Sometimes, an infectious digital virus can be a good thing, like when your brainrot spreads to all your friends’ video game consoles and they finally play a game you’ve been yelling about for a decade. Last week, after the previews went up for Digimon Story: Time Stranger, I looked on my shelf for my copy of Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth, the excellent, underrated 2016 RPG that marries monster-taming and a detective serial story. I was devastated to see that I no longer had the game, so I went to PlayStation Network to buy it there, only to find Bandai Namco had apparently delisted the game from PlayStation’s online stores in 2018! Thankfully, it’s been ported to PC and Switch, and I found the Switch Complete Edition that contains both the base game and its parallel story follow-up, Hacker’s Memory, was on sale on Amazon for $25, which is half off. Now I’m infecting all my friends with my same brainrot by gifting them copies, and others have been joining in on the collective playthrough because FOMO is a powerful influence. Even better, the Complete Edition is currently on sale for $4.49 through Fanatical. Join us in the Digital World, won’t you?
If you’ve never played a Digimon game or haven’t paid attention to the franchise in 20 years, don’t worry about jumping in here at Cyber Sleuth. Though the game is built upon the same mythology as the rest of the series, Cyber Sleuth is a standalone story that anyone can enjoy. Admittedly, the turn-based battles are pretty rote (Time Stranger is a pretty big improvement, based on what I played at Summer Game Fest), but their simplicity means they don’t get in the way of the real meat: the detective story and dense monster-taming mechanics.
Even if you’re not looking for a critter collectathon, Cyber Sleuth’s biggest draw is its Persona-esque vibes and its elaborate mystery. As the title suggests, you play as a digital detective who is investigating a virtual reality world called EDEN, where users are logging in and ending up in a comatose state in the real world. The titular digital monsters are also running rampant through the program, and as the lines between real and digital begin to blur, it’s up to you and your friends to get to the bottom of the calamity that threatens both worlds. It’s got a lot of moving parts, but it all comes together in a really satisfying fashion by the end of its roughly 50-hour run.
Hacker’s Memory, meanwhile, is a parallel story that follows a hacker who is dealing with all this nonsense from a different perspective, and is best played after Cyber Sleuth, as its story overlaps with the original. It’s another 50 hours or so of digital detective work, and while it’s not quite as impactful, it’s still a great, meaty addition to a game that deserves more players. With sales this cheap and Time Stranger on the way, there’s never been a better time to give one of the best Digimon games a shot.