It is not difficult to assume that the current feeling that the pandemic will change everything, or rather that the pandemic has changed our future, is not so true. On the contrary. To reason things out, the pandemic may have shortened the timing of certain changes and dealt a lethal blow to what was already wobbling. That's one of the things that French novelist Michel Houllebecq wrote in his letter to France Inter. And it's the same feeling you get when you enter the world of Neo Cab, the visual novel published by Chance Agency in 2019. Playing it during the quarantine I had the feeling of being returned to the future I was promised and it's an all but incredible future even today. A future that's not terrified and obsessed with the virus. As our future probably will be too, unlike this present bubble we're currently in.

But let's go in order. Neo Cab is a visual novel, a form of hybrid narrative, on the border between video games, movies, animation and game-books. The protagonist is Lina, who arrives in Los Ojos, a Californian city that could be any of the tech microcapitals of today's Silicon Valley, to be a taxi driver – the company's name is Neo Cab, and it works in a way that's not so different from Uber as we know it. But Los Ojos is a city of the future, fully automated, where cars are driverless and everything or almost everything is managed by a tech corp called Capra. In Los Ojos driving a taxi is more or less an act of subversion. Lina meets Savy, an old friend of hers, who gives her a bracelet that shows the emotions of the wearer through a scale of colors, and then disappears. From here starts the mystery that is the motor of the story, which follows many typical hard boiled cyberpunk clichés: data thefts, daring characters, radical fringes and many, many, many capsule hotels. All very intelligent, all very well told.

Neo Cab recaptures through the lens of fantastic exaggeration the very future we all told ourselves until early 2020. Los Ojos is the metaphor of the city where the project and the automation of that project have essentially won over life in favour of total efficiency. To the extreme limit of a scenery in which technology is able, as in a twentieth century social experiment, to direct people's emotions and channel their choices, manipulating free will in the most satisfying way that some great changes may or may not occur. A way to ask ourselves how much we are and will be free, without expiring in the conspiracy of the fake news about 5G spreading the Coronavirus. All presented very well, with extravagant characters, a neon interface as befits the aesthetics of our days (present and future), polished dialogues available in an impressive number of languages. An excellent moral story, which should push us to start thinking about the future as we had imagined it and above all in a critical way, coming out of the dead end where we locked down, on our balconies, counting how many runners pass and if they are properly spaced out.

We tested Neo Cab through an Apple Arcade subscription. Otherwise you can buy it on Steam and Nintendo Store.