Published: 1 Mar 2025
- Develop and Published by: MidBoss
- Released on: 2015
- Genres: Point-and-click Adventure, Interactive Fiction
- Rating: 1.5/5
Dropped after ~3 hours.
Played this without much knowledge outside of remembering this game being frequently mentioned alongside VA-11 HALL-A, so wasn’t sure what to expect outside of being cyberpunk-themed. The game awkwardly straddles between Visual Novel and Point-and-Click-Adventure, sprinkling a few puzzles in and offering the ‘illusion’ of adventure, while the story whisks you from A to B to C after long stretches of dialogue - voiced (a nice bonus!) but without the standard QoL features a VN comes with (boo!). Combine this with the game’s inability to decide whether you’re role-playing or just controlling a pre-defined main character, with the dialogue options lacking for the former and the lack of a character portrait built up for the latter, meant I never really felt immersed enough to properly enjoy the story and writing presented, regardless of the quality. The pixel art is nice, the music pleasing, and (against my better judgement) I liked Turing as a sidekick character - but that’s not enough to persuade me to follow it through to the end.
(The lack of autosave functionality and forgetting that fact was a real kicker too, the game does not skip through scenes well at all!)
