Back several years ago, for a stunning year and a half of my life, I lived alone in a very small corner studio on the 5th floor of a century-old hotel-turned-apartment-building on Capitol Hill in Seattle. It had pink walls in the kitchen and a panoramic view of the city skyline, though no dishwasher. I spent most of my time within the web of city blocks that make up that neighborhood, seeing a lot of the same faces, some stranger than others, especially where I got my groceries, my books, my coffee, the gyro place I stumbled into at 2 in the morning after my shift at a restaurant downtown.
I still kept to myself and my friends for the most part, but within my own zone of social comfortability, I felt part of a real network. The hardware store guy knew what kind of bulb I was looking for because of the apartment building I lived in. The mom-and-pop Chinese takeout place remembered me regardless of how long it was between visits. All of us restaurant workers kept tabs on each other’s shitty bosses. The bus drivers, the baristas, the unhoused, and the soothsayers on street corners. It was the kind of chaotic urban neighborhood interconnectedness that you lose when you move to a less walkable area.
I ended up working at a spot close to my apartment in the part of the Hill that had all the clubs and gay bars clustered together. I also catered and bartended in the same area, becoming familiar with my neighbors, the club scene, the athletic gay dads, the transplant tech bros, and the local company of bouncers that worked, often with me, during late-night and weekend parties. Relationships that were not intimate but enduring, stronger the farther out the strings go.
All of this to say, if I had to choose a street and a place in time in which to gather up all my neighbors and save them from a swiftly impending localized apocalypse, it would probably be somewhere in Capitol Hill, around the summer of 2018.
Obviously, the Rainbow Drive on which most of Techno Banter takes place is more of a dense (gameplay convenient) microcosm of the sentiment I’m conveying here, the life of particular city streets, but it all came rushing back to me, especially at the end. It’s a neon cyberpunk-lite capitalist purgatory type place, a genre blend of stereotypes and caricatures that make the setting feel more fleshed out and alive than a lot of other games of a similar style, scale, or length. There’s an artistic mix of realistic backgrounds with neon bloom and rain droplets, 2D pixel character models, some more refined and detailed than others. You see some people as animals, depending on their vibe, including yourself.
You play as Nil, a bouncer with a dog’s head working for a corporate asshole briefly masquerading as a down-to-earth entrepreneur for the purpose of an interview, who unceremoniously throws you out on your ass after you injure the pianist, pitch a bad product idea, and then accidentally let a pair of cultists into the party. Luckily, your froggy old boss from the Green Door – a middling dance club operating out of an old bunker – is sort of desperate to hire you back on.
Back on the late shift, your nights (of which you get five) consist of retreating from your shitty apartment, ingratiating yourself in the community, talking to old friends, helping folks with strange errands, listening to the soup guy tell his story, observing the odd habits of the local cultists, and meeting other characters in every corner of the block. There are other clubs as well, but they’re not really your scene. It’s the working class neighborhood, where everyone is either doing what they can to make ends meet and doing what they enjoy in their spare time.
The rest of your nights is showing up for your shift at the Green Door, carefully screening everyone who shows up at the door for red flags and bad attitudes. Techno Banter’s main gimmick is the rhetorical system it deploys as the actionable part of the game, mostly in the case of dueling insults with angry and affronted party-goers denied entry into the club, but also in a few key moments of higher stakes verbal negotiation.
The best part of this system is at the door, where you have to shame, taunt, and disrespect angry rejected customers away from the club. It works like combat, with basic attacks, fighting insults with insults until their health bar is depleted – which loses its luster a little once you get the catch: the correct insult will always be the most obvious counter out of the bunch, in case you had the urge to try and get a little creative with it. There are more special moves, tactics designed to counter specific traits like arrogance and naivety. Then, there’s an ultimate move called Cutting Remarks which works on special characters, an unstoppable combo move that bombards them with one final insult, cutting to the core of their insecurity and sending them away, sometimes crying.
While you work to build up the reputation of the club by letting the right ones in and sending the wrong ones away, you’re also building a continuity with these characters. Certain faces become familiar, both in good and bad ways, and how you treat them will carry over to your next encounter. This is important, because over the course of the five days, the cultists standing outside of the burger shop are gradually building a weapon of mass destruction right there in front of the dumpster and it’s about to become everyone’s problem.
In the course of talking to people on the block and doing little quests for them, you build up a rapport that will heavily influence the final mission. Some people are easier to please than others, some will require a little more attention. For how short Techno Banter is, it’s easy enough to do pretty much everything without it feeling like a drag. It helps that the characters and the tasks are consistently charming and funny.
In one scene, the two officers who guard the crossing between the wealthy part of the city and the part of the city that you live in – faceless, though the LED screens of their masks convey one happy face and one angry face, obviously – try to talk someone off a ledge and instantly give up hope as they find out the jumper is an artist. A writer, specifically. She cries that her life is full of cliches and she’s had enough, and you can talk her off the edge by giving her a series of thoroughly genuine and platitude-free advice.
