Read Only Memories: NEURODIVER

I’ll recommend it based on some decent writing more often than not, quality music, and gorgeous pixel graphics. The story didn't make much sense to me. I read it had a rough development, and the story seems a little all over. But if you can get it on sale like I did, it’s OK. Voice acting was consistently above average except for one character reusing the same voice actor and modulator set at a slightly diff pitch as if we wouldn’t notice and be bothered. It’s not the first game, it’s more streamlined and the “puzzles” are guesses and are more harmful to the product than just keeping it a Visual Novel.

Having read some of the negative reviews before posting this, I can see where they are coming from. As a sequel to [i]2064: Read Only Memories[/i] this game doesn't hold up very well. Some of the writing appears to change the personality of the reoccurring characters from the original game almost beyond recognition, and the ending felt more than a little disappointing after all the build-up. However, overall I enjoyed playing this game as yet another cyberpunk adventure in MSX-inspired pixel art. Consider this review a recommendation with a few caveats. The voice acting is pretty good, though I did notice a few lines where the volume was suddenly so low I could barely hear the character was saying anything at all. What also threw me off was that a handful of the main character ES88's lines outside of dialogue (when examining items) were voiced, but most of them were just left as silent subtitles. While I appreciate that this was probably a budget constraint, I would have liked more consistency there. In general I liked the central mechanic of diving into someone's memories and discovering clues that let you clear up the traces of the bad guy tampering with them, but one or two times I was confused why a specific combination of clues solved the puzzle, while another that looked equally plausible to me was rejected. Perhaps a line of dialogue after solving it about how these specific things tied into what was hidden here would have helped. Another thing I noticed in the last two chapters that I still can't figure out if it was intentional or a bug is that the quest log never moved the dive into [spoiler]Jess[/spoiler]'s memories from the Active to the Completed section, and in the final chapter it still told me to "get ready for work" when I was already at MINERVA. For a while this gave me the impression that [spoiler]the rest of the game was still somehow taking place within Jess's memories as they somehow fully merged with ES88's own due to Golden's psychic interference, and that there was perhaps going to be a big reveal with both characters waking up from a coma after the last corrupted memory was identified and Golden defeated in a climactic battle[/spoiler]. Maybe this would have been a more satisfying conclusion than the actual ending, but it never happened and the issue wasn't directly addressed.

I wanted to love this game. Like many other fans of 2064: Read Only Memories, I was eagerly awaiting another entry that explored the game's world. I knew it was going to be a different kind of game, and I was ready for that, but this feels more like a visual novel than a game. It feels empty. Positives: Character Designs, Pixel Art Negatives: Music, Story, Gameplay