Synergia Review – Blurred Lines And Robotic Hearts

Sunday, April 7, 2024

Genre – Cyberpunk, Dystopia, Romance Play Time – 5 hours Developer – RadiArt Steam VNDB

Are These Feelings Real?

Dealing with romantic emotions can be a difficult and this is doubly so when the entire world seems to reject what you are experiencing. Such is the situation Cila finds herself in when she develops feelings for the mysterious android Mara as the powers in the shadows will not allow their happiness to last. Synergia is an extended exploration of this pair’s relationship through a mixture of mechanophilia, yuri and dystopia. The result is a case study of their identities which grounds them within a sense of place many longer games can not match. Move outside of this core bubble and the cracks begin to show with the secondary cast lacking proper development and certain plot elements having little substance. However, is this inconsistency enough to undermine the strong foundations of the core relationship and the ideas it explores? Let’s get lost in the neon lights and find out.

Mechanical Love – Narrative and Themes

No matter how small an element might be, everything returns to being about the romance between the two leads. In making their relationship such a cornerstone of the narrative it forces the player to see the world through the lens of their emotions. Synergia is very much a title which wants people to engage with it on an immediate and visceral level. It puts a lot of effort into placing the player inside the head space of Cila by putting them into her perspective and dragging out the contradiction between her work and her own feelings. This tension is a core part of the underlying momentum that the story uses to keep the slow pacing from causing players to lose interest through the promise of what will happen when she eventually choose what she values. Prospects for the pairs future together are initially presented as bleak given how their world’s views on romance between human and machines. Here Synergia draws parallels between real world discrimination over who it is correct for a person to be able to love, with the most noticeable being the treatment of homosexuality especially since the pair are both female. Through this the narrative can present grounded themes and ideas about the subject without spelling it out in a way that insults the player’s intelligence and adds something solid to all the emotions they have been immersed in. Drawing these elements into a whole allows the game to offer something for every part of the player’s mind to engage with from the emotional to the intellectual and this ensures even after they put it down they will still think about it.

From their first meeting Cila and Mara's relationship is the core of the narrative

Acting as the backbone supporting this focus around the main romance is a strong sense of place within the decay of this cyberpunk dystopia. While we are never given a complete picture of the state this city is in, there is never any doubt this is a civilisation long past its prime with its ailing emperor and oppressive government. It sits on the edge of collapsing into nothing as it totters along and yet it still have teeth to bear against those who stand to oppose its beliefs. In many ways it is a perfect reflection of Cila’s own internal psyche as she remains trapped in the past and slowly rots away in the life she finds herself consigned to walk. Without Mara’s arrival she would probably have sat forever in that pit and so overcoming and moving on from the city which has constrained her acts as both as a literal and metaphorical escape from her own prison. Beyond this metaphor the world works as means to explain why people act the way they do and create a thick atmosphere of melancholy to contrast with the moments of happiness between the two leads. Leaning into this emotional representation of a lived in place gives an intimate feeling to the player’s time there as it offers an easy to grasp idea of place in a way they can draw parallels with their own experiences.

The setting is a wonderful mix of concrete and vague

When everything is so heavily focused on a single narrative and emotional direction, it makes the parts which go against this route stand out in a distracting manner. For Synergia this takes the form of Cila’s past and in particular her nature as a Daughter of Velta who was created from an artificial womb. This is used to explain Cila’s ability to heal from injuries faster than normal, but does not tie well into the otherwise machine facing narrative nor does it add anything meaningful to her dynamic with Mara since that role is already taken up with Cila’s past love for another android. It is brought up out of nowhere and is dismissed equally as fast creating a sense of whiplash where the smooth tonal flow and pacing of the game is broken abruptly. The only place where is take the spotlight as the core element of the plot is in the second ending where all previously established ideas take a backseat including Mara. However, nothing revealed during this ending is of any real consequence and it mostly just spins its wheels until events beyond Cila’s control allow her move on with the plot. It does not help that Cila has already come to terms with her origins and so lacks any character arc related to them leading to an absence of dramatic tension. The absence of Mara or events relating to her means this ending struggles to justify its existence in a visual novel so focused around Cila and Mara’s relationship. This leaves Cila’s creation feel like an odd inclusion which could have been written out and takes up space that could have been better utilised to expand on side characters or other themes.

