Neofeud (2017)

I wanted so badly to love Neofeud. It's genuinely so great to see a cyberpunk game that really tries to be gritty political sci-fi about struggling to get by in an irreparably fucked system. The game earnestly tries to engage with real issues around capitalism and white supremacy and the hopelessness of being a cog in the machine. And it's a scrappy indie effort from a one-man dev team. On paper, this should be a slam dunk for me.

In execution, well, there's some problems.

Let's get the most obvious one out of the way first. This is one of those sci fi things that's like "what if robots instead of black people?" and the coding is very VERY on the nose. It's written with a lot more understanding than most, but most of the robots have blaccents and there's explicit references to both "Trayvon King" and "Vaytron Martin" incidents of police brutality against robots and there's a sci-fi analogue to crack for robots and I could go on. It all hits really weird. Weirder still is one of the central characters, Proto-J, a drug dealer who talks in an especially over-the-top blaccent and aggressively misuses AAVE (also says the actual N word despite only saying "flack" instead of "fuck"). I have such complicated feelings about Proto-J. Like, his dialogue is deeply annoying (or just offensive depending on how much credit you're giving the writer) but he has a surprising amount of depth and emotion to him. He genuinely does feel like a real person, though not like any black person I've ever met. He reminds me a lot of some indigenous folks I've known who respond to feeling cut off from their culture by "acting black" in a really stiff unnatural way. Knowing that the writer of Neofeud (who is himself indigenous) spent a lot of time doing social work in poor communities in Hawaii, I fully believe that Proto-J is based on kids he worked with. But the game never explicitly talks about race beyond the human/robot metaphor, and there's very little nuance to the way the racial coding of robots is presented beyond "robot = black", so the character kind of just reads as a black stereotype anyway, despite what I genuinely believe are the writer's best intentions.

Even beyond the race stuff, the worldbuilding here is slapdash and heavily reliant on real world references (sometimes just straight up namechecks, sometimes fake name equivalents). The political satire is incredibly blunt and specific to late 2017 America to the point where it honestly feels a little dated less than a decade later. And worst of all, the way you end up "fighting the system" is by helping a more progressive oligarch coup a more overtly malicious one. The oligarch in question tells you it's the only way and the game frames that as the absolute truth. I kept waiting for the moment she betrays you or you have to betray her and it just doesn't happen. You just go through with the plan. It's so bleak and cynical, it honestly makes the rest of the game worse in retrospect. I don't know if I'd have finished Neofeud if I'd known that's where it was going when I started.

For all that, I couldn't bring myself to dislike Neofeud exactly. It's too earnest and weird. I haven't played much else like it. And when it does work, it's magic. There are moments where it's genuinely clever or funny or absolutely heartbeaking. It's crazy how much potential is on display here. The music is great. The art is weird and messy but it's also kind of perfect for a game like this. The puzzles are never exactly difficult, but they don't insult your intelligence either. And I know I've mostly complained about the writing, but it really does strike a beautiful balance of capturing the frustration of being a broke pencil pusher struggling to do some good while still also being a fun exciting adventure game where you do cool stuff. For all my problems with the ending, it is still cathartic to kill a bunch of cops and politicians.

Neofeud gets so close to being something amazing. Even though it's ultimately a bit of a disaster, it's a really impressive disaster and I think I'm still looking forward to the sequel.

I don't know.

Neofeud.

What a game.