Was looking for more interactivity, like in Ace Attorney; instead, this is far more like a visual novel. If visual novels are your thing, this is excellent. It's just not for me. There is voice acting, but I ended up turning it off because the mics they used keep popping bad when they talk and it kept taking me out of the story and making me remember I'm playing a game.

just about the same problem i had with norco. starting to think i'm just not a fan of the genre. leaving a negative review anyways since the save system suuucks and turing will just never ever shut up

The game is quite boring, it's too worried about being woke and it disregarded being fun. Hard pass

Nice art and music, but the text is so intolerably slow, and basically all you get to do is read it, and it is not particularly great read. Dropped.

An interesting setting and artistically pretty, colorful environments. Unfortunately, there's hardly any player interaction, and the few scattered puzzles are effortlessly simple. Most of the game is various NPCs expositing information, which makes it more egregious that nearly every single character in this game talks down to you. NPC attitudes range from friendly-but-arrogant "genius" characters who condescendingly recite trivia and expospeak to your character, all the way down to NPCs who are outright abusive. In the latter case, you are told to just suck it up and deal with it, as the character's tragic backstory apparently excuses any wrongdoing on their part.

There's ostensibly a message buried in here somewhere about accepting people as they are, but the delivery comes across as simply saying "sit down, shut up, and let smarter people than you tell you what to do." The crisp art and occasional moment of charming flavor text from interacting with the scenery is just not worth having to trudge through the many hours of toxic sludge this game has prepared. Not recommended.

I decided to finally knock this one off my backlog when I saw the sequel coming out. For the most part, I enjoyed my time with it. I enjoyed its characters and the world they inhabit is quite interesting to discover. There's a lot of little descriptions when you click on various items which fills out a lot of details, giving it a more lived in feel. It certainly is much more a visual novel than point and click adventure, so you won't be getting a puzzle fix here as they are few and far between. But there are some dialogue trees that'll have positive or negative effects later down the line. All was going well until... until the final chapter. Holy hell was it just awful :( It soured me on the whole experience. I'll spoiler tag my complaints but they'll be worded very vaguely if you want to peek before a purchase.


There are 2 mini-games you run into during the course of the game. One is an arcade cabinet, and the other is as necessary part of the story used to chase down characters you need to have a scene with. It's good that they introduce these early on because both of these mechanics are used in the final chapter. However, both mechanics are less difficult at the end even though the stakes are higher. The mechanic from the arcade cabinet just results in a few extra clicks you're forced to do. The chase mechanic is worse as well, because the first time you interact with it, you've got a goal of trapping a character so you can chat. But in the version used in the final act, there is no such goal, you're just doing busy work to run around in circles. It's again, simpler, but the stakes are higher as there is a life and death fail state. This would be disappointing enough, however, I certainly wasn't expecting any more complex mechanics. The issue is that this whole scene you're being chased by a character who, was written believably before hand, but turns into a campy Bond villain at the end. It feels like they got a new writer just for this act. He just loves to tell you all his evil plans, and the ways he's going to hurt you, and how fun it is to be evil, and it is just so damn boring and exhausting. It doesn't fit the character at all, who was, up until then, a pretty cool customer. It wasn't surprising in the least bit that they were one of the baddies. The reveal was telegraphed and obvious, so I'm not even sure if it was intended to be dramatic or not. But what was surprising is how that character becomes a cackling cartoon villain. Imagine if in Terminator 2, the T1000 in the final scene turned into Dr. Evil from Austin Powers and went on and on for an hour and half about how much fun it is to kill kill KILL!. It doesn't fit at all. The whiplash in the writing is horrendous. And he Does. Not. Shut. Up. It goes On. and On. and On while you're forced to engage in the subpar busy work mechanics. When its finally over, you get to another scene where your character is meant to accomplish the final objective. This scene is just another huge exposition dump. There's some dialog trees, but if there's a failure state in them, its quite hard to find. If it weren't for the previous scene, this one would be the worst writing in the game. It feels like there was a word count goal that the writers had to get to, because its so verbose. Its a little more earned here, but coming after the previous scene I needed a break and didn't get one. I cannot express enough how exhausting this was. When you finally 'beat' the game, you're let out into the world to see the consequences of your actions and... well it's good again, It's interesting to see how the world has changed and how those changes affect different characters around town. But the fact that the climax of the game is such a monumentous dip in quality for both the mechanics and the writing is impossible to ignore and overshadows the rest of my fairly positive experience.

Whew, needed to get that off my chest. Worth picking up on sale if you like visual novels with a few more minor mechanics. Or are itching to find out about the world before or after playing either its sequel, or VA-11 Hall-A: Cyberpunk Bartender which is in the same universe. The world and characters are interesting, but this isn't a bastion of fantastic writing. The final act's dip in quality really ruined it for me unfortunately.

I wish I could recommend this game because the team clearly did some things right (music, the retro-ish point & click art, character portraits) but even after two hours the story did nothing to draw me in. My robot sidekick is more annoying than charming, the mechanics are extremely basic, and lastly, I didn't feel like I had much agency at all to make decisions that would matter in my investigation.
If you need a cyberpunk fix, get it, I guess. But otherwise I hope the sequel will improve on the lackluster gameplay aspects.

2064 Clearly has its target audience that I just happen to not be apart of. Didn't grab me within the hour and, if it doesn't look like it's "for you", I doubt it will grab you either.

oh my god make the robot shut the ♥♥♥♥ up

I can vouch for this game's polish and production values. It looks and sounds real nice. But unfortunately when it comes to the department of holding interest, this game just doesn't do it for me. Shoe-horned politics aside, there's just nothing really particularly interesting about the plot. A story like this needs a better set up and more suspense. This can be achieved with more consistent tonality and better introducing the stakes. Random person gone missing and random people I need to talk to to advance plot doesn't achieve that. Start the game for example by showing a group of friends acting in a relatable fashion and then take one away would really be grounds for a more compelling story arch. Make that person someone who our protagonist is romantically interested in and then even more reason to want to rescue them. Or perhaps even turn things around and put us in the shoes of the missing person instead.
I did like that arcade mini game even though it was a bit short.
I can't recommend this in terms of a game, but it's got merit as a work of art.