So the wonderful people at GaymerX have collaborated with Mid Boss and Ouya to ready up ROM: Read Only Memories, a fantastic looking cyberpunk adventure game in the vein of one of my favourite games ever created: Snatcher. It will be made of sheer pure unadulterated awesome and here’s why you should back it, complete with an unprofessional abundance of exclamation marks:
It’s a Cyberpunk Adventure! To those who have played Kojima’s first great ambitious project Snatcher, they realise how tantalising a prospect this is but those that haven’t should think of Blade Runner, but awesome, anime and filled with really clever in-jokes and meta-puzzles. This is the dev’s favourite game, and sounds like the base for what should be a fascinating revival of a genre that’s been mostly dead since 1997.
The Story sounds rather fascinating! The premise sounds like a mix between Blade Runner, Chobits and the massively underrated Beyond Good and Evil. You are a journalist in Neo-San Francisco. It’s tough living in one of the fastest moving cities of 2064 but you’re plucky and will do anything to get a story. One day you get a ROM, a kind of robotic smartphone with a message from your friend saying he’s had to leave the country immediately. Naturally, as a journalist with the tenacity of Glenn Greenwald you look into the case, exploring the huge Parallax corporation your friend worked for. From there you uncover mysteries, solve others, and through talking to the diverse characters (more on that later) plots cover and uncover themselves and the story shifts based on your actions. All very fantastic-sounding if they pull it off.
It’s amazingly cute! Come on, look at this guy’s face and tell me you don’t want to play this game!
It’s a reason to buy an Ouya! The game is being created as part of the Free the Games fund, which means they will double the $62,000 pledge if it makes the goal amount. Which it will. Because the world is wonderful. Sure, it is only an exclusive for consoles and so you can still get it on PC, Mac, Linux and Android on launch, but still! It’s a good Ouya game!
It provides positive, diverse representations of the LGBTQ community! This is the elephant in the room really. You can talk to the ROM and provide your gender from a wide spectrum, something that hasn’t been seen since the transsexual Fuzzy jesters from Ultima III, and not deliberately even then. Moreover the cast of characters are fascinatingly diverse, with a wide range of sexualities, genders, degrees of mascot-ness and with that comes interesting ways to solve puzzles. It’s all very very interesting, particularly in a gaming landscape where the players are becoming more diverse but the games themselves ever more heteronormative.
There are about seven days left as of publication and it looks like an absolutely amazing thing to be a part of and I hope so much that they get the money they deserve. If you want to contribute, you can visit their Kickstarter here.
