Neon Blood (Nintendo Switch) Review

You’re Axel McCoin. Grizzled, amnesiac, hard-boiled detective with a problem. Crime isn’t your problem. Spark is. The latest drug on the block. And it’s messing up your memories, implants, and job prospects big time. And now you’re going to have to get that habit in check because a huge murder case has just dropped into your malfunctioning lap. Someone is murdering the engineers of the worlds largest implant corporation and it’s up to you to stop the culprit. But first, you’re going to have to try and get your shit together. Easier said than done in the dystopian, nightmare future of Neon Blood.

Welcome to the world of hard-boiled cyberpunk detective neo-noir, set in a broken future where implants and body modification are the order of the day. It’s a world marrying the glitz and glamour of rain-drenched, neon infused streets with drugged out cannibals just around the corner.

Neon Blood draws inspiration from far and wide, from Blade Runner to Cyberpunk 2077, with a dash of the finest detective noir movies and books, all combined to create its story and characters. Those inspirations show up in many ways, some not as obvious while others are entirely on the nose, like a slew of cameos from other, well-regarded games.

The story, spread across a couple of locations, will take you down the highway for McCoin’s Spark addiction and how it’s tied into the murders. Industrial espionage, rich people with god complexes, mutations and body horror gone out of control; these are just some of the narrative threads the game weaves together. And it’s a fine enough story only let down by its predictability. You can see where the story is going well before McCoin does, which does drain out some of the wind from its sails.

For all intents and purposes, Neon Blood is a point and click adventure with modern controls. The detective aspect of the game is less deduction and more about finding the clues in the environment and scanning them. As such, there’s a fair amount of back and forth in locations as you highlight one clue that will inevitably lead you to another and so on. Sadly, you can’t form your own interpretation and conclusions as to what happened, making the detective aspect of the game a bit of a missed opportunity in favour of a straightforward narrative.

The game doles out turn-based combat encounters at specific points in the story. There aren no random encounters here, with each carefully placed encounter used to further the story and increase McCoin’s stats and abilities. Each fight will increase your health or add a new attack to your arsenal, and it’s all determined by dice rolls behind the scenes – which can lead to some frustration as the amount of damage and healing you dole out is determined by how lucky that roll is. It’s a stripped back system but works well enough for the limited and curated encounters. Had there been random encounters, the less than flashy combat would have grown tiresome quick. These fights are also the only time the horror of the implants gone awry is made clear, with flashy quick time events that end most fights on a gory, pixelated note.

All of which brings us to Neon Blood‘s superb fusion of pixel-art and 3D visuals. The game is a looker, bringing that teched-up, glimmering dystopian set dressing to life. Neon lights and rain wash through the scene aplenty, complimenting the dark locations and shiny, rain-slicked streets. The characters are all lovingly animated 2D sprites on top of 3D environments. There’s a fantastic use of lighting, both in the detailed 3D backdrops and on the characters themselves – or at least when their outfits are neon encumbered.

There are some issues with Neon Blood, unfortunately. As gorgeous as the visuals are, there’s a sense that the Nintendo Switch is running slower in the more complex scenes as your movement seems slower than in less complex environments. This is componed by the fact the movement system is just clunky. That sluggishness, combined with the rather low camera position, makes it difficult to gauge distances between objects at times, and it left me getting stuck on objects more times than I care to count. A slightly higher camera angle might have sorted this out. The visual prompts in several quick-time sections are sometimes obscured by shiny neon lights and the generally dense details in the environments make it easy to miss them.

Those gripes aside, Neon Blood is a decently fun and beautiful adventure game whose gorgeous neon suffused setting is let down by a clunky movement system and narrative beats that are far too predictable for a detective mystery.

Neon Blood was reviewed on Nintendo Switch using a code provided to gameblur by the publisher. It is also available on PC, Xbox One/Series S|X, and PS4/5.