Birth ME Code Reviews

An incredible leap forward in the Code series! Almost everything had improved from the first game! The concept, characters, and tone are much clearer and more dynamic. The only thing that is markedly worse is somehow the player experience (but I don't think it's too terrible). In the first game, you could jump to any point in the flowchart of possible choices and endings to revisit information, make new choices, try and find Easter eggs... etc. In this game, you do see the flowchart and can revisit sections to review information... all the choices you make on a file are fully locked in stone. Each run will require you to choose a new file and play though essentially the entire game you've gone through before until you can make different choices. This is explicitly for story/meta reasons, but it's... not great. While you can fast forward your way through puzzles and dialogue you've seen before... the escape rooms seem mandatory. While I was mostly okay with this after discovering the min time routes for each, it did bother me that we could skip puzzles and not the rooms. There is an auto-pick choice feature... but I could only really use it to check the possible results of choices on the flowchart... if it could pick choices for me and speed up the process... I could never make it work. Finally, the puzzles. I'm split. Some of them are pretty good- challenging, with fair hints and interesting solutions. Some of them are incredibly confusing or misleading, leading to basically impossible roadblocks. A few require outside information or meta information that are not located inside the game (this would mostly require you to google charts or certain math concepts... that take you out of the game). I was generally able to make my way through the game, but there were definitely some times where I needed to reference a guide (the main one on steam is slightly outdated) because the clues were vague or misleading or required multiple logical jumps OR finding a required item took searching in the same location several times with no indication/proceeding required combining two items with no indication. Overall, I loved the concept and the execution is practically flawless once you consider the size of the team. There are definite issues, but overall, I enjoyed the experience more than some more polished visual novels anyway.