When Tales of the Neon Sea is tasking you with exploring a crime scene to deduce what occurred or otherwise revealing interesting details about the world and its characters, it’s an easy 8/10 game. When you’re stuck on a puzzle with no narrative justification that’s made up of 6 smaller puzzles, all of which you can interact with but only one of which is solvable at the time, and there’s no direction explaining what the hell your goal is or even where to start? That’s when Tales of the Neon Sea becomes a 5/10 game. Judging by the chapter select screen, these two halves each make up 50% of the game, and yet you’re bound to spend twice as much time with the latter as you do with the former because the infuriating Matryoshka dolls of nesting puzzles are designed to waste your time, and that’s just not okay. Tales of the Neon Sea is bursting with promise, but its later-game focus on increasingly complex puzzles begins to miss the point; adventure games like this aren’t about arbitrary playtimes or the necessity of a difficulty curve, but about fun and storytelling, and the sad truth is that I wasn’t having fun during the second half of the game when the story got shoved aside in favor of increasingly frustrating gameplay. That having been said, this is a game that’s currently lacking an ending, and future chapters (which will supposedly be added in a free update later on) and patches could help pull Tales of the Neon Sea back from the brink by prioritizing storytelling in a limited number of recurring areas rather than puzzles that take you to budget-draining new environments.

Tales of the Neon Sea‘s story may be incomplete, but I’m invested in it

You play as Rex, a detective who runs the Mist Detective Agency. He’s joined by a quirky outdated robot who functions a bit like a butler, BB-X, as well as several stray cats who live in his house, led by the intelligent black cat and secondary playable character, William. Tales of the Neon Sea is a noir cyberpunk story full of sentient robots, classism, and murder, and that last one happens to be Rex’s area of expertise; once a brilliant detective before an accident led to him being outfitted with numerous robotic parts, he has a preternatural talent for combining the faintest of clues into a coherent sequence of events that help him to solve crimes. At first, Rex is merely stumbling across crime that occurs near his house, but when a serial killer with a close connection to his past resurfaces and begins creating macabre statues of flesh and metal from its human and robot victims, he’s compelled to get to the bottom of things and finally put this case—and along with it, his unfinished business—to rest.

That probably sounds pretty serious, so I should likely also mention that William is a womanizing cat who can speak (but only to other cats) and has some pretty harsh opinions about Rex, who he nevertheless saves on multiple occasions. At one point, Rex wakes up from a hangover, only to come down into his living room and discover that William is having a cat party with members of a cat mob while his apparent girlfriend, Elizabeth, sulks upstairs. Of course, William is only close with the cat mob because he helped to figure out a situation involving a “biocat,” which the real cats regard with suspicion.

The dynamics between robots and living things is interesting in general, with there being a whole history where the first robot to attain sentience was heralded as a prophet, leading to a schism between them and the humans who created them. This erupted into a war that’s since faded into memory, to the point where a robot is running for the city’s mayor and attracting the support of even some humans, but distrust and prejudice linger in the background nevertheless. Since the story cuts out suddenly at the end of chapter 3, it’s difficult to get a sense of how important this dynamic will end up being to the serial killer plot (after all, the grotesque monuments are comprised of both human and robot victims), but the interplay between different groups is believable without becoming so heavy-handed that Tales of the Neon Sea forgets to embrace the craziness of it all, and this establishes an enjoyably unique cyberpunk atmosphere that’s totally unlike anything else I’ve ever played.

The pacing takes a hit when the puzzles start becoming obstacles, though

Early on, Tales of the Neon Sea‘s gameplay and story are intertwined—if you’re lockpicking a door, you get a lockpicking puzzle, while your limited funds mandate plotting a course through certain bus stops/train stations/walkways that minimize the expense. Once you reach the middle of chapter 2, however, that goes out the window and puzzles exist solely as obstacles present to impede your progress. It’s at this point that the story grinds to a crushing halt; you’re looking for victims and perpetrators in a deserted area, so it’s just you and a bunch of puzzles that rely on increasing amounts of moon logic. Characters only show up between hours of puzzle-solving, and even then, their presence is so brief that this could be classified as a cameo. As soon as they give you a new lead, you’re dragged off into some new area full of interlocking puzzles that make little sense, and you continue chipping away at the bizarre leaps of logic required to overcome them until the credits finally roll. Tales of the Neon Sea‘s initial combination of gameplay and story is incredibly charming, and I wish that it lasted, because what it’s replaced with is wildly inferior.

