Tales of the Neon Sea

The first couple of hours of gameplay are highly enjoyable: beautiful, imaginative art, interesting backstory and a great investigation mechanic. Unfortunately, things degrade after the first few hours: the detective mechanic is abandoned, the mouthy sidekick robot blows up and hardly plays a role again, the environments become bleak and uninteresting. The game seems to lose its way and forget its heart. A huge pity since the early game showed so much promise. What dropped the rating below an average 3 stars was the sheer number of bugs. If you encounter these, things that worked for me at different times for different bugs included switching to keyboard controls, switching resolution, keeping the resolution but going to windowed mode and, in one inexplicable instance, changing the language to Chinese til I got past the point that kept breaking. Because the game utilises an autosave feature you can count on replaying portions a couple of times til you figure out which trick resolves it. Hopefully the developers will release a patch with fixes soon. Only at that point would I recommend this game.

The atmosphere of this game is great. The cyberpunk gritty detective noir feel works. The cat sidekick is nice too and the puzzles, while not very challenging, are OK. The story is interesting too. So overall a good adventure. But not a great one. The action sequences are annoying to play. They basically are QTE. Press the button at just the right moment, nothing else. With instant death, if you get the timing wrong. The other annoyance is the inability to save your game. It's checkpoint only and only one save state. Did you miss an interaction? Or fail to turn a side quest in? Well, tough luck. There is no going back once one checkpoint is passed. That is just shoddy game design. But on the plus side, I didn't notice any bugs, that other reviews complained about. So I guess they were fixed. If there is a sequel, as the ending suggests, I would definitely be interested in that.

The game is beautiful in terms of lights and colors. It's really refreshing to walk around and try to catch every details. You clearly feels that the dev put all their soul in this game. Mastered pixel art. The story is classic but never predictable. Some great ideas are developed here, like the part with cats. In cyberpunk game we usually focus on the human life style impact. I liked the idea to see how the "animal" world would change. As for the game mechanics, they do the job. You will have to solve puzzles, something under time constraint, to progress and resolve the case. Various gameplay are present, maybe not exploited to their maximum. You can analyse object with a detective view, you have some basic craft (you can only built what is necessary to your progression in the story), you have side quests you can choose not to do, you can play as a cat ! When you have collected all the clues in a crime scene, you will have a collection a gears to put on a pocket watch to rebuild the crime. There are some shoot phase where basically the cursor move and you have to press a key when it's in the right zone. Finally you have environmental puzzles. In the end is a calm game where you read a lot, observe and solve riddles by walking through beautiful pixel art panel. Some BlackSpot : if you want to understand fully the world you will have a lot to read. If you're not a big reader, then you will miss a lot of things. Also, if you're not an expert in english (or chinese) you may some troubles to follow... A really cool game with amazing pixel art and a good cyberpunk story. If you like riddles and reading this is the game for you.

I think this game looks fantastic, but it's so unclear at times that I struggled to get through it, even with a walkthrough. I could only reccomend it if you get it on sale, I bought my copy for €3,49, thats a good deal. €13,99 is not.