Preview | Read Only Memories: Neurodiver - Making Ruthlessly Delving Into Memories Of The Past Fun Instead Of Traumatic!
Read Only Memories: Neurodiver boldly asks the question: What if your memories had the stability of a modern AAA game, but could be accessed and ‘fixed’ at will? And also, what if every character was blatantly designed to look queer as hell?
Okay, there’s more to it than that, I promise. Neurodiver puts you in the shoes of Luna, a.k.a ES88, a psychic Esper capable of looking into the minds of others. Espers’ abilities have eventually led to the creation of the eponymous Neurodiver, an adorable crustacean-looking creature who speaks only through ‘Blorp’ noises and can itself reach into memory banks to ensure that a person’s perceived reality in their memories actually lines up with the objective reality of what happened. With their powers combined, Luna and the Neurodiver hope to offset neurological conditions such as Alzheimer’s and help people remember the things and people near and dear to them. It’s a unique and heartfelt premise, and Neurodiver’s thoughtful writing is full of kindness and levity that backs up these complex themes.
Being a point-and-click visual novel, Neurodiver’s focus isn’t particularly on gameplay, instead the game focuses on interactions between the many characters you’ll find across the MINERVA corporation Luna works for. There’s a certain awkward charm to every character, and I mean that in the best way possible; Luna will nerd out over the long-running Magical Commander Yukino (or, the future’s Sailor Moon) with an engineer who’s just happy to speak about his special interest in one scene, and then stumble over her words in a flustered gay panic when asked out by her Neurodiving partner GATE in another scene. Daisy Guevara’s performance of Luna stands out as the highlight of the voice acting on show - while every performance I’ve heard so far has been great, Daisy injects Luna with absolutely infectious passion, joy and a touch of social awkwardness.
A lot of the game’s comedic beats actually hit their mark too, avoiding the unfortunately common trapping of visual novels that are sometimes trying to be a little too funny for their own good. There’s an appreciable attempt here to write these characters as flawed; not in the grand sense of having a fatal hamartia that haunts them at every step, but instead as twenty-somethings just attempting to do their best at work every day. It’s touching in a very postmodern way.
However, despite not being the focus, there is still some great gameplay to be found in Neurodiver. Luna’s ability to delve into broken memories and fix them translates into being presented with a scene from the past, using some simple detective work to figure out what’s broken and how to resolve it. These imperfections manifest as Memory Fragments – abstract errors found in these scenes that absolutely should not be there. Neurodiver tasks you with looking around the environment to find items that are tangentially related to the fragment. For example, with a fragment that appears as a physical manifestation of a skull-visaged anime character, you’ll have to ‘attach’ a poster of said character to the skull in order to defragment it. Essentially, it makes a game out of the mental torture of trying to manually connect the neural pathways in your head to remember something important to you, with effectively cathartic results; even something as mundane as helping the aforementioned engineer remember his work password becomes an engaging task of connecting the dots.
Neurodiver also looks and sounds fantastic; its style draws inspiration from anime of the 80s and 90s, blending colourful, distinct characters with its vibrant cyberpunk setting to create a striking style. Special mention goes to the designs of Luna and GATE, who are some of the most evidently and beautifully sapphic designs I’ve seen in a while, as well as the sheer amount of detail in every memory scene Luna finds herself in. As for audio, Neurodiver states itself to be paying homage to the soundscapes of FM sound chips used in consoles such as the Sega Genesis. There’s plenty of truth to this, as the soundtrack takes the contemporary style of visual novel soundtracks - full of chilled, welcoming melodies and bass to settle you into each environment - and transports it back a few decades to create a sound that could absolutely pass for a production of the time.
Even just speaking to the brief few hours I’ve experienced for this preview, Read Only Memories: Neurodiver is looking to be a standout visual novel sitting amongst the VA11-HALLAs of the world. It’s only about a month away, so you won’t have to wait long to interact with the Neurodiver themselves and love them as much as Luna does – they’re just a little guy!
