Neo Cab review

 

  In the hands of other mobile developers, a game like Neo Cab might turn out to be an all-too-familiar management game where you juggle fares, routes, car charge, and energy to try and optimize and upgrade your way into the ultimate taxi driver. Chance Agency took a different approach, and used these trappings as mere set-dressing to upend and push back against this approach to hustle culture and min/maxing everything while telling a compelling story to boot.   It's a great game, and still well worth playing if you missed it when it initially released on Apple Arcade.

Drive to survive

Neo Cab tells the story of Lina, a driver for the eponymous rideshare service who is just arriving to the city of Los Ojos to reunite with their longtime friend. Without giving too much away, this reunion quickly get interrupted and leaves Lina with no choice but to drive nightly shifts as they try to piece together what is going on with her friend, and the implications it might have across the city.

This sets up the perfect model for a management game, with Lina having to manage her emotions, income, driver rating, rest, etc. though - interestingly - Neo Cab resists making this the central thrust of the experience. Instead, each passenger Lina picks up has their own, unique background and dialog sequences that keeps the focus of the game on storytelling and fleshing out the world of Los Ojos and the situation Lina is in, while the management elements take a back seat.

Vision zero

Throughout all of these conversations that Lina has with her rides, you get a great sense of the state of Neo Cab's world. Despite the futuristic look of the game, many of the things plaguing the citizenry of Los Ojos map fairly cleanly onto the state of the world today. In fact, since the game's initial release in 2019, some of the things forecasted by the game have simply come to pass in the real world.

Discussions of corporate greed, the surveillance state, autonomous vehicles, and more are front-and-center in Neo Cab, and the superb writing allows these conversations to feel natural and relevant in response to both the person Lina is talking to as well as Lina's emotional state (which is tracked and displayed in game through a in-fiction piece of tech called a FeelGrid).

Car talk

I find Neo Cab's narrative just as compelling as I did years ago when I first played it, and it has aged very well in how it examines the topics it does. I also continue to be thankful that the management layers present in Neo Cab don't really matter all that much, or at least never prevented me from taking the paths I wanted to through the experience.

This is to say that if you want a management game, this is definitely not the one for you, though I'd imagine you could gather that much through Neo Cab's free-to-start opening sequence.

Plunking down $5.99 is well worth the cost for some great writing, intricate dialog sequences, and a set of characters that does a pretty great job of capturing the broad audience of people needing a ride somewhere.

The bottom line

Neo Cab's premise is not just a novel way to get you to juggle systems optimally. It is the vehicle through which it examines this exact kind of plate-spinning and how it is used to shape power structures.

If you think this sounds too heady or preachy - don't worry - there's more than enough personality and heart in the writing to make Neo Cab a great ride regardless.