• Price: $10.99 USD
• Developer: Hollowmend
• Publisher: Viridian Software
• Release Date: November 3, 2022

A review code was kindly provided by Viridian Software on behalf of Hollowmend. We thank them for being able to cover something they’ve worked so hard on.

I always enjoy checking out the latest visual novels, and the art style of Pirated Code: Admin Edition further contributed to my interest in the game. It apparently originates from a game jam, and has now made its way to Nintendo Switch with additional chapters and extra content! They made an interesting design decision in opting for a storytelling format where character portraits will be on either side of the screen as they talk to one another. There’s a minimalist background depicting a space scene, but other than that the focus is on the character portraits.

The story begins with Dex and “Operator” having a conversation that comes to an abrupt halt when their (space)ship suddenly decides to install the content from a chip that Dex stole. Dex panics a bit when he finds out that the ship has just installed an unknown AI as its copilot. As he has no idea if it’s malicious software or not, he’s naturally very concerned about the situation. Dex and Operator decide they might as well start up the AI, who introduces themself as Seren. Seren, who identifies as non-binary, apparently has lost their memories – their data was corrupted and they appear to have lost some functionalities.

Seren is rather displeased with Dex for stealing them and potentially being the cause of their corrupted data. But in the meantime, Seren will have to remain with Dex and his ship until they can find out more about their origins. (Well, and Seren apparently replaced the ship’s previous copiloting software…) With Seren at his side, Dex completes some shady courier jobs working under his mother, who acts as the “Captain” of their smuggling crew.

In between jobs, you get to see some humorous interactions between Dex, Operator, and Seren – and you may run into characters from Seren’s forgotten past. There are several bad endings, a neutral ending, and some that are good. I like to save the best for last, so I first chose options that I assumed would lead to negative results and therefore one of the bad endings. Those choices did result in a bad ending, and it happened in the span of about five minutes. Certain decisions will also provide you with some secret content and character profiles.

Each storyline is fairly short, but they still added functions to skip previously read text or go back. I thought these functions were well-executed; the skip function was fast and effective, and the back function seems to let you go back to previous lines as much as you’d like. While I definitely appreciated the implementation of those features, I did want a bit more story content.

To me, it doesn’t seem like there is an explicit explanation of the mystery behind Seren – it’s somewhat referenced in the secret notes, but I would have liked a more expansive and direct explanation. The romance is kind of minimal, with barely any difference between the platonic and romantic ending except for a few different lines.

That being said, I was a fan of having a non-binary love interest option in Seren. I think it’s incredibly important to have more LGBT+ representation in all media formats. I think that these characters often tend to be sidelined as minor participants in stories, so having Seren as a main character was fantastic. I may have also liked it if there was an alternate secret route with Dex and Operator romance, given that Seren (unintentionally?) implies that relationship. 😂

There are some intriguing concepts that are mentioned here and there that I wanted to know more about. They mention clones – reminding me of Star Wars a bit – but they’re only mentioned once or twice. That could have been an interesting subplot. DNA signatures are apparently used as identifiers, and Seren initially identifies Dex by his DNA signature instead of his name. I thought it was another neat idea. I did like the scene where Seren showed Dex and Operator images of animals from the Earth of the past. They don’t mention any other planet names though, which could have fleshed out the universe of Pirated Code more. There are good ideas here that could have been used to lengthen it a little.