This game is all about the grungy digital sidewalk art, the exhaustively detailed ideas, the cyberpunk lore. The puzzles are secondary, and though there is a handful of traditional point 'n' click hurdles here, they're only for genre flavor. What you get with Neofeud is tantamount to an interactive story -- a fascinating journey into a literally mixed-media world, limned in an aesthetic that I dub junkpunk.

The adventure takes place in a flakked up continuity where robots get high on mythium until they blue screen on the sidewalk, and chimeric demi-people living in shipping container favelas try to jack free power from killer electric meters. The style, like the world, is somewhat junky too. But it looks so good in all its expressive, soul-soaked junkiness; every rusted-through, goo-dripping part is in complete, dissonant unity with every other, and the way each object or character would look in any other style can be easily imagined. That, in general, is the success of a style: it's thick enough to carry its own rich personality, and yet is transparent enough for symbolic clarity, for every consciously included detail to be readable by all those not inside the braincase of the creator.

Like in the Blomkamp film Elysium, society is split into two stark sections in the world of Neofeud: the world of corporate states below, a place of garbage mountains as big as the Rockies, of city-sized permanent tent settlements populated by a junky mixture of humans beset by nanotech-borne diseases, crippled robots shell-shocked from their time subduing a radioactive Europe, and mutant refugees from various macro-scale gene-splicing experiments. Up and above are the one-percent in their floating sky fortresses -- those who travel the stars, reap the resources of the asteroid belt, experiment on the sentients of all worlds to their hearts' content, and in general incessantly seek ways to amplify their own power and pleasure. A horrible amplification of where the United States is headed, maybe, with a patina of satire on the surface and a whole big book of serious world-building just below.

It's so novel that in this cyberpunk, junkpunk exploration you're not controlling another Deckard-type detective (the easy out), but a science fictional social worker: one of those guys who has to keep up with the robotic welfare queens and tentacled lower orders, making sure that they're getting the benefits due them, and not getting high while smacking their poorly assembled kids around. I really like Karl Carbon as a protagonist; he has an obvious pity for these miserable collage people, but he also knows the wrong things they're capable of and doesn't try to sugarcoat it. Karl, I assume, is sort of a murky mirror for the game's creator, Silver Spook, who obviously is quite liberal -- and though politically I cannot agree on certain things (I'd probably be one of those Humanity First goons in his universe!), I most certainly do sympathize with the Spook's frustration over those disgusting, billionaire hoarders of power and profit who've thrown our society out of balance just to pursue their base desires -- for whom gutting whole economies with sanctions is on the up-and-up, fomenting destructive proxy wars is perfectly justifiable, and carpet bombing a country-sized ghetto full of civilians is just business as usual. . . or maybe even a good ol' time!

(Neofeud proves to me, once again, that you don't have to be sitting at the same notch on the political spectrum as somebody to enjoy their art -- and this is an amazing one, a one-man show apart from some of the voice actors, and heck! I never would've guessed that the robotic rigga Proto-J and the ridden-hard-and-put-up-wet Karl Carbon were both voiced by the very guy who crafted this big, woolly experience! I am all in for Neofeud 2, which is coming soon!)

I think this game rocks. Will probably write a fuller review when I finally beat it. Way smarter than it lets on, and the music is pretty good, even though I always feel a little weird when the robot says the n-word.