#rp2064

I got ending #1, or, as it’s called in the game, Ending One. I did so because the game is so fucking tedious that I didn’t want to go through it multiple times, and Ending One is the best golden ending. Like the True Pacifist Ending in Undertale, once you see Ending One, you’re pretty much done. You saw what you needed to see. Go back and get shittier endings if you want, I guess!!! There are more achievements if you do!!! Kids love dem cheevos, right??

The thing about ROM is that it’s hard to talk about the ending without it sounding contrived and silly, because that’s what it is. But, like the best stories, it’s able to help you suspend disbelief and go along with it during the story itself. Despite my constant frustrations with the UI, I have to admit that I wept manly tears during the climactic scene of the broken little robot struggling to maintain as much of its source code as it could while overwriting the source code of a much bigger robot. Because it was good writing! I cared about Turing more than I cared about any other character. Turing wasn’t the player character, but there’s no doubt in my mind that they were the main character. Turing’s growth as a person, and they are a person, is the real focus of the game.

It gets very overwrought, to the point of taking me out of the story a bit, before the final chapter. You and Turing hatch a plan to stop Parallax, a computer company that is planning on letting an all-powerful AI loose on the internet. The AI, called Big Blue, would have the power to control any other ROM (robotic assistants used by humans for everything from cleaning floors and keeping track of appointments to helping police fight crime and controlling the weather). This would give Parallax an irresponsibly large amount of power, and is generally seen as a bad thing. Turing is guided by a couple of other computer experts (who do not work for Parallax) to the idea that they can patch some of their code, which is self-modifying and gives Turing sapience, into an update that all ROMs will download, giving them all sapience, and, therefore, somehow, immunity against Big Blue. I don’t think they actually take Big Blue out? I think Big Blue is still okay at the end? Just powerless? It’s a little unclear.

But this would require physical access to Big Blue, so the story suddenly shifts gears and you begin planning a heist. You call upon half a dozen other characters you’ve met throughout the game, and, based on whether or not you were rude to them, they either risk their lives and careers for your sake, or they don’t. Probably. I wasn’t rude to anybody when I could avoid it, so everybody helped me out. It seems like the heist would honestly probably work without most of them, so probably they just don’t help and decide to sit the whole thing out. There are achievements for making the NPCs dislike you, so it’d be worth my time to find this shit out if I cared about achievements (I don’t).

There are some twists and turns in the heist itself, of course, because it would be boring otherwise. One of your allies, one you absolutely must take along, betrays you and reveals a tragic backstory while attempting to murder you. He’s also straight, which seems to equate to character weakness in this story. There are only a couple of explicitly gender-normative heterosexual characters in the game, and one of them is a coward who demands you give him a lot of money so he can flee the city before he helps you, and the other tries super hard to kill you. It’s an unusual decision on the parts of the game’s developers.

There are plenty of characters whose gender or sexuality are not explicitly mentioned, so the default assumption is that they’re probably cisgender and straight, right? That’s just what you assume when you meet, say, Ramona, the barista at a coffee shop that serves drinks called Hassy? It’s not really a coffee shop, but that’s obviously the vibe you get from it. Not the point. The point is, for all we know, Ramona is trans and bisexual, but it isn’t stated. It doesn’t matter. With the guy who tries to kill you, the fact that he was married to a woman and had a biological daughter is pretty important. Also, he’s a sadistic murderer. Haha whoops!

So you have no chance to stop this guy from killing you, but Turing apparently has a laser? Or a bomb? Or something? Turing blows the dude’s shit up pretty badly with something, but not before getting badly damaged. This is somewhat foreshadowed in your first conversation with Turing, where they say they could tear off your arm if they wanted to (but they won’t, because of social norms–this is really the only reason given, and, frankly, it is sufficient).

So Turing is dying, and you have to pick them up and carry them to Big Blue. That alone is an incredibly powerful moment, but it’s diminished somewhat by Turing saying they don’t feel pain the way humans do and this whole thing doesn’t actually hurt. It’s just inconvenient. But once hooked up to Big Blue, Turing DOES seem to experience pain, as they get into a tug of war with Big Blue to determine whose code gets overwritten.

Turing explains early on in the game that they don’t actually have a huge amount of storage space, and most of their factual knowledge is retrieved from the internet as needed. So when Turing talks about the scientific name for a certain tree, that isn’t knowledge they hang onto for more than a few minutes at a time. But their personal experiences are important enough to keep, since those are what make them unique and inform their decisions. Turing might be able to download publicly available information about TOMCAT, but conversations with TOMCAT are preserved only in Turing’s internal memory. Those are irreplaceable and precious, so Turing never overwrites them.

