Inception-like mystery adventure
Read Only Memories: NEURODIVER is a premium adventure game from MidBoss. This mystery experience lets you follow ES88, a psychic detective chasing a rogue known as the Golden Butterfly. Using the titular Neurodiver, you enter people’s memories, solve puzzles, and find clues as to where the rogue esper is.
Set in the world of 2064: Read Only Memories, Read Only Memories: NEURODIVER is an immersive game with a visual style reminiscent of early 90s anime, complete with a familiar cast of characters. Its cyberpunk world of Neo-San Francisco can easily be mistaken for that of Cyberpunk 2077.
Find the Golden Butterfly
From the outset, Read Only Memories: NEURODIVER feels like a video game version of works like Inception or Paprika. It brings the player back to the cyberpunk location of Neo-San Francisco originally introduced in 2064. This shared universe also brings familiar characters such as the bio-engineered attorney Jess Meas or the hacker TOMCAT. Despite these shared elements, however, Neurodiver offers an original story and new gameplay mechanics.
The mystery game is brought to life in a visual novel style, with puzzle-solving elements at every turn. You enter the memories of other people and try to restore fragments of their minds. Everything you do brings you closer to the Golden Butterfly, whoever or whatever it may be. This premise and gameplay style work well with retro visuals and matching soundtracks to bring that 80s to 90s synth-wave vibes.
With a committed aesthetic and superb writing, the only thing that’s not up to the same standard is its difficulty. If 2064 is any indication, the difficulty of the puzzles is not designed to keep you for hours. They only work as short distractions as you progress the story, which, by the way, can lead you to one of its multiple endings.
Heavy on story, light on puzzles
Overall, Read Only Memories NEURODIVER is a worthy title to share the Read Only Memories universe. Its aesthetics, in terms of graphics and sounds, bring you back to a stylized retro imagining of a cyberpunk future. The gameplay branches out into different endings, linked from one page to another through the use of stagnating puzzles. Not too challenging, but definitely worth a playthrough.
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