Neofeud: Reclaiming the Future from the One Percent

Time to Beat: 8 Hours

I started following James Dearden on Twitter in 2017. I followed him because of his marvelous sci-fi mystery adventure game, Technobabylon. Among his followers was Christian Miller, who as the one man team of Silver Spook Games, created the dystopic cyberpunk adventure game, Neofeud. As soon as I saw the pictures I wanted to play it. Two years later I present my review, but it isn't the one I had hoped to write.

The protagonist of Neofeud is Karl Carbon an ex-cop who works as a social worker for the destitute of Coastlandia City. In the year 2033 the elite of society live in a techno-utopia while the bottom 99% love on less than nothing. Humanity created sentient robots, and used and abused them. Karl stumbles into a plan to upend the social order, by revealing and destroying the cabal which hoards the world's wealth for the one percent. The developer creates Karl as a paradoxical enigma. Karl projects a gruff exterior because he feels he has suffered unjustly. He is an idealist who believes in equality, fair treatment, and the injustice of an economic system which collects the sweat of the laborer to enrich the ruling class. He helps a destitute robot when she doesn't have the proper paperwork for social assistance. But Karl is also a bully, which makes sense when he is punching up against his boss, but conflicts with the game's message when he harasses the disenfranchised. Karl threatens to frame one robot and snitch on him to the police, unless the sentient does him a favor. He swaps deadly drugs to a down on his luck robot, in exchange for information to break into a robot drug den. Karl is as relentless and ruthless as the people opposes when he is tracking down a lead. This seems like a thoughtless mistake by the developer, because it reduces the player's empathy for the protagonist.
Karl is joined by a gangster robot, Proto J, and the millennial Sybil (She also happens to be a princess). Both appear absurdly stereotypical. J speaks in an African-American gangsta dialect, while the princess speaks solely in a tone which oozes with sarcasm and whine. Neither resembles the real people they seek to represent. Their dialogue rasps against the player's ear, because they slip into caricatures. Forming a party of three they are a renegade time traveling team, and this presents more problems. Time travel is a delicate technique in the best of tales, but in Neofeud the mechanic of travel highlights the games limitation and illusions. Sybil tells the protagonist that her ship can travel backwards, forwards, or sideways in time. Then she tells him what time they should go to. It may appear like a recommendation, but the game enforces her speech as a command. The player must manually tell the time traveling spaceship where to go, but any choice except the one recommended by Sybil is refused. If this is as intended, why force the player to click the buttons?

Neofeud mixes some good mechanics in with the bad. The puzzles are the everyday pick up items, use them from the unlimited backpack, and rub them against other objects. They are serviceable, though the game is fastidious about clicking on the correct spot on the screen, and occasionally it isn't the location one would assume. The best puzzle involves Karl's visit to a robot family living at the bottom of The Pile: a massive landfill. He investigates the house and grades each section on whether it meets health code violations. Karl holds a checklist, and for each item he describes the regulations and current condition. The abode fails each requirement, but an empathetic player knows the fault lies not with the family, and approves their situation. Still they suffer the punishment for their violations. Later mechanics, like a scene where Karl must shadow a robot without being seen, or escape a bar under assault from the Coastlandia police are finicky and needlessly frustrating. The only balm to these dangerous spots is that death is trivial. Karl revives immediately in the spot he perished.
The most striking characteristic of Neofeud is its visual appearance. The entire game is hand painted, and eccentrically stylized. Some of the backgrounds are amazing, a fantastical representation of the author's vision, but a significant number appear mundane, cluttered, or drab. The characters are worse because their movements offer little of the brilliance of the backgrounds, and instead are muddled, jarring, and jerky.

The story, once one explores bit, begins to suffer a similar discord. The plot is a lengthy, overbearing, and obvious critique of the modern structure enforcing economic slavery, while encouraging environmental destruction. Even those players who agree enthusiastically with the premise may realize the writer's representation lacks even a sliver of subtly. It leans so hard into its polemic that it borders on parody. In addition to its message Neofeud incorporates numerous sci-fi concepts. Between the political diatribe and the constant introduction of new ideas (which the game picks up and discards swiftly) Neofeud suffers from too much exposition and not much game. Like the visual effects the game contains a few astounding incredible plot points, but mostly suffers from laughably absurd situations and resolutions. The player may often feel that the character's choices are inane, and wonder why they can not intervene and make better decisions. The player is driven from one spot to another with no feeling of agency, as other characters direct the narrative. Technology is repeatedly employed as a deus ex machina to rescue the protagonist from impossible situations (like when a robot becomes god-like to rescue Karl). The concepts and ideas are communicated through mediocre dialogue with serviceable voice acting.
The silliest aspect of Neufeud, and yet worthy of mention, is the constant use of references. The characters refer to events they would be unlikely to know about unless they majored in 1990's references. These allusions are thrown at the player like pasta at a wall, hoping something will stick. Instead they fall to the floor leaving a mess of dried spaghetti and splattered marinara. Wading through the mess I wondered if something can even be called a reference if it's an obvious name drop.

What follows is just a partial list of everything alluded to by the author in eight hours. They are not spoilers because they have no bearing on the plot, unless one is appealing to 1990's nostalgia.

Denzel Washington
Catch 22
Bruce Willis
The Predator
DARE
Time Warp
Transformers
Soylent Green
Ghost in the Shell
Alice in Wonderland
Darth Vader
The Matrix
Zorro
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Back to the Future
Trayvon Martin
Blade Runner
The X Files
Kant
The Dali Lama
Ice T
Nietzsche
Nintendo
Neuromancer
Konami Cheat Codes
Donkey Kong
AOL
Welfare Queens
James Bond
Clinton
Bush
Koch Brothers
Mr. T
Dickens
Dr. Who
The Hunger Games
John McClane
Professor X
Tolkien
Trump
and
Steve Jobs
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Neofeud includes ideas of value. It's greatest strength is talking about reality. It's willing to stretch boundaries and be a bit psycho about the philosophical. Is reality a lie, just electromagnetic signals, or illusions? The government of the .000001% in rule by distributing drugs to pacify the populace. They deliver the opiate of the sentient for free. But Neofeud spends most of its time treading old ground or floundering in its trite exposition.

In conclusion, Neofeud is a mixed bag. The story is an absurd exaggeration of our current situation told mostly through exposition and full of plot holes. The player lacks a feeling of agency, while the characters don't generate the emotional resonance needed to make the story compelling. Neofeud strikes a serious pose, but instead is only seriously cheesy. The artwork is occasionally brilliant but can't mask subpar animations and mediocre dialogue. The game includes a handful of good mechanics mixed in with a collection of frustrating ones. And the whole thing is muddled with an overwhelming veneer of 90's references which don't improve the plot.

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