Tales of the Neon Sea‘s puzzles are varied to a fault; there are memorization puzzles, problem-solving puzzles where you have to manipulate pieces (either by using other pieces or parts of the board you can’t see), spatial awareness puzzles that require connecting two points despite each action affecting the position of nearby pieces, coordination puzzles that task you with tapping a button while moving something around, and a bunch of other types. On one hand, this keeps things fresh and ensures that you won’t be getting sick of a single minigame that’s frequently repeated. On the other, it ensures that everyone’s bound to have trouble with at least one puzzle that makes absolutely no sense to them, and Tales of the Neon Sea has plenty of infuriating candidates.

Most of the bad puzzles suffer from the same root cause: too many elements. If you find yourself in a room that requires several 3-number combinations and the environment is detailed enough that one could glean 50 different permutations from visual cues, you’re not going to be intuiting the few right answers without a ton of guesswork. There’s simply too much noise for the right solution to pop out to an observant eye. The same problem occurs when you have a large area filled with 5-6 mini puzzles that all rely on the same nearby equipment. There’s an order you need to do things in, but all of the pieces can be interacted with immediately, and this makes it difficult to know where to start. That’s compounded by Tales of the Neon Sea‘s refusal to explain the rules and goals; machinery only functions if you route enough energy to max out its battery symbol, for example, and you have no way of knowing that outside of trial and error. Your movement speed is incredibly slow and areas tend to be large, so having to run back and forth to figure out what buttons cause which reactions is tedious beyond reason. Worse, the puzzles at the end have some buttons that can’t be interacted with and result in Chinese-language prompts when you try. The localization has some minor rough spots, but errors being in Chinese in the English localization is insanely confusing.

Tales of the Neon Sea is a blend of genres, but mostly an adventure game

When I first saw Tales of the Neon Sea‘s trailer, I was impressed by its aesthetic and yet completely confused about what kind of game it was. Despite what’s eventually revealed to be an unhealthy preoccupation with puzzles, this is primarily an adventure game. You pick up items, combine them with other items, and then use those items on the environment to open the way forward and collect even more items for later. Even the investigation sequences play out like a cross between adventure and puzzle game; you wander around scanning clues for fingerprints and oddities, combine your observations into conclusions, and then place numerous cogs representing those conclusions into a watch in a puzzle minigame so that they’re all moving while touching the center. It’s strange, but the kind of strange that I found myself enjoying anyway.

Tales of the Neon Sea occasionally takes an unfortunate dive into more action-oriented gameplay, however, and this goes as poorly as you’d expect. The very first scene has you running from an enemy who kills you in a single hit and requires precise timing (and an awareness of the run button) to avoid. Later on, you’re dodging drones who can similarly kill you in a single hit, and these lead to a boss fight that plays out as a timing minigame where your reticle dances around and only hits the target if it intersects a target area when you attack. After that, you wander into a warehouse and get imprisoned, switch to William, and have a limited amount of time to figure out a puzzle to save Rex. Timed sequences are unenjoyable in general, and timed puzzles are especially ill-advised.

Of course, it doesn’t help that Tales of the Neon Sea‘s controller support is spotty. There doesn’t appear to be any dead zone factored into the analog sticks, and the directional pad does nothing. Moving from side to side is fine enough most of the time (unless one of your sticks drifts, in which case you should expect to walk into a drone laser at least a couple of times), but during puzzles, the game doesn’t always seem to register the stick resetting to its neutral position. The end result is that I had times where I was hitting the stick left or right over and over again, only for a solid 85% of those inputs to be ignored. Considering how much item selection there is here, I recommend sticking with the keyboard and mouse for the sake of your sanity. Being able to click things rather than scrolling to them also speeds up puzzles.

The sprite art in Tales of the Neon Sea is some of the best I’ve ever seen

I’m not normally a fan of combining sprites with post-processing lighting effects, but Tales of the Neon Sea pulls it off better than most. It certainly doesn’t hurt any that its sprites are gorgeous and expressive, with each scene bursting at the seams with details. For example, you can see NPCs walking past the windows outside when you’re inside of the early game’s repair shop. The lighting is fuzzy, but not so fuzzy that sprite details are lost, and it provides a soft, appropriately neon glow to everything that’s simply gorgeous. Honestly, I can’t help but suspect that a large part of the budget went into the visuals, which is all the more reason to rein in the puzzles; Tales of the Neon Sea already has numerous gorgeous areas that I’d love to explore further as the story unfolds rather than being herded into totally new environments that cost additional money to create sprite art for. I don’t have anything negative to say about the visuals themselves, though. The soundtrack, on the other hand, is merely okay. It maintains the atmosphere, but there are a few points (such as the credits and cat party scene) where the music stands out, and I wanted more of that.

Story: 2/3 Gameplay: 1/3 Visuals: 2/2 Music: 1/2 ★★★★★★☆☆☆☆ – 6/10
*Click here and scroll to the bottom for a detailed explanation of what these numbers mean

Tales of the Neon Sea Review Screenshots

*A Steam key was provided for the purpose of this Tales of the Neon Sea review

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