Neo Cab

I went into Neo Cab expecting a breezy cyberpunk visual novel and came out the other side quietly unsettled, which is precisely what Chance Agency was aiming for. The game plants you inside a single cab for its entire runtime, cycling through nights in Los Ojos, a near-future city run by a corporation called Capra that has automated almost everything except the faint, inconvenient desire people have to talk to another human being. Your friend Savy has vanished the moment you arrive, and with no money and nowhere to sleep, the only move is to keep picking up passengers, called pax, and hope someone in the back seat knows something useful. The loop is tight and intentional. Each night you choose from a short list of available fares, weighing destination distance against fuel costs and the coin you need to cover a bed. Once a passenger is in the car, gameplay shifts entirely to branching dialogue, and every word you choose feeds back into Lina's FeelGrid, a smartwatch-like device that broadcasts her emotional state in shifting colors. That mood system is the game's most original design move: push Lina too far into anger or anxiety and certain dialogue options grey out entirely, not because the game is punishing you, but because she simply will not say those things right now. It creates a strange intimacy. You are not fully in control of Lina, and the game earns that constraint by making her feel like a real person rather than a player avatar. The passenger vignettes are where Neo Cab does its best work. The cast was written by a team that includes Robin Sloan and Leigh Alexander, among others, and the range is striking: a quantum statistician who speaks in branching probabilities, a girl sealed inside protective mech armor by an overprotective parent, a cultist processing grief in the only language he knows. Each ride works as a self-contained short story while also threading quietly into the larger themes of gig labor precarity and algorithmic control. You also have to maintain a four-star driver rating or risk deactivation, which mirrors the real-world anxiety of Uber-style star systems with uncomfortable accuracy. The survival layer is light but present: mismanage fuel or funds across multiple nights and the walls start closing in. The weaknesses are real. The opening leans on expository inner monologue that tells you things the writing should be showing, and several critics found the central mystery around Savy less compelling than the sidewalk vignettes surrounding it. The ending in particular has divided players, with the mood system feeding into a final confrontation that can feel unfair depending on emotional choices made hours earlier. The soundtrack by Obfusc, who scored Monument Valley, is gorgeous but loops visibly during long sessions. And at roughly three to four hours for a single playthrough, some will feel the fare meter stopped too soon. Still, Neo Cab knows exactly what it is and does not overstay its welcome. It is a game built by people who worked in Silicon Valley tech and watched the "move fast and break things" era from the inside, and that specificity gives the world a credibility that pure genre exercises rarely achieve. If you can tolerate a slow first act and a story that prioritizes texture over conventional plot momentum, there is something quietly affecting here that most games do not even attempt.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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