I first played 2064: Read Only Memories in 2020, after purchasing a Racial Justice bundle on itch.io in the early days of the pandemic. I’ve always had a soft spot for indies, especially because they were often the only games that would run on my shitty Macbook. A dive into the hundreds of games included in this bundle brought me to Read Only Memories, whose cyberpunk pixel art aesthetic and sci-fi setting quickly sucked me in.
The first Read Only Memories was a real trip. You played a struggling journalist in Neo San Francisco who wakes up to find a ROM – a robot with artificial intelligence – named Turing in your tiny apartment, and the two of you band together to help find his kidnapped creator. The game’s strength is in the relationship you build with Turing alongside its well-written cast of characters. The things you choose to do and say affect the way Turing views the world, and therefore, the game’s ending. I was struck by the amount of heart, and its attempt to portray discrimination and diversity that isn’t too far removed from our own world.
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I’ve been anticipating Read Only Memories: Neurodiver ever since, and from the demo build I played, it seems like we’ll be getting something similar, but also very different. The first thing that struck me was the subtle change in art style: I was immediately taken by the increased amount of detail rendered in backgrounds and characters. Neurodiver also leans harder into the vaporwave aesthetic, with bright neon accents everywhere and a more pastel colour palette.
The biggest change however, is the game’s central mechanic. Most of 2064 involved going to places and talking to people, making it more of a visual novel than a typical adventure game, but that’s not a problem for me – plus, its storyline and characters were compelling enough to carry me through. Neurodiver, though, seems to be more hands-on. In the sequel, you play as ES88, an ‘esper’ with telepathic abilities who must attempt to capture a psychic entity that is hiding in the memories of others. In this demo build, you’re just trying to help your colleague remember his password so he can log in to his computer.
You’re accompanied by a Neurodiver, a bioengineered purely synthetic esper – the first of its kind. It helps to boost your natural ESP abilities and collect clues and thoughts in the memories of the people you investigate. In this case, that’s your coworker. The Neurodiver attaches to his arm, and you’re inside his memory of his desk from a year ago, but a giant terrifying creature is obscuring his screen.
You recognise it immediately as memory damage, likely inflicted by some sort of psychic attack. With his help, you collect clues about what he could have included in his password. There’s a sticker on the side of his desk that could be a clue. He named his plant but insists that he wouldn’t have put his plant in his password, so that’s a bust. You rifle through his drawer for extra clues and put all of them aside. Combining them according to common themes helps repair memory damage and reveal what he changed his password to on that fateful day.
The short preview mostly helped to illuminate the new gameplay mechanics, but I’m already sold. With more puzzle-solving opportunities placed at your feet and more of a focus on gameplay, the sequel has a decent shot at elevating itself over the first game. I can’t wait to see if it does.
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