NeuroNet: Mendax Proxy

this game has a nicely written story and the art is done well too. i like how human the charackters are and how relateable their reactions are. and the voice actors have done a good job voicing every single line of dialog too. the little reaction comments you get after some events and especially those at the end of a chapter are well done and a nice touch. it's also nice that you can reset a chapter and fix the bad decisions you have made. though i suggest going easy on the resets as the game doesn't fully track which events you already went through in a previous chapter and that can break the immersion. though as a measure of replayability the events are randomly pulled from a pool of possible events/problems, so actually getting the same problem again is a matter of luck. or dedication, as you can learn and memorize fairly fast if you keep resetting. though resetting after 50+ events feels rather tedious, so i really advice to only use reset when you really mess up. it's a good thing that you get many more events than needed, enough to max out at least two or three of the four stats each chapter, so mistakes are easily forgiven. perfect play is not required to beat the game! i'm still only at chapter 4 but i can clearly say, this game was worth buying! well, i already knew that from the demo i got to play months ago, but the full game really delivers a nice story. my final score would be around 8.5/10. (the missing points mostly being the lack of full event tracking. i have no noteworthy complains beyond that)

Everyone that's ever played Reigns, a mobile game, knows how this goes. It's a visual novel. In this case you're an AI and during the course of the the game you constantly making choices having to pick between two options every time. The choices you make, change some side stories, possibly the ending and 4 parameters of how well you're doing. The 4 parameters represent money, people/happiness, security and power. If one of these ever goes to zero, you lose... Or so I'm told as the game is so easy that it's almost impossible to lose unless you're doing it willingly. I like visual novels and the main thing that attracted me here is the audiovisual aspect. The art is very nice and stylistic and I like that the characters aren't completely static. They move a little making them seem more like living breathing humans. They are also all fully voiced in English. Those things are rare for visual novels. I also liked the idea of being an AI that makes choices that shape the city it controls. I wasn't disappointed in the story. I liked how the characters, stories and side stories are written. While the characters aren't very deep they're not stereotypes either. However, for a game that's all about making choices, those choices felt mostly meaningless in the end. Far too often my choices felt in vain as the story would end up the same way anyway. The 4 parameters I mentioned before don't seem to influence anything either. Technically there are different endings but they consist of just a few vague lines of text that don't explain much. Whatever you do, you're basically left wondering what influence all of it had. If you'd take a look at my achievements you'll notice there are many achievements I didn't unlock in my one play-through. So yes, objectively on paper your choices do matter and your play-through is probably different than mine. I can only say those differences all felt very shallow. A thumbs down feels too harsh but I can't wholeheartedly recommend it either. I'm intrigued enough that I want to check out what this developer makes next.

Really enjoying my time with this game so far, glad I bought this

Game got me hooked on my first playthrough that I finished the game on one sitting! But sadly on my second playthrough I realized that the game doesn't really have meaningful choices besides at the end where it will change the ending slightly. It's still a good game if you're not too worried about illusion of choice

Recommending this game is hard to do. Its dialogue and choice system is a simple binary choice, that sometimes holds deeper choices, but often not. Frequently, when you play the game, you can only around half the time intuit what your choice will do. This game also has the unfortunate problem of setting up a more interesting sequel. However, with all of these reservations, I do still recommend this game. Just get it on a sale though.

A quick game but an interesting one, worth buying on sale.

Okay I'm an AI for a couple hours, but what happens in the end, why cliffhanger?

Was enjoying it well enough until I started to run into a repeated issue. After some scenes the game would not load the next scenario. Quitting to main menu and loading back in seemed to fix it, just with the annoyance of getting repeated events (even events from previous acts, which seems like there should be something to prevent that since we've already seen those results in the feed). Then in act 4 it kept locking after Kyros asks about data leaks. Doing the main menu thing got me locked on the same spot, after going through dozens of repeated scenarios. So I decided to try quitting the game to desktop and loading back in. This apparently was the worst thing to do because it loaded my game on a black screen and didn't do anything. So I reset the act and soon after got soft-locked on a different spot. Will give the game a break for now. The only other major complaint I have is that we are not given the proper information to make a lot of these choices. In game as the city's AI, Arc would have context behind their choices. They have access to an enormous amount of information and the capabilities and processing power to go through that information and make informed decisions instantly. We as the player, do not. So getting a choice like "have the ambulance take the shorter route that has high traffic" vs "take the longer route that is clear", only to be penalized for taking the longer route because apparently we can reroute traffic on the shorter one - when we are never told that's something we could do and just have to guess at that -is a little silly. Or when we're asked about what to do with neuronet security breaches and we get the choice "neuronet mapping" or " security 'thought'". I had no idea what either or those entailed and only after choosing one, did it explain what it would do. Of course, unless you want to restart the whole act (which seem to get longer as the acts go on), you just have to live with the results of the uninformed choice you just made. Makes playing feel bad at times. Finally and this is just a sort of fear of mine based on the game images and trailers: I don't like where things seem to be heading with Elemai. The girl is sick with something incurable and doesn't have long to live. But because we see the image of a digital little girl, the game logo of a Elemai hooked up to a huge machine, and the trailer where Elemai is digitized and talking about other people's memories, I fear she's going to die and the mom is going to clone a copy of her into Arc. Probably makes for a good story but I hope that doesn't take away any individualism from Arc. I would like to continue to play as this self aware AI and not some little girl. If she's a different program though and we can be pals then that's cool. It's mostly the bug that tips this towards not recommended. Even if you enjoy the game, if you run into the bug you can quickly find yourself burnt out from restarting or just hardlocked out of progressing entirely. I will say though, the problems seemed to arise when I restarted the game and restarted acts. Maybe a normal save system would've prevent this.

Absolutely enthralling cyberpunk psychological exploration. It won't hold up for a second playthrough IMO, but that first playthrough was absolutely worth the price. I couldn't stop. I nearly the played the entire game in one sitting. The only weakpoint is the core story's ending. It's too abrupt and too bitter. It needed more room to breathe, and especially if you manage to help out on all the threads the story offers, there should be a more positive mood to the outcome. But I thoroughly enjoyed the 5ish hours leading up to that ending, and it's very much immersive, keeping engaged in the moment-to-moment events. Really it has dozens of little narrative arcs, each with satisfying pay offs. Kinda like CP 2077, the sidequests are better than the main story, but still absolutely worth the price of admission. Recommended because it absolutely enthralled me despite a lackluster finish. Flopped over the finish line, but I LOVED the race.

A really fun experience, good writing and visuals, and an interesting story to hook you up. I'd love to see more from this world, from these characters, but with how short the experience is, I hesitate to advise getting it at full price. A 10/15% discount would be more reasonable. 8/10 for me.