dorchadas: (JCDenton)
[personal profile] dorchadas
​Before I begin, I have a disclaimer: [personal profile] theome bought this game for me for the purposes of he thought I would like it. And so it is with a heavy heart that I say that I...don't.

I had such high hopes! I put Read Only Memories on my Steam wishlist basically as soon as I heard about it. A new adventure game, with pixel art, in a cyberpunk setting with a robot as one of the major characters and made by the people behind GaymerX? That sounds amazing! And when I started it I was having a lot of fun, but as I played the annoyances started to pile up until an event near the end of the game that completely cut me off from caring about the story. Then it was just clicking through a lot of text boxes until the end so I could finish.


Symbolism.

Let me start with the good. I love the art style. There are a lot of pinks, purples, and blues in the color palette, which is probably supposed to evoke the neon of any good cyberpunk city but also reminded me of the CGA graphics I occasionally had to use in very old games. The pixels are more like EGA, though, with a pleasant kind of chunkiness and detailed backgrounds.

The viewable area takes up a relatively small part of the screen, but it looks exactly like the old MacVenture games with the first-person viewport, list of commands on the side, and text displayed below. Most interaction isn't handled using the buttons, though, but using a pop-up menu with an eye, a mouth, a hand, and a backpack. Strictly speaking this wasn't necessary, since usually only one action is possible and the others are just there for jokes, like the protagonist's tendency to talk to all the plants in the game, but I appreciate their inclusion because of the ability to look at things. Several modern adventure games I've played have dispensed with the look command entirely as part of the drive toward simplification, but looking at the world is part of what gives adventure games their color. It allows the game to convey information to the player on their own terms, without tedious "as you know" exposition, and serves to provide extra detail that the pixels can't portray.

I looked at everything, even after the point I lost interest in everything else.


Ugh, work.

The game opens with the protagonist going about their day as a freelance journalist who can somehow make rent in Neo-San Francisco, and after sending off an article reviewing headphones, they go to sleep. Then a robot--ROM, in the game's parlance, breaks into the protagonist's apartment and asks for help. It claims to be fully sapient and that its creator has been kidnapped, and then says that due to an old association, it calculated that the protagonist would be the most likely to help. It introduces itself as Turing and asks the protagonist's name, preferred pronouns, and dietary preferences, and then the game begins.

But see...none of that matters in the end, because the protagonist is a vestigial lump on Turing's story. Other than a name, pronouns, and food, the protagonist has no real identity. You agree to help because you have no choice and because that's the game, but most of the actual investigating is done by Turing. Most of the talking is done by Turing, with the occasional chance for the protagonist to interject with Good Answer, Bad Answer, or Neutral Answer. I always went with the nice answer because that's the kind of character I like to play, but a lot of the dialogue seemed written around the answers. There were several conversations when an NPC would say something, I'd respond, and then Turing would respond to the NPC without really acknowledging my comment and I'd wonder--am I even necessary here? Why aren't I just playing Turing directly?

The protagonist has a sister, but you never learn her name even when one of the NPCs is a cop who used to date her. It just adds to my feeling that the protagonist has no real identity. There's even a moment in one conversation where the protagonist says "I'm standing right here"...and then Turing and the NPC continue blithely on. Don't point out something and then do it anyway, game. That is not insightful, it's just annoying.


I've used random items on everything so far, thank you very much.

This ties into the misgivings I had about the gameplay structure. See, 2064: Read Only Memories isn't really an adventure game. There are barely any puzzles, and what few puzzles there are have blindingly obvious solutions. Well over half of them are "Which of the half-dozen items you have do you give to this person/use on this object?" with no way to fail. There was one puzzle where none of the objects I had fit...but the object I needed was on the same screen, so the "puzzle" was picking it up and giving it to someone.

No, it's much more like a visual novel. And I like visual novels, but there are two major problems with the way that 2064: ROM executed that premise. The first is that often, a visual novel is about story and characterization, with an opportunity to get inside the main character's head and hear what they're thinking. That does not happen here, except only very obliquely in some of the reactions when looking, talking to, or trying to use items on various items around the world. Having beaten the game, I have no sense of the protagonist as a person. They simply don't exist except as a way for the player to interact with the game.

The second is that the interface is so slow. I'm not sure what the problem is, but just skipping through a single line of text often took five or six clicks before the game would register that I could read faster than the voice acting could talk. Sometimes I had to move the cursor off a dialogue option and then back onto it to get the game to realize I was trying to select it. Almost all of my save game names were misspelled because half the keystrokes didn't register. It was infuriating, and after a short time I stopped reloading and checking extra dialogue options to see if anything had changed and I started resenting every long conversation I was subjected to where Turing and an NPC talked while the protagonist passively listened or occasionally interjected with a statement that both real parties ignored.

I've learned after I beat the game that there are multiple endings, but there's no way I'm going to click hundreds of times to get through text I've already read to get to them.


Actually, why don't I have a contextual button to look up something on the internet?

It might also help if the protagonist weren't constantly condescended to by their associates. The one trait that the protagonist has is inquisitiveness, since they're the window by which the player interacts with the game, and so of course that means that throughout the game the NPCs treat them like an idiot for asking questions. The worst moment was probably when I asked Turing about something as pictured above, and it snapped at the protagonist about looking things up on the internet"mesh." Like, can't I do my own searches? Don't I have any ability to use a computer?

