Read Only Memories: Neurodiver Review

Moment to moment, MidBoss’ Read Only Memories: Neurodiver is an utter joy to experience. The pixel art pops off the screen with an impressive array of colours, the stirring synth music never fails to get across the emotions of the scene whether that's cheerful or unsettling, and the cast consistently makes strong first impressions with great performances. This carries on through to the ending, which I will freely admit had me in tears with the dark secrets revealed and the questions Neurodiver asks about identity. I, as a rather slow gamer, took around eight or so hours over time to see everything the game has to offer and I enjoyed every one of those hours. I want to stress that, whatever else I think about Neurodiver, it offered me hours of a fun and interesting story with nary a moment that dragged on for too long. If anything, it went by a bit too fast.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with a short game, especially if it delivers what it sets out to in that limited time, but Neurodiver simply does not use its time well. On the one hand, the point-and-click style puzzles certainly have their moments, especially in the first half, where the solutions require a little thought and logic. In each chapter, our protagonist, ES88 (or, to her friends, Luna), must dive into a given character’s mind in order to repair their memories about a specific incident in their past. This allows for a fun mix of puzzles, where some of the objects you pick up in the character’s past are useful for dealing with events that actually occurred in their memory (typically by bringing it up in conversation with another character), whereas others are instead used to fix corrupted fractions of the memory (by interacting with the corruption and putting together the items that help to explain either what’s supposed to be there or why it’s been replaced in the subject’s head with whatever’s there instead). By the third chapter, this mix of traditional point-and-click puzzle-solving and item-mixing memory repair exists in a good balance that would appear to be ramping up in complexity. The best part, by this point, is how well these adventure game elements fit with the story, with nothing feeling tacked on.

On the other hand, these puzzles get drastically simplified from then on out, often requiring very little exploration or legwork at all. Hopefully, any player who’s made it to this point has been sucked in by the story or is very interested in seeing how old friends from MidBoss’ prior title, 2064: Read Only Memories, are doing, because it becomes genuinely hard to consider Neurodiver’s point-and-click adventure genre anything more than a coat of paint the further you get into it. Heck, even comparing the two games, 2064 is much more of a traditional point-and-click title, complete with being able to freely use almost any item with any object in the world and even getting to hear multiple thoughts on given things by clicking on them repeatedly, both being features that Neurodiver lacks.

Thankfully, those checkups with returning characters are genuinely engaging. I’ve only played a small portion of 2064 before now, in order to craft a clearer picture of what to expect from this world, but I still have to say that getting to see where TOMCAT, Turing, Jess, and Lexi are now, through the lens of a new character, is fantastic in the way that most “Where are they now?” segments at the end of stories are cathartic and comforting. I don’t get all the references — I’m sure ES88 doesn’t either — but the few people I met back in the old game seem to have grown a bit and are happier. It might be different for big fans of 2064, but I imagine getting another chance to see everyone will feel at least as nice as it does for me.

Beyond that, what’s left is what appears to be the game’s true focus: being an interesting and mind-bending visual novel. Thankfully, I love that kind of thing, as my friends would be happy to tell you. However, Neurodiver squanders its time here too. As the story goes, ES88 is working for MINERVA, a corporation that manages espers (or psychics, if you will) in Neo-San Francisco, and she’s been tasked with looking into mental attacks around the city believed to be the work of a rogue esper named Golden Butterfly. To assist ES88, she carries around the Neurodiver, a cute little squid-like manufactured esper that boosts her psychic abilities and allows her to dive into subjects’ memories, and is followed by GATE, a very strong woman (that ES88 has an equally strong and obvious crush on) essentially living in a robot body and who is tasked with protecting ES88 and the Neurodiver. There is a fun arc of ES88 working up the courage to ask GATE to spend an evening at her place (which is interestingly inside the same building as her workplace, funny that), and this side storyline runs quite well alongside the main investigative one, where ES88 consistently finds Golden Butterfly hiding out inside people’s heads and they try to mess with her, seeding doubt in her mind about MINERVA and herself.

