NeuroNet: Mendax Proxy

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.

I got this game on sale and I'm glad I did. It felt a lot longer than I was expecting it to be and played like a visual novel with a number of choices that did have small impacts on many aspects of the game. I don't expect to enjoy a second play through immediately after finishing my first, but I do think it'll be fun to replay a few months from now. I finished the game once and I'm still missing a couple of characters and locations, so I know there's definitely more content for me to discover within this game. As others have stated, I'm not a huge fan of the ending, but it wasn't as disappointing as I was expecting from reading the other reviews. The ending I got just felt like it was preparing a game two that doesn't exist. The things I did really enjoy about this game were that the characters were actually very interesting and had more personality and depth than I expected, I felt like I was able to choose what type of AI I wanted to be, the story unfolded in a gradual & satisfying way, and the voice acting was fantastic. If you enjoy casual conversational visual novels, this is a great game. The gameplay never feels boring, only somewhat repetitive (due to the style of gameplay), so it's a great game to play in bursts

Really liked this. Playing as an AI was neat, and I enjoyed the story overall. The visuals and VA were pretty cool too. It's a pity it's a bit of a chore to try and go for different endings, time wise. Otherwise no complains (besides an unfortunate bug with reseting the chapter, though that's being worked on atm afaik)

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.

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

I use Arc btw