Of Man And Machine – Characters

Above all other characters stand Cila and Mara, it is their individual characters and the dynamic they share which create the game’s compelling hook. Cila is our protagonist and point of view character and she makes for an interesting choice to narrate this journey. She is at once deeply involved in this world through her job and her past, yet detached as she merely meanders through her life without making any meaningful connections. Despite this she never comes across as cynical, she knows how unfair the world can be but even in the face of this harsh reality she can never quite give up on the feels which have defined her. As such Mara makes for the perfect contrast to Cila. As a bubbling ball of curiosity and smiles, Mara acts as an excuse to have the world explained to the player and to communicate just how sheltered she has been from reality. There is an innocence to her actions which disarms Cila and gets her to open up to Mara, but at the same time she not without her own intentions and desires to drive her. For Cila, Mara is a rudder to guide her life towards some kind of future and help her understand her own emotions. This creates an unbalance in their relationship with Mara being the driving force and Cila being dragged along behind and plays into their dynamic for the eventual pay off to their relationship.

Yoko is by far the most developed secondary character

With so much of Synergia’s short duration focused on Cila and Mara, there is a distinct lack of development and engagement with the secondary cast. Each is given just enough time to provide them some basic substance and fulfil their plot function before they are cast aside never to change again. As you can imagine this makes them feel quite hollow and it detracts from the concrete sense of place the game sets up by making its inhabitants lack a feeling of humanity. Take Yoko, the most prominent of the side characters and the closest thing Cila has to a friend. Initially she is involved in events quite extensively since she is the person who gives Mara to Cila and know the truth about Mara’s existence. However, after a while she just drops out of existence and only reappears in the climax as means to provide a means of escalating the conflict. Yoko’s motivations are not explored in any detail and end up being boiled down to a simple hatred of the empire which create a flat feeling character. The developers do try to correct this through the later released epilogue Sunrise and this does do a good job of exploring her motives and humanity. It is just a shame that this does not apply to the rest of the secondary cast who never escape their lack of screen time.

Our Grimy Dystopia – Visual, Audio and Technical

The title’s relatively low budget is clear to see in its lack of the bells and whistles found in larger visual novels. However, this is not something the player will notice in the moment as Synergia knows how to milk every drop from what it does have available. Each part of the visuals and audio works to push a specific sense of what this dystopia is like to live in and the emotional mood of the characters. This manifests as stripes of striking colour in an otherwise dark and muted landscape, their beauty a fleeting reminder of the happy moments of people’s lives and the grim reality which surrounds them. Even at its brightest the colours are always muted as if smothered by the smog of the city’s factories and it adds an almost dreamlike quality to the intimate moments between the cast. The music adds to these vague feelings through its synth tones and it conveys a world of technological brilliance coated in a thick layer of soot out of which only glimpses of what came before can be seen. It leans heavily into promoting this atmosphere to the point that even outside of the context of the game the audio sells the experience of playing it and the fragile mix of oppression and hope it represents.

Strong and muted colours define the identity of Synergia

Conclusion

Cyberpunk is a genre which has gone relatively unexplored in visual novels, but Synergia provides a compelling case for why more games should make use of it. The wonderfully all consuming romance between Cila and Mara makes for a space where the themes and ideas can be explored freely. Supporting this is a sense of place which paints a bleak picture of the pairs prospects and yet feels alive in its own unique way. It also helps the narrative to have Cila and Mara be such strong personalities with their dynamic being a selling point for the game as a whole. Making sure these parts for a cohesive is the visual and audio which present a vision of this world and its characters without saying a word.