Neon Case

The Neon Case is set in late 21st century Hong Kong, and the future looks fabulous. With descriptions of flying cars, for example, the text invokes the future as seen from the past. (Is anyone else reminded of Blade Runner (1982)?). In less adept hands this might have plunged the story into silliness, but for me these elements hit in exactly the right way.

The protagonist, Mei Ling, and her partner, Kai Wong, have been called to investigate the “killing” of Luna, an android sex worker, at a club. In the first half of the game, the reader must inspect the crime scene, and because a picture is included, the reader also sees the mutilated android. One might wonder if this eroticizes violence. I’m inclined to say, “No,” because the fact that the victim is an android allows me to distance myself from the violence. This introduces a tension into a work driven by characters who see androids as the equals of human persons. As interesting as this is to contemplate, I won’t explore the topic any further here because as I explain below, the pictures present a far more serious problem for the story.

The investigation requires the reader to engage the club owner, the “killer”, and finally Luna herself. This last interaction distinguishes itself by allowing the player to talk to Luna, who in her “deceased” state can only communicate via a chat interface, and so a bit of “realism” is introduced to the game. In terms of interactions this is easily the weakest part of the work. Instead of clicking on the hint button immediately, I decided to try my hand at composing my own queries, and that went badly in unanticipated ways. At one point the chat hung, and figuring that I was not going to see a reply, sent another question, only to then see two replies. By the time I was ready to click on “hint”, the button was disabled because it was time to move on. Maybe it’s because I know from embarrassing experience how fraught designing a novel means of interaction can be, but whatever the reason, the clumsiness of the interaction didn’t diminish the story all that much for me.

So with all the strengths and my tolerance of the one major weakness I’ve mentioned so far, why the one-star review? That brings us back to the pictures. While there’s a lot I like about them—I loved the palette of the first few images we see, for example—there is one glaring problem that I cannot get past: Mei and Kai are coded as white while the “killer”, who is not in any way a sympathetic character, is coded as East Asian. This is made worse by the fact that real-world Hong Kong is a former colony of a European nation. There’s a lot I can look past in a work of interactive fiction, but the implication that colonizer = good, and colonized = bad, however unintentional, is not one of them.

I’m not writing this review to shame the author, whose work I would have happily given three or four stars if it had not included the pictures. And I’m not writing this to call the author out but to call the author up. One reason the pictures do not work at all is that they undercut the author’s best intentions. Good sci-fi is commentary on the present, and I believe Neon Case is no exception. When the player is presented with three alternatives of moral weight, the author seems to favor the alternative that requires the characters to treat the member of the arguably oppressed class as though she is the equal of other persons. I would love to see the author take on subject matter like this again while being attentive to all the components of the story and how they complement—or don’t complement—each other, perhaps with the help of one or more sensitivity readers.