Review grubmaiden 5/5 · Apr 5, 2026
After a lot of time putting it off, I've finally finished this game after waiting a good year before actually getting past the prologue! In spite of its UI, UX, sluggishness, and other problems pertaining to the writing, I came out the other side in love with so many of the ideas. It lives and dies by how much you'll …
After a lot of time putting it off, I've finally finished this game after waiting a good year before actually getting past the prologue! In spite of its UI, UX, sluggishness, and other problems pertaining to the writing, I came out the other side in love with so many of the ideas. It lives and dies by how much you'll love the buddy detective format, and Turing himself, a ROM the central plot of the game revolves around; in a high stakes investigation that threads between corporate influence, political movements, the dubious legality of Neo-San Francisco life, and life wasting day jobs.
I'd first heard about Read Only Memories through its connection to VA-11 Hall-A, and I can't say it particularly stuck out to me. After years of waning interest and growing resentment for cyberpunk as a literary genre for a number of reasons, I realized I own the game through an Itch bundle and decided to download it anyways. Maybe it would change my mind, maybe it would be as good as VA-11 Hall-A. I didn't have very high hopes, realizing that it was going to be a battle to complete the game. So I kept it shelved until now, since I've developed more interest in visual novels and detective mysteries, cyberpunk criticisms be damned.
Why do I dislike cyberpunk so much? Well, I don't really know the best way to answer it, but to me it's more a problem of conventions, trends, and fundamental building blocks of creative writing. In order to make such a high concept story work, you need to provide a lot of creative effort, writing, and communication to the audience of what makes the world tick, and what makes it separate from the noise of so many other high concept stories doing the exact same thing without falling back on too many cliches. This doesn't mean bad, this just means it's going to take a lot of work and quality writing in order to pull off, which just by virtue how many works of media get made on a regular basis with little thought and care, it's far less likely you're going to get something that does something so high concept so well, and more likely that you're getting a Blade Runner glazefest.
With cyberpunk specifically, it leans so heavily on its cliches, that the identity is practically nothing without them because of how orthodox fans of it can be. Never in any other subgenre or scene have I seen this much fear of stepping outside of a comfort zone of the same banal influences, to where a techn-noir story about artificial intelligence being pitched to me sounds more like a threat than it does a recommendation. And still, I sat with that nagging voice telling me to try it anyways, given I was itching for murder mysteries in my heart. Just because something is cyberpunk, it doesn't mean that they're substituting it for personality, or for normal literary genre and structure.
My dive into Read Only Memories was rewarded. Not only was it fully voice acted by a fair bit of people I recognize, but it has a massive amount of personality for all of the key characters and even some notable side characters. More to the point, the mystery itself was very compelling and had such personal stakes driving a case that would become far bigger than any one person, any one city. Directing the focus away from just truth and justice, and more towards meditations on genuine social justice and the direction our corporatized world is heading, not in the most original ways, but in one of the most sympathetic and human ways I've managed to see in this genre.
Being a mystery, I'll spare you of any spoiling details, but there is so much to be sucked in by, so many charming faces, I can't help but gush about them. First is Turing, and they're your partner in crime for the entirety of the whole game, whether you like him or not. They're something like, a very concerned, intelligent but not fully wise teenager in the body of a tiny little cute bot, and they're requesting your help to look for their father, your friend, Hayden, after thugs raided their apartment. They're very earnest, sympathetic, with a heart and mind for art and poetry once you can look past their brash know-it-all attitude, to where they really feel like a genuine friend as the game progresses.
Another character I really love is TOMCAT, a big shot hacker involved with the history and development of meshnet and the corporation that owns it, Parallax. They help you and Turing out through most of the game, have such a charming presence, cute accent, and love the way they express their gender too. Another detail about the game is how it really loves to express queerness in a very honest way. It's just there. It's not the main focus on the story, but you can linger on it, meditate and think about it enough to where I can imagine it would either lead to a few peoples awakenings or perhaps to call the woke police on the game for being SJW bait. Yeah, this isn't a game that capital G gamers will like.
And this leads me to my third big grievance with cyberpunk as a genre before I continue. It's not just that high concepts are difficult to nail. It's not just that cyberpunk is full of cliches. It's that cyberpunk authors love to put in all kinds of allegories and metaphors for real kinds of oppression that haphazardly mix in with their own novel ideas, which can lead to very messy, offensive, or even patronizing parallels, or draw attention to how it really isn't thinking about the real world. They draw parallels to abortion clinics with their metaphors but nowhere does abortion have anything to do with the social justice elements of the story. They bring up allegories towards racism and homophobia, but those don't factor into the allegories for the story either. It's post-racial and post-homophobia so often, but they repackage these bigotries in new ways to where it just feels unrealistic. These people who would be complaining about hybrids in this game would also be massively transphobic and pro-life, and yet they aren't. Is it to dial in the scope, or is it a lack of time to write these kinds of considerations? In either case, it leaves the world feeling like set dressing for the core ideas and not so lived in.
