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Neon Struct is a game built for such a time as this - a surprise, when its elements are so familiar. There's the style, a still-chic blend of 80s cyber fashions that includes Blade Runner hover-cars, Halo Jones' pouting punks, night-scraper skylines, pulsing tubes of blue and pink neon and a synth soundtrack that could perfectly score a Ryan Gosling Drive-by. There's the protagonist, one Jillian Cleary, a conscientious Federal Agent who is betrayed and hunted by the Bureau because, predictably enough, she knows too much. There's her modus operandi, a blend of stealth influences, most plainly Metal Gear Solid. You must creep through the shadows and crawl through air vents, avoiding the light that may report your presence to the roaming guards (whose routes you watch and note with feline vigilance). You must skulk beneath the swivelling eye of the CCTV camera, hack into computer systems and attempt to complete your objectives without being seen or heard. All of this style and activity is common in video games. All of this could have combined to create a pastiche. And yet, David Pittman's game unfurls with unusual grace and elegance, and breaks its player into rare places of political questioning within the medium.
Rarely does a video game's action and theme align so closely. In Neon Struct, you must evade the watching eyes of your would-be captors, either by hiding in shadows (you can see how visible you are at any given time via a simple gauge, permanently displayed near the centre of the screen) or shutting down surveillance systems. In thematic terms too, this is a game about hiding. You play as an Edward Snowden-type, a former agent of the surveillance state turned public informant, who must survive off-grid, hiding from the "augen der welt" ("eyes of the world") of the game's menacing subtitle.
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