though sometimes you will be a little too honest, piss off a passenger, only to have them rate you 5 stars because it’s the first authentic human interaction they’ve had in a while. Dialogue thus becomes a tightrope.
Players of Neo Cab will rapidly realize the potential for multiple playstyles in this game. Lina can play the concerned friend or political activist, respectively. I was shocked but delighted to discover that this game is willing to delve headfirst into controversial and meaningful social issues. Neo Cab is willing to address themes of sexuality, race, income inequality, gentrification, corporate monopolization, and more. The game doesn’t hamfist these issues either. Small but effective design decisions caused me to lend faith to Neo Cab, like when I unexpectedly realized Lina was referring to a masculine passenger who was wearing makeup as “they/them” without needing to be corrected, or when a spoiled-rich white teenage girl tries to wax philosophically about race but is quickly shut down. Neo Cab seems like a simple visual novel, but it boldly confronts topics that are normally ignored within the genre.
I never thought to myself that I would be interested in playing a video game as a cab driver. In Neo Cab, you don’t control the car itself. In fact, with the exception of choice, both in terms of dialogue and narrative threads to pursue at a given time, the game can be almost entirely clicked through. Yet, as each passenger entered Lina’s cab, I found myself trying to find the good in people. I found myself feeling an awe and wonder toward the vacant city streets that zoomed by in the background. At the 3 hour mark toward the end, I felt myself empathizing for Lina, the loneliness she feels, and the connections she makes through her otherwise soul-deadening and oppressive job. Lina is doing her best to survive on her ethical terms. It makes me want to do my best, too.
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