Read Only Memories: Neurodiver Review on Xbox
Read Only Memories: Neurodiver is a story-rich adventure and the sequel to 2064: Read Only Memories. Explore the rich world with an intuitive point-and-click interface as you take on the role of a young psychic agent tasked with tracking.
The premise is you take control of ES88, a young esper employed by MINERVA, and has been tasked with tracking down Golden Butterfly, a mysterious psychic entity hiding in and fragmenting the memories of Neo-San Francisco's citizens..
The game boasts anime inspired art, retro FM synth music, intriguing characters and an intriguing story, within 5 episodes to get to grips with, and two endings.
Accessibility
With regards to accessibility, there is no button re-mapping, subtitle or cursor sensitivity options. With regards to visual settings, and Sound options are equally limited, so should you have sound, movement and eye sight issues, this game would not be for you.
Gameplay
The sequel to 2064: Read Only Memories, the new game allows players to take on a new characters development and return to Neo San Fran. For new players like myself, this is an introduction to the franchise and what it stands for.
You take control of Luna Cruz de la Vega or ES88 for short, a young lady who is a manga fan at heart. She is also a Esper agent, for the information company called MINERVA. She and other Esper agents are psychics able to read people’s minds, but uniquely she is the only one bonded with a biological device called a Neurodiver.
This biological companion augments the physic allow them to fix peoples minds whom have lost memories. Accompanied by her bodyguard GATE, a battle droid lady who incidentally Luna has a crush on, they solve a variety of missions for the corporation, as a terrorist attack is soon revealed.
Set in a cyberpunk future, with sentient robots, and where people augment themselves not with technology but by spliced animal DNA, the world showcased, is unique and intriguing. This is for all its intent, a narrative based point and click adventure, that’s aim is to tell a compelling story wrapped in some simple puzzle like mechanics.
From the begging tutorial level, you will notice there is no hand holding and everything is about listening to the conversations carefully and studying the world around you to move the story along. Due to the actions of the terrorist, delving into the inhabitants of Neo San Frans minds become the norm in a bid to resolve scrambled and damaged memories and get to the heart of the what is really going on. As you make your way through the story, you will often have conversations with colleagues and residents alike, and each of these will often provide you with various dialogue options, though from my testing, they don’t change the stories outcome, except for one choice at the end which I wont spoil.
The moment you start to dive into residents memories the game moves more from a narrative based experience, to a puzzle based one. You will explore moments that are more of a grey area and in doing so you’ll encounter corrupted fragments that need repairing. First you learn a bit more about the subject in the real world to get to understand what drives them, then you dive into the physic world of their memories. Here is where you will encounter those fragmented memories normally overlayed with something that is personal to the individual.
To restore the connection, you do this is by finding related objects around the area or surrounding areas, which gets dropped into your inventory and at the fragmented area, placed in a holding area, in which if correct placed, will restore the truth. What starts off as helping find someone’s forgotten passwords, by learning about their hobbies, soon grows into a more complex and intriguing missions with interesting characters that often showcasing some moral compass depending on the memory that’s corrupted.
The game story is what keeps the whole gameplay mechanic together as you start to endear yourself to Luna, Gate and the Neurodiver in this futuristic world.
Graphics
The games pixel art is lovingly colourful and detailed and very much reminds me to Hideo Kojima’s Snatcher in terms of it’s style.
Landscape and character models ooze style and an almost comforting experience, that entice you to explore them carefully in abid to progress the story. The pixelated backgrounds vary from bars, cafes, trains and offices which all showcase of the charming world you are inhabiting. What surprised me was the colour pallet on use, as everything is bright wonderful and bubbly, unlike most cyberpunk worlds currently on offer. It was a refreshing change that I definitely could do more off.
The control system was pretty smooth, and moving the cursor around was as simple as moving the left thumbstick, whilst your button pressing engaged or disengaged with the world around. Dragging items into the storage area to solve puzzles, was also a pretty simple task.
Sound
The game is 90% voiced with the main story aspects of the game lovingly told by the voice actors engaging work. You can tell that each actor brings a unique and fun take on their characters and this translates to a more light-hearted experience as you explore. Luca voice actress, Daisy Guevara, makes the role her own that really sold the characters incredibly awkward, and sometimes naive outlook, whilst also showing of her hugely nerdy side whenever retro anime is mentioned. When the story can to a close, I felt a strong connection with the character and her struggles.
However, there was a bit of disappointment that it wasn’t fully voiced as areas which the game deems irrelevant, say a tree, house plant or random NPC, is told solely by subtitle. This can be a bit jarring at first as you come of hearing Luca describe a particular object to saying nothing when you click on an irrelevant item. Maybe this is a bug or intention, I cannot tell, either way it would be better if this could be solely all voicework to stop that broken experience. Another issues was voicework would sometimes, fade out or reduce in volume part way through the sentence which whilst wasn’t often again broke the experience.
With regards to the music, these are small noticeable sound bites at the end of each episode, and none in the main game, of if there is, its so quiet that it was barely noticeable to my ears. The game prefers to focus more on the voicework and in-world actions like picking, placing and engaging with world items.
In terms of recommendation, a soundbar will be sufficient in engaging with voicework on offer.
Verdict
This leads me onto the rating of the game:-
Now I rate games in order of, avoid, on sale, great purchase and must own. My rating for Read Only Memories: Neurodiver is a "Great Purchase’’.
The game itself is an enjoyable, but it a bit short narrative based point and click adventure. The story is by far the best part, followed by the voicework which is exactly what you need in such a game as this.
The game is currently priced on Xbox at £12.79 or approx. $15 and depending on skill and patience would give you well over 4+ hours worth of gameplay. Combine this with two different endings, you could add another hour to the mix depending on where you save.
I haven’t played the franchise before and whilst it has some issues, there was nothing here not to enjoy and spend an afternoon engaging with. Puzzles was right amount of complexity, with the story and ending itself being the real stealer of the show.