I have no complaints about the subplot exploring GATE and ES88’s relationship because that goes to very sweet places and is well-paced throughout Neurodiver. The main mystery, which is the game’s primary focus, however, I have many complaints about. There are big questions that Neurodiver threatens to explore (which I will try to be somewhat vague about, in the interest of avoiding spoilers), like “What’s okay for a corporation, or even a person, to do to someone, even in the name of their own safety?” Others ask whether it can be forgivable to hurt someone if it is the only way for you to survive and, in a very cyberpunky way, what is the best way to deal with the parts of yourself that are struggling to heal from trauma. The issue here is that these questions are brought up right around the ending and, even though that ending can edge towards being a good kind of intense, I can’t honestly say that any of these deeply interesting questions have any sort of satisfying answer or even exploration. The closest it comes to that is how the very limited branching ending offers two different answers to that last interesting question. However, those endings are, on the whole, very similar, so while it can be nice to give Neurodiver your answer to some of these questions, those choices don’t amount to much outside of the player’s own introspection. That’s not to say the game needs to provide some sort of explicit analysis on where it stands on the issues it brings up, but rather that it would be nice to be allowed to sit with these feelings for longer than just the closing minutes.

With all that said, it may seem like Neurodiver is a greatly disappointing experience, especially since it ends long before it really has time to explore the questions it raises and the new portions of the Read Only Memories world it adds. However, as much as the story feels a tad shallow, it’s still well-told and well-presented. Maybe I’m just a sucker for the ardent love of anime and games Neurodiver wears on its sleeves with all the references and exuberant characters, but I was consistently charmed by what I saw. The writing is supremely funny and occasionally heart-wrenching while maintaining all the internal consistency of a very wacky, yet somehow still grounded anime. The voice actors’ performances were all engaging and clearly given with 100% effort, especially our heroine’s. There are even segments partway into the plot where some VAs voice Golden Butterfly in addition to their usual voices, which is a somewhat subtle and incredibly interesting decision, implying so much about how Golden Butterfly might operate and about certain aspects of their existence before they are revealed.

Other aspects of the presentation are just as high-quality, as I mentioned way back in the first paragraph. The art style simply looks incredible. Colours and shadows pop off the screen and little animations give each and every character their own feel. I love how L.U.C.Y., the earnest and slightly too eager receptionist for MINERVA, is so bouncy with her robot arms and head. Other characters, like ES88 herself or her hapless co-worker Harold, are likewise incredibly expressive, shifting their faces widely from big emotion to big emotion. To once again compare to 2064, it’s impossible to deny that, as nice and expressive as the characters were in the now-nine-year-old game, Neurodiver is an improvement on every visual front. The backgrounds are so much more detailed and filled with colour, the characters get so much more to work with, and everything is so much bigger too, inherently requiring more detail and effort. The older game certainly maintains a classic charm to its looks, but it’s pretty clear-cut to me, at least, that Neurodiver is much more a feast for the eyes.

Speaking of feasts for senses, the sound design is also amazing, perhaps even being my favourite part of the game. The sound effects, for one, are a delight. I cannot get enough of the Neurodiver’s little blorps whenever they “speak”. Then there’s the soundtrack, which I don’t even know how to begin praising. Basically all of the tracks sound great, with nary a mediocre song in the bunch and each of them absolutely offering the player good reason to just sit with a scene for a while to chill and/or stress while listening to the song play out. It’s hard to pick a favourite, since I have a bit of a bad memory for noises, but it always makes me sad to hear “Let’s Sit Together” or “Let’s Remember Together” fade out when I listen to the soundtrack altogether, so these two, so filled with a nostalgia that makes me cry a little, are probably close enough to that pedestal to count. At the same time, however, “My Instinct (Lexi’s Theme)” is such a fun theme to listen to and it helps me feel ready for just about anything. It is a serious strength of Neurodiver’s music that even I could sit here, listen to the whole soundtrack, and probably give you a mostly clear description of how each of these songs make me feel. If I were wearing a hat instead of headphones, it would be off to the composer and sound designer, Ken Syder, also known as coda.

Now, I’ve said a lot about how impressive this game’s presentation is, but I don’t want to get across that Neurodiver is all style and no substance. There is definitely a lot of style and I can honestly say that I’ve found no faults in that whatsoever, but there is substance here too. Neurodiver attempts to explore some big ideas without sacrificing an entertaining story and cast of characters. Sure, it stumbles towards the end and doesn’t spend enough time to develop its big ideas, but it can’t be said that there was no effort made. The gameplay is, likewise, very fun in a classic adventure game sense of exploring different puzzles. The issue here is that the gameplay takes a backseat for the most part at a certain point. Overall, it’s hard not to feel disappointed once it’s all over and you realise its story looks incomplete, but while you’re in the thick of it, the game is a joy to play. The ending too felt right in the moment for me, however simple it made the final puzzle, and it left me in tears. If you can let yourself be swept up by it, Read Only Memories: Neurodiver is a wild ride, even if it comes with a disappointing aftertaste.