Maybe I imagined it, but there seems to have been a bit of a thing about games noticing the economy in the past little while. Whether it's bigger, open world games adding it in as an optional cash earner on the side, or smaller indies like Night Call calling upon you to balance not starving or losing your job with solving a murder. But my favourite example of what I'm deciding to describe as a craze is Neo Cab.
]]>We're having a bit of a cyberpunk moment. I've seen and played and received emails about loads of games that include the word somewhere. Lots of dystopian megacorp skyscrapers. But I can't remember seeing a game that's set in the liminal stage before, the time between the now and when the mass surveillance, holograms and AR implants take root.
Neo Cab is set in that time. It's a story-heavy adventure where you play one of the last human gig drivers, in a San Francisco-inspired city in the near future called Los Ojos. In Los Ojos, most cars are driverless, advertising is personalised, and beautiful clean streets are awash in purple and blue light. It's also clearly a complex, nightmarish time and place to live.
]]>You can today hop behind the wheel of the final human-driven taxis in our near-future in a new demo for Neo Cab. That's the chat-o-driver we've cooed at a few times since its announcement in 2018, and it's finally almost here. As well as releasing the demo, developers Chance Agency today announced a release date of October 3rd. Have a peek in the new trailer below.
]]>Neo Cab is that game you’ve seen about being an Uber or Lyft style gig-economy driver, set in a dystopian sci-fi future. It has been described as “neon-drenched” because that is the only way we have thought of to describe “thing that is cyberpunk” so far.
“We don’t actually self-identify as cyberpunk,” said Patrick Ewing, creative director of the developers Chance Agency, and not a retired basketball player. “We call ourselves ‘nowpunk’.” Neo Cab is, he explains, about a world where we just continue on our current trajectory. “I do think that's the job of dystopian sci fi, is to warn you of something while there's still a chance of changing it.”
]]>We ask the tough questions here at RPS. We’re like Jeremy Paxman but in a very long bear costume. We once asked 15 developers what they’d do if they were stuck in a room with a clone of themselves. This is important stuff.
Today, we ask another question: What would you gift the games industry for the holidays? We put this query to a bunch of game artists, writers and designers to see how charitable they were feeling. Today, you get to open these presents. Happy holidays!
]]>Over the past several weeks I have sent a lot of interesting people who work in the games industry an email containing the following scenario:
"You enter a room. The door locks behind you. From a door opposite another you enters. This other you is a perfectly identical clone, created in the exact instant you entered the room, but as every second ticks by they are creating their own distinct personhood. The doors will unlock in 90 minutes. Nobody will ever know what happens in the room. What do you do? (assume the materials you need for whatever you want to do are in the room). Please show your working, if able."
]]>Now that the festival of bellowing that is E3 2018 has come to an end, we begin the arduous process of making sense of it all. This means sifting through mountains of press releases and trailers to find all the curious games that lurked outside the spotlight glare of the larger publishers. And we find such treats as Maneater (Jaws RPG where you play as Jaws), Rapture Rejects (battle royale where you fight for the last spot in heaven) and Neo Cab (Uber-sim meets Blade Runner). So many delightful things, in fact, that new video person Noa couldn't resist gathering them together.
]]>The festival of dumb explosions known as E3 is over, but that won’t stop us. The RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show, goes deep into the show, picking out our favourite games, the oddest moments, and best rats (spoiler: it was the one crushed by a shelf in the Resident Evil 2 trailer). We’re also introducing two new voices this week. Who are these strange people?
]]>During this year’s E3, I saw the largest screen I’d ever witnessed, folded around the corner of a building like a giant piece of glowing paper. It told me to buy Nike. LA is already the neon futuretown of California, never mind Night City. But I didn’t just see ads for shoes at the LA convention centre, I saw a lot of games too. From the bustling streets of Cyberpunk 2077 to the twisting tornadoes of Just Cause 4. From the crumbling Capitol of The Division 2 to the clumsy motorcycling of Trials Rising. Here are my highlights from the game industry’s annual festival of bullets and colour, the sci-fi dystopia that was with us all along.
]]>What happens to the gig economy once capitalism destroys us all? Well, that's what Neo Cab sets out to answer. You play as one of the last Uber drivers is a shiny dystopia where you've got to keep your feelings from exploding while you engage in a quest to save someone close to you. Managing the emotional needs of your passengers along the way, and becoming invested in their lives, are the parts of the gig that you probably won't be compensated for. Outside of your in-app star rating. (Which, let's be clear, gives me enough stress in the current dystopian world. How bad does someone have to be before I give them less than five stars? To we have to have a head-on collision? What is my star rating less than 5.0? Who did I murder?)
We've got an E3 trailer for Neo Cab to share with you.
]]>Survival in games has become synonymous with simplistic managing of resources in order to stave off the entropic forces that come for all of us. Neo Cab, from Californian studio Chance Agency looks to put a much more human and relatable spin on the concept.
Neo Cab is a game about being one of the last cab drivers. In the not-too-distant future, you play as Lina, one of the last human members of a business long since taken over by AI in the city of Los Ojos. Players are tasked with balancing money, reputation and emotional health, while navigating both the streets of the city, and the conversations that the job brings.
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