Neo San Francisco is a place where people are accepted for who they are and who they want to become, even if that means some pretty extreme body augmentation. Of course, as we saw in 2064: Read Only Memories, there are limits to this, with that game featuring a murder mystery where animalistic body mods were discriminated against and giant corporations engaged in seriously shady dealings. Read Only Memories: Neurodiver takes us back to Neo San Francisco and gives us another lens through which to view this world.
The preview demo we had access to for Read Only Memories: Neurodiver placed us in Chapter 3 of the game where we are introduced to one of the main characters Luna, codename ES88. Luna is an ESPer, a psychic, and she is the only ESPer who has been permitted to have a Neurodiver.
You may expect a Neurodiver to be some kind of machine, but it isn’t. A Neurodiver is a creature that can deepen an ESPers connection with a person’s memory, helping to uncover various details. This technology is proprietary of MINERVA, the scientific organisation of which Luna is also an employee, and a pretty important one at that. It is not just Luna and Neurodiver against the world though. Backing her is GATE, essentially a bodyguard for both Luna and Neurodiver, and there is also TRACE who works as intelligence, and Fortuna, the head of MINERVA.
Read Only Memories: Neurodiver is a point and click adventure at its heart, with items that are collected related to specific memories. One of the early memory dives is to help a fellow staff member, Harold, remember his password. To do this you can look around his desk first and find various items for clues amongst them. Once you have all the items you need, you can tackle the anomaly in the person’s memory by selecting the correct clues to clear things up for them and help them remember what they need.
Forgetting a password seems innocuous enough, but this is just the start of Luna’s confrontation with a rogue ESPer known as the Golden Butterfly. What we know from the demo of Read Only Memories: Neurodiver is that Golden Butterfly is invading people’s memories and removing key parts of them.
Fortuna puts Luna on the mission to find the Golden Butterfly and deal with them. Along the way you make choices through the conversations you have with the different characters, from low impact choices to big ones that will have major consequences. For example, do you listen to your boss and carry out an order, even if it is not part of the operational guidelines, or do you defy them and not alter someone’s memory? That is just one of the choices that you will be faced with, and some of these decisions could be harder to make, especially if you have played 2064: Read Only Memories where you got to know some of these characters.
Read Only Memories: Neurodiver looks to carry on the themes of its predecessor, posing tough choices that will question your morals. The writing is solid as is the voice acting of the cast, though not every line is acted. The story has promise and if the writing stays strong MidBoss will have a thought provoking game on its hands.