(Presumably, Turing will eventually need to add another hard drive somewhere to their body if they live long enough, but this isn’t a big concern.)

All of this matters because Turing’s connection to Big Blue threatens to destroy those stored memories that Turing has been keeping. TOMCAT, on the phone with both you and Turing, hastily backs Turing’s memories up for later reupload (simply saying “it’ll suck” to put them back later), but fears that if Turing loses too much of themself, they’ll be unable to finish copying the self-modifying code into Big Blue and the whole heist will fail.

So you have to talk Turing through it. Keep them talking and focused on not losing their mind while TOMCAT handles the details, and Turing’s code should win out. So you get this emotional recap of the last few days, reminding Turing of the friends they’ve made and the people who matter most to them.

To be frank, I can’t say I got super attached to most of them. Very few had any actual character growth, just additional backstory that helps you to understand them. This is surprisingly realistic. I mentioned not caring much for the character Jess a few posts back, and that didn’t change much throughout the game. Her story in particular is handled really clumsily. Rather than grow or change, Jess just suddenly tells you her life story at one point. You don’t ask for it and you don’t need it. She just tells you.

It is a pretty good backstory, too! Jess explains that she became a genetically altered hybrid because it was the only way she could save herself from dying of skin cancer. Before becoming a cat, she was an insect person, which fixed up her skin and bones well enough that she didn’t have to worry about the cancer anymore, but made her frightening in the eyes of both strangers and her own family. Eventually, she was able to undergo further genetic modification and become a “cute kitty,” because she was willing to become an otaku’s wet dream if it meant she would no longer be a Japanese horror movie monster. Obviously, being an otaku’s wet dream has some disadvantages, and she’s very defensive and irritable as a result of that. But the worst part is that it was deemed too risky by the government to let her modified genes be passed down and allowed to alter future generations, so, in her own words, “they frickin’ spayed me.”

So Jess is a character whose body has tried to kill her, been modified repeatedly and irreversibly, and then violated against her will. It is no wonder that she is angry all the time. That’s her character arc. Jess is angry all the time. Oh, this is why. Okay, I get it. But she’s still angry all the time.

I did get a kick out of her reaction when I gave her the drink she asked for, though. At one point, she tells you to stop bothering her and instead ask the bartender for certain information that you need, but you’d better give her a drink for her trouble. Nothing happens if you don’t do it. You can just get the info you need from the bartender (well, actually, from his big bear husband) and leave. But if you buy a drink, any drink seems to work, get the info, then return to Jess and give it to her, she laughs and says that you scored a point for actually doing it. It’s about the closest she gets to friendly, and I thought it was very cleverly done. She obviously said that you owed her a drink in jest, but, by taking it seriously, you show her that you take HER seriously. That she isn’t just an otaku’s wet dream; she’s a real person whose time is valuable and whose concerns and desires really matter. Being shown that, instead of merely being told that, is meaningful to her, and it makes her happy.

Am I overthinking that? Absolutely. But I’m not wrong.

There is no reason for Jess to have a character arc beyond this. She isn’t the main character. For a background character like her (or TOMCAT, or Melody, or Majid, or Chad and Oliver), the realistic thing to do is to simply learn more about them and come to a greater understanding of them without expecting them to change in any way. People, by and large, do not change. It is foolish to expect them to change. It is better to understand why people are how they are than to change how they are. From a more cynical perspective, that’s the right way to get people to do what you want: figure out their desires and motivations and exploit them, rather than try to add new desires and motivations of your own design to them.

Lexi, your cop friend, is pretty much the only background character who changes significantly over the course of the game. She quits the force and decides to go into business as a PI. But even this is pretty inevitable. It’s not like you do much to influence that decision. You just see it happen. Still, I like Lexi. Her character design is a bit silly to me, but that’s fine. Maybe she’s quite fashionable for 2064. I’ll be 80 years old by then, if I’m still alive. I doubt I’ll be thinking of this game by then.

Who am I kidding. If I make it to 80 years old, and I hope I do, I’ll absolutely think of this game. I’m 33 now and I still think of games I played more than 20 years ago: the chances of me NOT thinking about video games in another 47 years are near nil.

