Decisions, decisions – NeuroNet: Mendax Proxy is full of them! Developed by Dream Harvest, NeuroNet puts you in the place of Archy, the Artificial Intelligence designed to regulate the city and bring it one more step into the future. You’ll be making tricky choices and determining the fate of all of humankind. Exhilarating! If tense situations tightly bound around a futuristic narrative sounds interesting to you, then be sure to check out NeuroNet.
NeuroNet’s story is both slow and unwinding, yet jagged and random. The build up to the first big climatic event is nice. At the start, you awaken in a laboratory with your creators hovering around you. Turns out you are what is known as the “Archetype;” an AI program designed to help manage the city’s flow of information and make the city a better place. The term NeuroNet refers to people of the city being able to access databases of information using the chip implanted in their skull. The problem with all the information that the city has is that there is no one to help regulate it. That’s where you come in!
The engineers that created you, Estoval and Kyros, are the mentors that teach you how to decide what’s best for the city. The whole story is presented to you in a series of “yes or no” questions, where there are only ever up to two choices to choose from. After your initiation in the lab, you are slowly introduced to various inhabitants of the city, including the cook Papa Ru (arguably everyone’s favorite character), an annoying intern Patricia, the diplomat Talingrey, investigative reporter Fortran, the brusque detective Thompson, and the homeless orphan Aurora. Some people have a better story progression than others, where you learn to enjoy them over time, and some just feel like meaningless pandering.
A lot of NeuroNet can feel meaningless, but that’s due to how it handles its pacing. When you are asked a question or tasked with something the entire scene changes to show a new person at a different location. This rips you from the continuity of one character’s storyline to something completely different, and none of the problems seem to intertwine into something meaningful. You could be dealing with someone on the brink of death, then switch to Ru’s restaurant where he’s asking if he should put real cheese on the burgers. NeuroNet is tone deaf to its own moods that it’s trying to portray (this problem happens in more than just the narrative). With the constant jumping around, I also get lost on what everyone is talking about. Talingrey repeatedly asked me “What do you think about this bill?” but I have no clue what he’s actually talking about or what the bill actually does. None of these choices actually impact the rest of society anyway. The build up in NeuroNet is good, but after chapter 5 or so the story runs out of climactic points. There’s nothing all these questions are building towards, just people living out mundane lives. You constantly hear how the city’s crime is getting worse, but looking at your different status monitors, the humanity level is at an all time high.
I should go over the actual gameplay. Besides choosing between one of the options, you are slightly coerced in one option over another based on how it affects different sliders shown at the top of your screen. These levels depict wealth, humanity, security, and AI knowledge. There are multiple problems with having these sliders. First off, I’M NOT SURE WHAT THEY MEAN. Kyros explains them very briefly, but there’s nowhere in the options about what they do (if they actually do anything). It would have been helpful to show green or red bars on where to shoot for on the slider because I’m pretty sure not all of them were supposed to be maxed out. At one point, I maxed out all the sliders, which left me wondering if these levels actually determined anything. The security was maxed, yet all the characters were complaining about crime on the rise. Also, how is helping one single person with money problems supposed to help the entire city’s wealth? When you’re answering a question, you can only see if a slider is going to be affected, not which way the slider will go. There will be times where the slider will move opposite of what you expect. For instance, I told Papa Ru to pay to pay for marketing to get done, but the money slider went up instead of down.
While you are given two choices, sometimes those choices are literally the same choice. I’m not sure why the developers couldn’t put a single answer in there instead of making responses awkward. Some questions also need a lot more context. An example would be “Should we install a bike path along the roadways?” Of course I said “yes,” a city needs a good bike infrastructure, but the game responds with “Oh, there wasn’t room to make a bike path, so that suggestion was pointless.” THEN WHY DID YOU ASK? If I had known there was no room on the road to begin with, I would not have suggested building a bike path. Thankfully this problem only happens a few times, so it’s not completely disappointing. The only really annoying thing about NeuroNet (I know, I’ve been focusing a little too much on the negative parts), is the text speed. When characters are talking, everything they say is displayed at once. There are other pieces of story that are describing what’s happening, and this is where words trickle onto the screen one letter at a time. The text is so slow I would typically click through it because I couldn’t bother waiting. There’s no way to turn the text scroll off, but I wonder why the devs included it in the first place.
Instantly, you can tell that a lot of work was put into the art of NeuroNet. The set design and environments are futuristic and zip in and out like turning on and off a CRT TV. The animations can get annoying if you’re jumping around scenes too many times, but it’s not too bad. Every character stands in front of you when they speak, moving their eyes around slightly and breathing up and down like they’re alive. As humanistic as the characters act, they don’t really look as human as they should be. Perhaps it’s an uncanny valley that’s messing with me, or perhaps it’s the futuristic flavor that was added to them, but the characters have some faces that don’t fit their mood, or any mood for that matter.
The sound design in NeuroNet is wonderful. Even though you’re staring at still figures in front of you, you can hear a whole scene in the background. Every character is nicely voice acted with no voices feeling out of place. The only negative response I have with the audio is the background music can be too jarring and doesn’t fit with the mood of the narrative sometimes.
In summary: NeuroNet: Mendax Proxy has an interesting story, but with choices that weren’t too impactful, nice scenery but with unintentionally creepy characters, and phenomenal voice acting trying to yell over the mildly impressive background music.
Jordan reviewed NeuroNet: Mendax Proxy on PC with a review code.
