Synergia

Genre: Visual Novel

Players: 1

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Review:

Synergia is a Visual Novel released in 2020 on PC ported to PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, and Nintendo Switch in 2021, then brought to Xbox One in 2022. The cyberpunk-style story of Synergia focuses on Cila, a veteran of this setting’s police force, looked down on and mistrusted by her colleagues for a past incident where she broke her country’s strict law forbidding a human from forming a relationship with an android. Cila’s loveless and mostly mundane routine is thrown into disarray one day when her personal android house servant breaks, and her friend Yoko sets her up with a secondhand replacement named Mira, only for Cila to discover that Mira is very unlike any other android she has ever encountered.

This story pairs strong themes of technology with questions about what place love has in a cruel and uncaring world, and for the most part I found this to be one of the more compelling stories I’ve encountered in a game in a long while. This game’s characters are extremely compelling, particularly Cila, Mira, and Yoko, though other characters featured here are also interesting. In addition, the world presented here is fascinating, and the story set into motion when Mira and Cila meet is one filled with intrigue and mystery.

Fans of the works of Isaac Asimov and Phillip K. Dick will find a lot to appreciate here, as Synergia dives headfirst into heady topics regarding artificial intelligence and augmented humanity, all within an oppressive, suffocating surveillance state where it seems taken as a given that peoples’ every action is being watched, taking place in a dingy cityscape. In this sort of setting, it raises the question of how a forbidden love can blossom.

And it sorta’… doesn’t? Without getting into spoilers, I feel a blooming respect and friendship growing between the two main characters, and Cila definitely shows a latent attraction to Mira, but I didn’t feel like the transition into romantic love came across as natural to me. Of course, we are talking about a romance involving an android, but I’m sure you get what I mean.

This kinda’ gets into some of the issues I have with the latter parts of the game’s story, where it seems like virtually every character has major backstory revelations and the player should have been exposed to these more gradually instead of having all of these major character moments shoved together one after another in short succession while the game’s complex climax is playing out in the background. At the very least, I think this story should have done a better job seeding these backstory elements and character motivations throughout the story, when at best we saw a brief reference to an enigmatic event or odd behavioral tic without any explanation or context.

It’s a shame this game seems to rush its final chapters, because for the most part this is a wonderful experience with superb writing, great characters, and some really excellent aesthetics, with beautiful hand-drawn 2D art for the characters and moody 2D backdrops for the city and its various locales, and with a moody synthesized soundtrack with some nice piano themes for its more quiet moments.

I should note that, in terms of gameplay, you shouldn’t expect much here – there are four or five major points in the story where players can make choices or inspect computer files for additional information, and this can result in one of two endings (plus an extra ending if you see both that shows you important events that transpired before the start of the story). However, for the most part this is one of the less-interactive entries in the Visual Novel genre.

There is one other major issue I have with this game, and it’s on the technical side of things. This game tells you only a few of its controls at the start, and does a pretty terrible job of explaining most of them. At one point i accidentally skipped over a line of dialogue early on, and in my search for a history of the dialogue, I accidentally sent the story speeding forward at hyper speed, forcing me to restart the game from the beginning (the game does allow saves, but again it doesn’t make it clear how to do this). A part of this issue is because the menu buttons and their cursor highlights don’t make it clear that you’re highlighting these options, and it’s not clear what each one does until you toy around with them.

Despite that I definitely have major complaints about Synergia, overall I thoroughly enjoyed this game’s art style, its characters, and its story. The technological themes it tackles are thought-provoking, and its characters are really compelling. I do wish the story’s latter chapters were stretched out and their major revelations were sprinkled throughout the story, and I wish the game’s interface was handled better, but overall this is one of the most satisfying “pure” Visual Novel games I’ve played, and I absolutely recommend it to fans of the cyberpunk genre or sci-fi stories in general.

tl;dr – Synergia is a Visual Novel set in a cyberpunk world about a police officer who finds herself the caretaker of an unusual android while dealing with friction due to laws that forbid human-android romances. The writing and characters are excellent, and the art is beautiful. I just wish the control interface wasn’t as needlessly perplexing, and I wish the major plot revelations stuffed into the game’s final chapter were spread out and given more room to breathe. However, overall I found this to be an extremely satisfying read, and I recommend it to anyone who fancies themselves a sci-fi enthusiast.

Grade: B+

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