Image: Starblade Games

There's been a murder in The Drowned City, the future metropolis built on the soggy remains of New York. The good news is that you know who the killer is: You! Probably. Unfortunately, you're also playing as amnesiac police-bot Buster 09, and she has no memory of how she got where she is, or why she put a bullet through her own creator's heart. Maybe not the best foot to start an investigation on, but it's all you've got in Neo Junk City.

I've been looking forward to this one for a while, after a lengthy (and now sadly unavailable) demo. It's an interesting mix of classic point-and-click inventory juggling adventure, multi-choice dialogues (as you'd expect from the genre), and some decent action segments that remind me a little of classic Hideo Kojima cyber-detective adventure Snatcher, although used a bit more liberally.

The combat, more specifically, reminds me a lot of SNES Super Scope lightgun games, especially in the impressive multi-phase boss fights. Against regular enemies, you're able to take cover to avoid damage, but in running battles, you're mostly trying to intercept enemy projectiles and shoot them down before you can take damage. It's honestly nice to see so much variety and effort put into what other games usually make a very brief and mindless minigame. And you'll have plenty of chances to shoot things - some areas have roaming encounters with grunt enemies.

All that, plus the occasional Outrun-like driving segments too. Because if you're going to have a cool future car and license to drive it at dangerous speeds, you're going to want to drift that thing at a hundred miles an hour. It seems that there are a few situations where you can get by without violence, and some areas have traps to evade in real-time. A rare case of a point-and-click adventure hybrid hitting a fairly confident 50/50 split.

As you can see from the screenshots, the trailer, and just about anything about this one, it's full of charming cartoony sprite art, with some wacky character designs and some very vaporwave-styled backdrops. The artist does clearly like drawing buxom, leggy dames, though, given that the entire Buster line of robots (sometimes several on screen at once) all look like hot girls in corsets and hotpants. Still better than black, visored military gear though, so I'll take what I can get.

Interestingly, this is the first title from Starblade Games in nearly a decade. It's been a loooong time since their previous release, the princess-kidnapping villainous platformer Nefarious, and it's been interesting to see the stylistic shift from Flash-adjacent vectorized sprites to chunky pixels. I definitely prefer the latter so far. Either way, this is one I hope to sink some time into this week, time allowing.

Neo Junk City is out now for £17.75/$20, with a 15% launch discount running until November 16th. No discount bundles on this one, sadly.