When William Gibson wrote Neuromancer, the archetype of the cyberpunk aesthetic, in 1984, I wonder if he knew that he had created one of the most perfect settings for video games. Both ludonarratively and philosophically, the “high tech, low life” relationship between video games and real life is only getting closer and less discernible as time goes on. As their designs get more intricate and lifelike, we find more elaborate ways to experience them, and their effect on the individual and society as a whole becomes a greater and greater debate.
There’s always a lurid element of self critique when a game takes cyberpunk as its backdrop. When a Decker links into a network to explore its secrets in Shadowrun, it doesn’t take too many grasps to cobble together the metaphor of the consistent race for total immersion that game developers and hardware manufacturers are running every day. The Oculus Rift or Playstation VR look like a checkpoint on the path to The Matrix of video games, complete with the potential irony of plugging yourself in to a game where you plug yourself into to another game. Plug-ception.
Or there’s the other, more sinister reality – plugging yourself into another person. It’s a concept explored in films like Surrogates and Gamer, and the parallels of using real people as avatars for real life experiences as opposed to pixelated ones in digital worlds is the common discourse. The standard settlement of these stories is that controlling other real life people is kinda of icky, not all that different from the books and short stories that play with the subject. Video games that circle that narrative don’t really meditate on that sort of idea for too long. The popular videogame cyberpunk trope is “detective in the grimdark future” a la Blade Runner. From Anachronox to G-Police to Deus Ex, video games have driven home one clear fact: in the future, there are an abundance of trenchcoats and anti-heroes.
To play a game that directly tasks you to play as a person playing someone else is a less-explored trope, though. Military shooter kill.switch, which is often credited as the first modern appearance of our now standard third person cover shooting mechanics, has its story centered around the idea that you play a controller, who is remotely operating a living solider on the battlefield. The Assassin’s Creed series routinely features a character from the present jumping in a machine and controlling a character from their genetic past. Neither are very cyberpunky outside of these singularly prominent tropes, though.
Neon Chrome may be the first game I’ve played that actively plays with the human avatar concept in an appropriately cyberpunk setting. As a “hacker”, you use your skills to take control of human mercenaries – referred to as “assets” – and use their skills to infiltrate a monolithic tower of the Neon Corporation. In a game about replicating the tense yet passive action of shooting your way through a fortified position by remote, there maybe no more appropriate perspective than the distant bird’s-eye view of a twin stick action game.
Traveling through a floor of the Neon Tower is like walking through an office building sponsored by a dour Lisa Frank. Blasts of yellows, purples, and pinks rage against the general darkness and down tempo blues and grays of the walls and floors in Blood Dragon sort of ways. The sterility of texture-less surfaces invokes that science lab creepiness that Human Revolution pulled off so well, and even though each floor is crawling with robotic and organic enemies bent on stopping your rampage, there’s still an unsettling air of isolation that hangs over everything.
The rogue-lite elements in the game are adequately applied and are on par with genre contemporaries. It’s more Rogue Legacy than Spelunky, in that there is an overall collection of progress that carries over from session to session. Even though you start at the bottom floor each time, you can spend accumulated currency to upgrade your starting merc with perks that give them an edge or just high base stats. Another bonus within the confines of the rogue-lite: it really complements the overall narrative well. When your merc dies, you just disengage and throw him away, ready to assume control of the new one. His upgrades are bio-mechanical, and they can be switched on the fly. Many games have to just expect the sort of built in half-measure that gamification does to their stories. Chrome doesn’t, which is a small thing, but an interesting one at that.
The various roles of merc all have their specialties. The Corporate Solider, drably named by my go-to asset, comes with a bullet soaking battle shield, for example. There are six total, with a random mix of three available at the beginning of each run. Also, the levels themselves are randomly generated. Enemies and trap types are consistent within sets of floors, but the layouts themselves are different every time. The objectives will vary as well, which differ between killing specific enemies, finding certain items, etc.
There are a lot of cool things, big and small, that Neon Chrome does pretty well within the confines of the familiarity of this sort of shooter. Many of the environments are destructible. With the right weapon, most walls can become doors quite quickly. You’ll have many opportunities to find new weapons as you progress, each feeling adequately responsive proxies for their real world counterparts. There is an added loyalty bonus for sticking with the same weapon for long periods of time, though, as new upgrades become available only if you’ve stuck with the weapon from floor to floor. The seductive call of shiny new weapons overcomes me more often than not, but at least it’s there, right?
The super minimal HUD really helps you focus when a lots of things begin to happen at once. It stays out of your way, and it was never a factor when I met my untimely demise over and over again. Much of that was due to the super aggressive, if not all that bright, AI. Without taking much stock in their own safety, they charge headlong through offices and rooms in pursuit of your scalp, and they will take it by any means necessary. They become easy fodder for your gunfire, but overwhelming to your life bar.
All in all, Neon Chrome nails the cyberpunk mystique in way games don’t do very often, within the confines of a genre we are all familiar with.
Pick it up on Steam, and share your knowledge with the rest of us on the Official Neon Chrome Wiki! Neon Chrome is also now available on PS4, and it’ll be hitting Xbox One on June 8.