My personal favorite background characters are Chad and Oliver, though. I can’t really give a good reason why. There’s a lot about them that I dislike, in fact. Oliver’s portrait always shows him with his glasses half off, and he has a really annoying voice and a lot of obnoxious otaku stereotypes. Chad, voiced by YouTuber Nathan Sharp doing his best Danny Cooksey impression, has just as many obnoxious punk stereotypes, and a lot of his relationship with Oliver feels forced. But somehow, it works. I think it works because Chad is so sincere, whether he’s embracing the punk stereotype or not. It never feels contradictory. Chad fully embraces the idea of Turing’s personhood without a second thought; he and Oliver are on board with helping out as much as possible once they find out what Turing is dealing with, and they never question it. Chad has possibly the best line in the game, because it is dumb as hell, extremely heartfelt, and he absolutely means it, 100%: “Dudes gotta stick together, y'know? Don’t matter if you’re a robot or what. We all got the same shit to deal with. Gotta grab destiny by the horns and make your own mark!”

Later, when Turing is seizing up and near death, that’s one of the memories they replay to maintain focus. It stuck with Turing, and it’ll stick with me.

I’m a big believer in machine intelligence. It’ll happen eventually, whether it’s in my lifetime or not. I think that machines will reach a point where they become self-maintaining, and, once that happens, it’s only a matter of time before humanity dies off (hopefully peacefully) and the machines keep existing. I’m comfortable with that idea. I think that a universe without humans, but with machines that can trace their lineage back to humanity, is alright. I like to imagine that they’ll have the same shit to deal with, but there’s no possible way I could know.

So the idea of somebody Chad’s age (16) telling Turing that he can relate to Turing on the basis of “we all got the same shit to deal with” is an important one. He might not be right forever (he’s specifically referring to Turing’s relationship with their human father, and there’s no reason for me to think that machines created by other machines will think of their creators as their parents), but he’s right for now, and that’s important.

So. Is it worth playing Read Only Memories? Sure, I think so. I feel like a lot of the game’s biggest ideas (machine sapience, genetic modification, cybernetic augmentation, the increasing acceptance and prevalence of non-traditional gender norms) didn’t really do it for me, as those are things I already think about a lot. But little things, like someone undergoing a necessary medical procedure to beat cancer and being shunned by society and sterilized for the way it made her look, or a teenager unquestioningly befriending a robot because he has daddy issues just like the robot does, or an old woman’s administrative assistant robot wishing to stick around and continue its job because its boss had always treated it kindly, are things I hope I remember.

Ultimately, Read Only Memories absolutely is a morality tale that tries hard to preach a lot of lessons and get a liberal social agenda across to its players. And the best possible compliment I can give it is to say that it is in its smallest details that I found the deepest satisfaction. If you don’t like the message, you might not like the game. Hell, if you don’t like slow and clunky point and click adventures, you might not like the game even if you DO like the message.

I said in my last post about the game that I’d gotten to where Turing and I were all set to go to club Stardust to track down somebody named TOMCAT, all caps so you know they mean business. I got to the point where I was asking Lexi, my cop friend, to help me get past a robot to swipe evidence from a crime scene, when the game froze on me and I quit. I don’t know how much I’ll have to replay. I don’t really care.

In between, there were a number of major stumbling blocks that just got on my nerves. See, it’s a point and click adventure game, so you click on things, then click an icon saying what you want to do with that object, and possibly a third icon indicating which item you want to use on that object. And it’s a very unwieldy system. It’s hard to cancel out of the menu, and hard to quickly click through the menus in a hurry. It’s also hard to select the same thing a few times in a row, so you can, say, examine it, touch it, talk to it, and use a pair of headphones on it to listen to it and see if anything happens (most electronic items play ads or read out their displayed text out loud–it isn’t useful).

But putting that aside, since I might get more used to it, what I can’t get used to is how difficult it is to skip through text I’ve already read.

Before going to the club, I had to go through user setup with Turing. I had to give my name, for starters. Then, rather than ask my gender, Turing instead asks what personal pronouns I’d prefer be used. It’s a bit clever, since it accomplishes two things: it sidesteps the awkward question of how Turing can’t recognize my gender just by looking at me (presumably, Turing has scanned my online presence enough to know what kind of chromosomes I have), and it probably makes nonbinary individuals feel a little more comfortable that they can pick them/they or more. I didn’t see all of them. I would have had to click “see more,” and since my preferred pronouns were already at the top of the list, I didn’t want to lead Turing on by saying I wanted to see the whole list.

Towards the end, Turing asked me if I had any dietary restrictions. Like being kosher, or gluten free, or vegan. I did go through that entire list, and wound up picking “alcohol free,” because I quit drinking five years ago and don’t plan on starting again.

