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You know, if there is one particular genre that I really love more than anything else, then it’s the cyberpunk genre. You see, I grew up with cyberpunk games like “Syndicate”, “System Shock”, “Blade Runner”, “Beneath a steel sky“, “Neuromancer”, “Deus Ex” and “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” (not to mention movies and animes like “Ghost in the Shell“, “Armitage III”, “Cyber City Oedo 808”, “Akira” and “Blade Runner”). I guess that you could say that I love that kind of setting (William Gibson’s books got me into cyberpunk long before any movie or game suckeded me into the genre for life).

“Ghost in the shell” was the first cyberpunk movie that I’ve ever watched, and I found out about it thanks to the in-game ads for the movie in “Syndicate Wars”.

This is also the reason why I get really excited when I hear about a new cyberpunk game, and speaking of which. We were just contacted by a Hawaiian indie game developer called Christian Kealoha Miller (Silver Spook Games) and Christian presented us to his cyberpunk point-and-click adventure game “Neofeud” (the game is coming to Steam for Windows and Linux on the 19th of September). Anyways, this is what we were told:

“Hello,I am Chris, an indie game developer from Hawaii. I would love for you to take a look at Neofeud, my dystopian cyberpunk point-and-click adventure game in the vein of Blade Runner, but with an overlay of Game of Thrones-like political intrigue, and hand-painted, stylized visuals.The art, stories and gameplay of Neofeud are a reflection of my experiences as a STEM teacher for the underserved youth of Honolulu’s inner city.

Teaching robotics, programming, and sustainability is an often difficult, stressful, and even Kafka-esque endeavor — being in one of the richest, most beautiful places on Earth, yet dealing with families with working parents, who are living out of a van, or sleeping on the street. It is hard trying to keep the kids out of gangs, off of drugs, and on a path towards better opportunities, such as the ones I had growing up in a slum area of paradise while going to an upscale private school.” – Silver Spook Games

I haven’t quite seen a cyberpunk adventure game like “neofeud” before. I mean, just the visuals alone make the game stand out from the crowd.

Well, that sure sounds really interesting I have to say. So, what about the story and plot of the game then? Well, here’s the said background story for “Neofeud”:

“2033 – We create AI. Sentient robots arrive, but not as our Terminator overlords or our Singularity saviors — conscious machines are humanity’s unwanted bastard children. A few are geniuses who design flying cars, beat cancer, invent teleportation, but millions of defective prototypes roll out of factories — mentally challenged, motivationally-challenged, criminally-inclined. Legally conscious, but unhirable, these “Defectives” are shuffled through public housing and welfare assistance, straining the already overburdened back of the meager social safety net. The robots who don’t end up in prison are dumped, as a last resort, into a massive landfill known as “The Pile”.

Humans engage in perfection of their species — or at least the powerful and well-connected — genetically engineering children with human and animal DNA. The failed eugenics experiment “Frankenpeople” are discarded into “The Pile” as well. The new dynasties, ‘Neofeudal Lords’, live in towering neon glass castles, shuttle around in pristine nanotech-enabled pods, minds and bodies full of cyberware, spending most of their time taking selfies and “optimizing their monetization schemes”. A race of supermen concerned only with their own status, their prestige, their success. Where machines have become all too flawed and human, people have become flawless, perfect, cold machines.

Karl Carbon is an ex-cop, dishonorably discharged from Coastlandia PD for disobeying an order to shoot an unarmed sentient humanoid. Karl is exiled to “The Pile” as a lowly social worker. There he counsels gangbanging foster-kid robots and confiscates chimera-children from deadbeat half-wolf parents. Till one day a case goes horribly sideways and Karl is drawn into a sordid conspiracy that could threaten the strained fabric of Human-Robot-Hybrid civilization — or save it”.

“Neofeud” is said to offer +15 hours of gameplay. So I take it that you will face at least a handful of hostile encounters such as this one.

In other words, the game appears to be a mix of “Terminator”, H.G giger, William Gibson’s books, “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” and “Blade Runner“. Well, I don’t know about you, but I really like the sound of that. Furthermore, the following game features sounds pretty awesome to me:

Features:
– 15+ hours of gameplay.
– An original dystopic sci-fi world and story that will (hopefully) make you question some of your core beliefs. Or at least my sanity
– Tricky yet satisfying, point-n-click detective work, interspersed with tense action shootouts.
– Handpainted, uber-gritty, noir futureland. Makes Mad Max and Rick Deckard crap their pants.
– Endless bombardment of witty one-liners from hardboiled cyberpunk.

Let’s be honest. No cyberpunk game is complete without at least ONE sexy lady.

So “if” you like the sound of that, then you should keep your eyes open for “Neofeud”, because the game is said to launch to PC via Steam on the 19th of September this year (that would be on Thursday next week).

About Silver Spook Games
Silver Spook Games is a one-person-team consisting of Christian Miller, a Hawaiian writer, artist, and game developer with a passion for creating works of depth and relevance. Growing up Native Hawaiian in Honolulu, Hawaii, he experienced a somewhat ‘postmodern’ and dissonant existence of clashing cultures, peoples, and extreme inequality. Inspired by games like Fallout, System Shock, and films like Aliens, The Matrix, Bladerunner, District 9, and Elysium, he has gone on to write stories and create games in the tradition of dark, cautionary, and (hopefully) groundbreaking science fiction. Neofeud is an adventure-puzzle game that aspires to be complex, compelling, and challenging. Christian now lives on the Big Island of Hawaii with his loving, geeky, cosplaying Canadian wife, and two kids.