Another character walks around naked so as not to deprive the world of seeing his perfect abs, and he only grows to respect you if you do the same. There’s a man in a car with no wheels stranded on the sidewalk, handing out missions to you like “make sure these two people get into the club under the pretense of destiny” and “heckle this comedian doing stand up at the kink club tonight so good that he quits comedy.” Your coworker needs help avoiding the common pitfalls that comes with endlessly chasing the bag. A group of masked kids barricade the entrance to the arcade, but warm up to you if you speak to them like people – turns out, their parents know exactly where they are and are fully supportive of their adventures and creative expressions. Everyone’s motives and obstacles are real and, on some level, relatable.
The writing in Techno Banter is about rewarding you for meeting other people where they’re at. With the exception of a few distinct liars, taking everyone at face value and being flexible in your response easily gets you where you want to go, and failure to mesh with someone in a conversation is usually at least a little entertaining. Like with the special attacks, specific tactics against certain personality types, the rhetorical flow in positive or neutral conversation goes a bit more on instinct. You may not want to mock or belittle someone who is being vulnerable to you, or you may not want to be overly friendly or appeasing to someone who clearly disrespects you. It works, the writing leads to some interesting bits of dialogue and had me thinking outside of my own conversational box.
One of the tougher challenges for me was near the end, where you get the opportunity to talk down the leader of the local cult – the Golden Butterflies – who have crashed the party you’re performing at and initiates that localized apocalypse I mentioned earlier. Their whole thing is the dwindling down of the human race, stop procreating and walk hand in hand into oblivion type of ideology, which can be tough to chew through in terms of pure debate. By using some information about the cult leader you learned from a defector, you can incriminate him in betraying his own ideals, lying to his people, and emotionally bait his bodyguard into killing him. It has the twists and turns and rationalizations and denials that you’d expect and lands well as a culmination of all the conversational exercises Techno Banter puts you through.
By the time the Golden Butterflies have completed their bomb and activated it, you have one more evening to gather everyone in the neo-Berlin block that is Rainbow Drive and convince them to take shelter in the Green Door, the only spot on the street that can withstand the blast. Considering that everyone is trapped between a canal that separates them from the wealthy part of the city and a tunnel that’s lethal for pedestrians and leads to a desert, the Green Door is their only hope. It’s a satisfying inverse of the original premise, a sudden flip from protecting the club’s exclusivity to all but begging anyone and everyone you can to get inside.
Predictably, most neighbors are easy to convince, either because they believe you or they have nothing better to do. Some require a little more from you, some need to trust you, some are too busy – it’s not hard to save everyone, it just requires every quest explored, every person spoken with to the fullest extent. Some of those saved are even previously rejected clientele, who have grown as a result of their friction with you and are ready to be more agreeable.
There isn’t any punishment for not saving everyone – there are even a couple endings where you save only yourself. It’s more the reward for leaning into the ambition of Techno Banter, which is to explore through communication, and the inherent consequences of interconnectedness. The ending includes a little montage of how your actions affected everyone else, who was saved and what they went on to do, who was not saved and how they died, who escaped on their own and what they’re up to, and if you’re satisfied with how it all turned out.
At first glance, Techno Banter looked like an interesting aesthetic mess, and I love mess. The clashing art styles and character designs seemed fairly harmless, and the dialogue system was enough to get me to try it out. Even with short games like this the plot can easily be lost, but the throughline of Techno Banter stays strong – worry less about what someone looks like and focus on what they’re saying, build those bridges and help your neighbor, especially in this place where class separation is in fashion as always. It all blends into an immersive backdrop to an interesting talking sim that’s evocative of so many different types of experiences, even the misspellings somehow avoid being out of place. The narrative of Techno Banter gracefully flows through everything until it feels like the distinction between hoarding and maximalism. Even the soundtrack reinforces the nostalgic-anachronistic vibe – composed of local Berlin-based DJs, it goes from sounding like late 2000s electronica (waving to drum & bass from across the room) to modern lo-fi lyrical beats to futuristic cyberpunk ambiance. Specifically, Tschoris is immortalized in the game itself as the frequently featured artist at the Green Door, and has a lot of groovy, melodic house tracks and brighter beats that feel at home in this full spectrum kind of experience.
All of the elements of Techno Banter come together in a sort of chaotic harmony despite, or maybe thanks to, its freeform style. The developer, Dexai Arts, a small yet experienced team, made a game that’s weird and interesting, evocative of their own home and background, and cared enough to do it right. Techno Banter is a succinct and charming little package, something special for these times. It not only sells a setting and story as thoughtful and concise as the name itself, but it also – for me, at least – aroused those memories of rainy nights on a bright city street, bumping music and chatter from the clubs down the street, making my ends meet and being part of a community of gays and artists and other folks doing the same in our corner of yet another glittering capitalist city.