This was a horrible idea.

At Stardust, you can ask the bartender for a drink. Each time you do, you have to pick from a list of 53 drinks. The bartender then says, “So many drinks these days. Remind me what’s in that one again?” This is voiced. I don’t know an easy way to skip it without still hearing the first couple of words. Turing then lists the ingredients for you by checking drinkopedia. This is annoying, but I can deal with it.

Then Turing goes fucking berserk. He yells “HOLD IT!” and explains that this item would go against my dietary restrictions, and that it would be “remiss” of Turing not to advise against that order. The animations are unskippable, and this is multiple blocks of text. I can then say that I want the drink anyway, or pick something else. Then it’s back to square one.

There’s no way to just say “Turing, just look at the goddamn menu and tell me which ones I can drink, okay?” And a lot of the items are made up. Many are used again in VA-11 HALL-A, which is cute, I guess. But even of those, many of VA-11 HALL-A’s drinks have “optional karmotrine,” an ingredient that adds the alcohol to the drink. So I should be able to request the drink without karmotrine. But I can’t! I have to sit through Turing’s little freakout every goddamn time.

It is the worst. I should never have told Turing that I don’t drink. It isn’t worth the annoyance.

I could have just not bought any drinks! But it would have felt rude, after the long chat with the burly, bearded, Pakistani bartender. I moved on to the dance floor and met Jess, a cat hybrid, which means she has big furry cat ears where her regular ears would be.

This is opposed to where most cat people (mostly girls, let’s be real) have their ears, which is on top of their heads like a normal cat does. Jess’s ears are on the sides of her head. This makes me more comfortable. I often wonder what is in place where normal human ears would be on a cat girl. They always have hair covering the sides of their heads. Look for it. You’ll notice it if you look for it. You’ll never see a cat girl with a shaved head or a ponytail that has all of their hair pulled back. They gotta have enough hair to cover where human ears would be.

Jess DOES have enough hair to cover her eyes. That doesn’t bother me. She also might be furry all over, but I can’t tell. Her skin is the same shade of brown as her ears, but it’s also a shade of brown that could easily just be her skin color. Her ears are almost certainly furry, though, since they have little spiky bits at the end that must either be hair or really gross shredded skin.

Jess is also super rude, and I’m fine with that. I was just some stranger who walked up to her at the club. But I COULDN’T JUST FUCKING WALK AWAY. And that’s what I wanted to do! I asked if she knew where TOMCAT was, she said no, and that she was cutie cruising, which wasn’t an invitation to flirt with her. I WANTED to say “okay, thanks,” and walk off. I couldn’t. I had to keep the conversation going. Say something like “I wasn’t going to flirt with you.” I’m pretty sure that’s what I went with. And then it turned into a conversation about how Jess is sick of people harassing her or being rude because of her being a hybrid. She called me a genotypical and Turing expressed confusion about the term. I WANTED to say “Turing, based on context, it obviously means that my genome is unedited and I am a typical human, and that Jess is not genotypical and therefore has different DNA than a typical human,” and then WALK AWAY. But instead I had to sit through Jess saying pretty much the same thing. I get that I’m supposed to be immersed in the world and supposed to want to know more about Jess and her cat body, but I mean, shit! She didn’t want to talk to me! I wanted to just fucking leave!

Eventually, I was allowed to move on and talk to TOMCAT themself (always they/them), an androgynous hacker with an obviously female voice actor. It kind of kills the “mystery” of TOMCAT’s gender when I can hear them say one sentence and think to myself “oh, TOMCAT is a woman.”

I GET IT. Before anybody corrects me on this. TOMCAT is whatever TOMCAT says they are, regardless of their voice or genitals or their DNA. But it was weird to hear such an obviously feminine voice from a character who is so deliberately androgynous. I got over it quickly. I’m able to keep an open mind.

The chat with them went on way too long, and, stupidly, allowed me to ask about Jess for some reason. Because I couldn’t already figure out that Jess has dealt with a lot of rude or cruel people on my own. I had to hear TOMCAT tell me all about it. It’s fine. I don’t care. Jess doesn’t want to educate me on my spiritual journey towards becoming a better person, and I don’t want to force my friendship upon a woman who does not want it.

So after learning that I needed to fetch an item for TOMCAT and then that I needed the help of my cop friend Lexi (who used to date my sister, because it was about time the game brought in an explicit girl-girl relationship) to get to that item because it was evidence in an ongoing investigation.