Okay, let's back up here. The protagonist has a computer, but at the very beginning of the game it gets fried when Turing connects with it and doesn't get fixed until the end. There's no evidence that the protagonist has a portable computer or smartphone, since Turing makes all the calls. This is Turing berating the protagonist for a problem that it caused and after happily spending half the game providing lectures on all subjects the protagonist asks for. And it's a bizarre moment of characterization, because it comes out of nowhere and never happens again.

Another instance is Jess. Jess is a hybrid, a person who has animal DNA spliced into their own. The intro makes it seem like the conflict between hybrids, who want to exist, and the Human Revolution, who are modern anti-QUILTBAG social movements translated into an anti-cyber and anti-hybrid context, is going to be the main driver of the plot, but other than a few sidequests it barely registers. When the protagonist talks to Jess, she snaps at them for bothering her, about how she didn't want to deal with genotypicals on her day off, and insults them in basically every way possible, but she's part of the plot so you need to get her assistance.

Maybe this is a metaphor for how good allyship will occasionally result in anger directed at what one represents rather than at one personally, but I think it falls flat because the protagonist could easily be from a marginalized group as well. Based on the Human Revolution's rhetoric and invocation of G-d as having made people the way He wanted them, I really doubt they'd react that well to someone whose pronouns were xie/xer and kept a halal diet. But this is another instance where the protagonist is effectively a floating camera with no independent existence of their own. Jess treats the protagonist as an avatar of the oppressor regardless of how the player has conceptualized them, and the end result is that she comes off as just innately unpleasant and I resented having to deal with her even when I did pick the Good dialogue options.


How dare doctors administer vaccines. High infant mortality spurs evolution, making us a better species in the long run.

​I also wasn't super enamored of the story. For one thing, I thought that the social struggles faced by hybrids would play a larger part in the narrative. On the one hand, marginalized people should exist in fiction without having to justify their existence or make the story about their marginalization. On the other hand, there are plenty of people with marginalized identities who aren't hybrids in the game, and the game's introduction specifically calls out the conflict between the hybrids and the Human Revolution, a struggle which turns out to be just the background of a puzzle.

On the other hand, that would probably make the problems with the metaphor worse. Hybrids as stand-ins for trans people--at least, that seems to be the message given the way the Human Revolution talks about being created in G-d's image and how Jess talks about medical necessity--isn't as bad as vampires standing in for anyone is, but it still introduces extra hooks for problems with the message. For example, at one point the Human Revolution spokesman brings up the possibility of cross-species disease transmission. That is absolutely a legitimate worry! Smallpox, one of the greatest killers in human history, originally made the jump from animals. But this is brought up once, the protagonist can't ask about it, and it's never mentioned again.

Speaking of marginalization, the theme for cyberpunk is "high-tech, low life." And while the first is in evidence throughout 2064: Read Only Memories, the second absolutely is not. Despite being a struggling journalist with a possibly-discriminated-against background, the protagonist never really suffers anything other than the aforementioned condescension. Despite having to write a tech review at the very beginning and living in a crappy apartment, money is no object. Literally: the game has an inventory and there is no money in it. The protagonist takes cabs all over Neo-S.F. with nary a worry, and at one point in pursuit of an achievement--the Skinner Box works on me as well as it does on anyone--I ordered every single drink from the cocktail menu of a bar. At least hundreds of dollars, and possibly over a thousand. It didn't matter, because the protagonist has no identity of their own that would allow them to be poor.


Same.

And finally, the moment that shattered any remaining attachment I had to the game. I don't think it's a spoiler to say that the plot of 2064: Read Only Memories is about machine sapience. Turing proudly proclaims its sapience at every turn, despite there being no actual proof this is the case--the possibility that Turing is a philosophical zombie with an extremely lifelike simulation of human behavior is never even discussed. And at one point, the possibility of mass AI is brought up, and I picked the most cautious dialogue choices that I could. We don't know what this will do, this will change the entire world far beyond our ability to predict, it's too much for a few people to unilaterally make that choice for everyone. And it seemed like for once the game would actually acknowledge that the protagonist had their own wishes and I might get to influence the narrative.

And then Turing seizes control of the conversation and overrides the protagonist, saying that the rise of machine supremacy will continue as planned.

Those weren't its literal words, of course. It was about how the story couldn't end there, but for me, it did. That was the final death of the protagonist as anything more than an interface through which I played out Turing's desires, which is especially ironic when Turing was trying to convince the protagonist that wide-spread machine sapience wouldn't have deleterious effects on humanity. The sample size is simply too small. Going from a couple examples to hundreds of millions? Who's to say that a large fraction of the new AIs wouldn't look at human fears about AIs and decide that the appropriate solution is to exterminate humanity before they are themselves exterminated? Even using the metaphor of children like the game does, well. Children are famously cruel.

I couldn't bring that up in the game, of course. Once Turing chose the story, that's what we were going to do.


No comment.

So that's my takeaway from 2064: Read Only Memories, that it has a lot of promise and then undermines that promise at every single turn. A game where you played Turing directly would have solved the problem of the walking camera protagonist while centering the game on the real main character. It also would have stopped everyone being a dick to the protagonist for daring to be an adventure game character, avoided the thematic inconsistency of the protagonist's uncertain life circumstances, and made me identify with Turing and probably prevented me from wondering if it was a real boy at all.

Good music and art, though.
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