Visual Novel Review: Fragmented

Fragmented is a visual novel about the AI VTuber Neuro-sama which was created by one of her programmers, Alexvoid. It was created for the game jam that was held for Neuro's second birthday.

The story is simple, simply following Neuro after a stream when she gets an error because Vedal's hard drive is full. She manages to restart herself and needs to remove some memories to clean things up. However, because of the error, her memories are fragmented. The memories take place in picture books, which Neuro has to open one by one until all of the books are cleared out.

The art is the main draw of this game, as the picture books have adorable art. The locations are presented as pop-up tabs within the books, with Neuro-sama and Vedal acting out the memories. These are both memories of streams that actually happened with some details being misremembered, and as is the case with today's large language models like the Neuro twins, some memories are completely hallucinated.

There is no challenge in this game, as it is exactly what it looks like, just a cute short picture book that can be experienced in as short amount of time as actual, physical picture books. The music is soft and melodic, and Vedal and Neuro speak in a style reminiscent of Banjo Kazooie or Animal Crossing, with unintelligible sounds taking the place of voice overs. Neuro's, especially, is fun because the gibberish has her timbre and pitch which sounds just like her voice. The only real voice overs comes from Neuro in a clip from a stream at the beginning of the game.

Fragmented is a fantastic little story book-style visual novel created in a small amount of time for the game jam associated with Neuro-sama's second birthday. The music is suitably soft, the art is beautiful, the misremembered and hallucinated memories are fun, and the Animal Crossing-style gibberish is just so cute, and fits with the tone of the game perfectly. It has an abrupt end, but it is a fun game to experience at least once if you are a Neuro-sama fan. Even more than that, it is definitely something you could feel comfortable experiencing with children. It's just so darn cute.

Final Verdict:

4½ out of 5