Now, I need to talk about Jess. People hate Jess. She's a hybrid, a lawyer and advocate of hybrids rights. They're genetically modified people who take on the appearance of other animals and are reviled by the game's protest group The Human Revolution, and are socially stigmatized, systematically living without rights and sterilized. As a transgender woman, I sympathize very deeply with how they decided to write hybrids the way they did, and yet my criticism of no explicit digging into the problems of transphobia and body rights in the real world bugged me a bit. But what bugged me more is how they make the character Jess so unreasonably hostile towards you for the first half of the game, immediately characterizing you as a bigot for bothering her, assuming the worst of you, just foul mouthed miserable, meant to be the voice of the voiceless, but not really compelling anyone to care enough with their shit talking.
And the thing is, I've met a lot of Jesses. I've BEEN Jess. Everyone in my shoes, everyone like me, we've all had a Jess inside our head that combats the programming we were unsuccessfully forced into by a cisheteropatriarchal society. Only, the battle continues inside of us as we combat dysphoria, as we combat internalized bigotry towards ourselves and our friends, as we combat reconciliation towards people who seek to hurt us on a constant basis. Even I have this problem, where I'm so inclined to forgive, to hear out, to soften, to pour so much emotional labor in people who don't understand me, don't like me, don't want to like me, because I think that I can get through to them when maybe asserting myself would've made more sense in the moment. It's a fine balance we all have to deal with, and Jess is someone who stands further on the spectrum of militant attitude than me. And I can't hate her for it.
Jess is written like a real person, and like someone I could build mutual respect with, like people I already do build mutual respect with. But I keep my distance from more often than not lately, because my methods of activism differ greatly from hers. And because spirals of negativity aren't good for people like me and with that mentality I would be suffering wounds, twice, three times over senselessly like a wounded animal picking at my scabs from fights I didn't mean to pick. Neurodivergent recognize neurodivergent, I see the patterns in which I fail and suffer and try to work around them. My emotions run too hot when I'm in a position like hers. You can't blame me, cause I'm Jess. I live that shit every day and just try to keep my head cool but every now and then it all falls apart, I have a bad day and here I am, we'd be like the spitting image of each other.
In any case, the more you play the game, the more choice you have to warm up to her, to understand and make amends with the grievances, to do speak truth to power as a journalist and stand up for the most vulnerable. She takes note of this and gives her regards in the best way she knows how. It may not look like much but begrudging respect when you're already so in the dark, pressed for so many favors, when your backs against the wall and peoples livelihoods are on the line, she really is showing you she cares. I think I love Jess' writing a lot, the more I reflect on it. She would be at the heart of a similar game to this, but the true focus is on Turing even if her scenes support the greater emotional narrative at the center of the game.
There are so many other characters who are just so unbearably charming in their own ways. Starfucker and Oliver, two misguided but good hooligans caught in your path, who end up really being sweet and cute. The bear couple who run the bar are so great for each other and really contribute to a deeper examination of lower class people and their struggles with crime in this kind of world. Lexi the police officer is also great, deeply worried about you and trying to solve your case through clear channels and hitting wall after wall in a corporatized police force, really showing how hard it is to do right through the proper channels in a corrupt world. Fairbank. Ohhh I could say so much about Fairbank, but you really need to see him for yourself. I cant help but keep talking to him, fascinated in everything he says and why.
Because I don't want you to know anything about the plot given you consider picking up the game yourself, I can't properly talk about what I love the most about the ending I chose, but I got The Awakening, and I feel like with all of the considerations and flaws in the genre I've mentioned, and given how the plot twists and turns, it assuages all of my worries and does all of its ideas justice in the end. It's a very human game, injecting humanity into things you'd never think, pointing towards a more human future. A future that isn't just going to come without us doing anything. We all need to be a witness. We all have to take responsibility for our futures collectively. We can't let corporations decide what direction the future of how we organize, communicate, live our lives. They only know how to disrupt and not how to construct something truly made for us, but we know how because we are the community. We are the people. We really have to have solidarity and believe in each other, and only through resistance, persistence, and love can we get out of this hole the state and capital have dug us into.
Jan 10, 2025
