Neon Blood is a striking retro-noir RPG inspired by Blade Runner and Octopath Traveler

At the IndieDevDay 2023 in Barcelona we scanned through 100+ indie projects and cherry-picked 20 of them for a Gamereactor interview. Neon Blood was pretty obvious.

"It was like a remix of the things that we love and we like", says tech director Alejandro Chipelo. "And we take a couple of inspirations of Blade Runner from the environments, then one game in particular that is Octopath Traveler developed by Square Enix, that mixes and blends very well the 2D pixel art characters with the 3D environments, and we love RPGs".

"It was at the beginning kinda trial and error", adds pixel artist Roi Turregui on the matter of the unique graphics, "because at first it's a bit difficult to blend these 3D environments with the 2D pixel art. The first iteration of Neon Blood was completely different, with smpler characters and very low poly, with less pixels for characters and so on, and then we tried to enjoy our ride and to take our style with pixelated textures for the 3D environments (...) I joined later, not from the beginning, and when I entered I thought we need to desaturate everything because we have some great shaders which make the lights reflect, so we don't need those colours, we need something more noir, darker, with some kind of art animation".

"There's a mode in the game that's really enjoyable that is the detective mode", finally explains narrative director Daniel Pérez about the story of main character Axel McCoy, "that helps you to follow some clues and the game, I think that the most interesting thing in the game is that you have to be following clues, and when you are advancing through the game you get faced to some combat, to new characters, to new enemies, but the main thing you have to do is investigate. You start like a regular policeman, a regular detective, and then with the flow of the narrative, you end up becoming the key part of a revolution that aims to destroy the foundations of this cyberpunk and noir aesthetic. We have two cities, one very luxurious and one very poor..."

Play the full interview to learn more about Neon Blood, the PlayStation Talents programme support, and how publisher Meridiem is planning to release it next year on pretty much every major platform, including a physical edition.