Crowdfunding Spotlight is here to help cover unique and promising new projects, and Tales of the Neon Sea certainly qualifies. Developed by Palm Pioneer and slated to be published by Zodiac Interactive, it is a noir adventure game set in a vibrant cyberpunk landscape. As for the premise, you can view that below.

In the near future, humans and sentient AI robots rely on each other for survival despite growing tensions and unease. Our protagonist, formerly a veteran police detective but now retired following years of frustration and disillusionment, spends his days intoxicated while accepting random jobs as a private investigator to make ends meet. He exists within the neon sea of an immense city, its blinding artificial lights unable to hide the shadow of greed and lust that threatens to engulf it at any moment.

This drunken cycle is broken when our hero becomes entangled in a missing person’s case, one which holds the key to tracking down a monstrous killer who long ago escaped justice. Unlock your memories, decode the truth, and resist drowning in the wave of conspiracy that grips the city!

It certainly sounds promising, and it’s also set to release on PC. But you might want to know a bit more about the game, right? Controls are handled either via mouse and keyboard or via gamepad (thankfully). You set about finding clues and solving puzzles, but you also have William the black cat at your disposal to help unearth hidden paths that the detective can’t travel. Given the nature of the plot, I’m not so sure William is a biological cat, but he still sounds like an interesting companion. Perhaps best of all is the fact the game is already half constructed, so hopefully the advent of some crowdfunding will see to it that the game gets made all the faster.

The folks behind the game

By now you might be interested in helping fund the game, and there’s a lot of ways to do so in the next 29 days. Tales of the Neon Sea only needs $10,093 to get funded and there’s a lot of tiers at your disposal. The lowest tier to get something is NZ$ 18, which nets you a digital copy of the game as well as a thank you; NZ$ 24 gets you all the previous awards plus some HD wallpapers; if you want to spend a bit more, NZ$ 43 gets you all that plus a digital OST and DLC (assuming the funding goals for those are reached); for NZ$ 146, you’ll get a bunch, including refrigerator magnets, a digital art book and access to an early demo; and for the truly money flush, you can spend NZ$ 882 for a ton of stuff, including the option to design a key NPC in Tales of the Neon Sea. There’s more tiers than that, though you can see a bunch below.

All in all, Tales of the Neon Sea is a promising looking game. If you love helping fund cool indie projects and love pixel art, you can’t really go wrong. To see more details, just check out the official Kicktarter page.