And Lexi, shockingly, didn’t want to help me to do that. She instead wanted to check things out on her own and see if the investigation itself was on the level first. Which seemed reasonable to me, since I knew it wasn’t. But I couldn’t say that. I couldn’t say “okay, fine, do what you have to do and get back to me.” Instead, I had to try like five or six different ways of pleading with her to just break the rules for me. And it was super annoying.

So, yeah, the dialogue choices are obnoxious. It’s easier to handle when, say, I’m talking to Turing about the trees in the park and Turing tells me that tree knowledge is kept in personal memory because of the great personal importance trees have, since Turing was restricted to watching educational programs for a long time and has memorized all 403 episodes of Bob Ross’s “Joy of Painting.” Because painting was fun, and Bob Ross’s anecdotes were fun! Turing even ended the lecture by saying that was enough talking about “happy little trees,” which was a cute touch regardless of how often Bob Ross actually said it.

So SOME of the dialogue is fine. It’s really only when I have to make choices about how to steer a conversation that I find myself wanting to pull my hair out because all of the important things have been said and it’s time to move on and the game is forcing me to keep fucking talking.

The voice acting is a bit off-putting. Not that it’s bad. I actually think the actors are pretty good, at least so far. I don’t know any of their names, though I guess I could check the emails I’ve gotten from the devs about it. I’ll probably recognize Jim Sterling, just because the guy has a pretty distinctive voice and other reviewers have mentioned his voice as really standing out

The actor (actress? Person? Let’s go with person) playing Turing is surprisingly good, though I have a sinking feeling that I’ll be super sick of that voice by the end of the game. The voice really reminds me of Megaman, somehow. I’m not sure if it’s the Megaman from Megaman Legends or another Megaman, but it’s what I think of. And Turing looks a little like Megaman, so that works.

The voice doesn’t emote very well, though. When Turing looks sad, it doesn’t come through very well through their voice. Or when angry, or whatever. It always sounds muted, like the emotions are turned down slightly compared to a person. I think that might be the idea, though.

Remember how I said that the dialogue in VA-11 HALL-A was weirdly stilted and detailed? Turing’s is like that, too, and I’d LOVE to think it’s intentional. But I can’t now! VA-11 HALL-A ruined that for me by showing that EVERYBODY talks like that.

I mean, it’s cute to see that Turing’s idea of how to best kill time is to explain in detail how I should be taking care of my plant. But it’s not cute to actually sit through the detailed explanation. And it’s not cute that it was the only conversation while killing time.

Turing is, in the year 2064, the most advanced sapient AI in existence. And that’s phenomenal. I’m into that kind of thing. It’s kind of neat to see it after playing VA-11 HALL-A, where the Lilim, a bunch of robots more advanced than Turing, are just walking around like regular citizens. Turing still has a lot of generic computer abilities, like the ability to do internet (“mesh”) searches to suddenly learn new things, or hack into doors. The Lilim don’t seem to be able to do that. They got additional emotional processing and self awareness, but lost mechanical abilities. That alone is really fascinating to me.

See, there are two articles that show up in VA-11 HALL-A that change the face of the in-game world, but which are never explored more deeply because none of the other characters think it’s as cool as I do. I can’t remember the order that they appear in, so I apologize for that.

The first was about new regulation going into effect mandating that Lilim must have distinctly non-human appearances. Too many Lilim were looking too human, and it was leading to confusion. The Lilim had to be legally required to be obviously non-human. That’s great! It shows that Lilim, at least some of them, want to look as human as possible. And it shows that this is making people uncomfortable. The idea that Lilim could pass for human is making lawmakers, and therefore probably civilians, uncomfortable. That’s a lot more interesting to me than most of the shit that’s in either game.

The second was about how the birth rate in Glitch City is on the decline as more and more people are entering long-term relationships with Lilim. This is even more fascinating. This is, I honestly think, one of the biggest threats AI can pose in the real world. It’s the kind of thing that I think about a lot. I don’t expect humanity to be destroyed in a robot uprising–I think we’ll just slowly be supplanted by robots. Gradually. It’d take a few generations of declining populations before humans are the minority, but it could happen.

I mean, if I met a Lilim as advanced as the ones in VA-11 HALL-A, I’d have no qualms about trying to date one. I don’t think that’s just me, either. I’m not saying I’d PREFER to date a robot, but I’m saying I’d be willing to do it if the robot were advanced enough. Because, shit, why not?

So it’s kind of sad to see the original sapient AI, Turing, stand around in my apartment requesting permission to order supplies to repot my fucking plant.