I’ve been putting off writing this
review. I’ve avoiding writing it as I have to rip ‘Remember Me’
to shreds and I don’t want to do that. What ‘Remember Me’ does
well, it does very well. Parts of this game deserve to be heralded as
some of the best moments in video game history. It really says
something about how bad the rest of the experience was that it
retroactively destroyed those moments for me.
‘Remember Me’ follows Nilin, a
memory hunter living in Neo-Paris in the year 2084. Now by the year
2084 technology has been invented to allow memories to be digitally
saved and transferred. This technology and the company that created
it have caused all manner of social unrest and decay. Nilin is
fighting alongside a group calling themselves ‘Errorists’ to
bring down the company responsible, ‘Memorize’, and save the
world. Now your average memory hunter can only steal memories from
people. What makes Nilin special is her ability to change memories,
‘remixing’ them to change someone’s personality and attitude.
Will Nilin’s power be enough to stop Memorize before all that makes
humans unique is forgotten?
So, funnily enough, playing this game
with an open mind is the worst thing you can do. I say that because
the first hour of this game is possibly the best opening a game has
ever had. This is an issue because it gets your expectations up. Any
hopes or expectations built up in that opening hour are slowly but
methodically dashed against the rocks that are the following five to
six hours of gameplay.
I’ll start with the good, because I
really want to be as nice about this game as I can. Firstly this game
is beautiful, absolutely stunning. Every visual element has been
meticulously designed. Due to this, the world feels very real and
organic. Neo-Paris and its inhabitants look alive and feel
believable. The character movement of Nilin, in particular, is
incredibly lifelike and expressive. The effort of the design team and
3D artists is incredible and ‘Remember Me’ is easily one of the
most attractive and visually distinct games I’ve ever played.
In addition to the visuals, the game
sounds incredible. Every element of the sound design of ‘Remember
Me’ has been carefully considered. The voice acting is really
strong and you can tell that the cast were passionate about the
project. These strong performances are helped by the overall
fantastic sense of sound design the game has. For example when
characters talk in larger rooms they have a slight echo to them. The
soundtrack is the real star of ‘Remember Me’ it’s incredible
and very distinct. The game only really has one musical theme but the
soundtrack is made up of multiple distinct remixes of that theme.
This is a really nice thematic idea and it ties the game together
nicely.
Now so far I’ve only been praising
the audio/visual polish of ‘Remember Me’. Now this game has a lot
of interesting gameplay ideas. One of these ideas is absolutely incredible, both in terms
of concept and execution. During ‘Remember Me’ Nilin has to
‘Remix’ several memories to further the Errorist cause. These
sequences involve hacking into a targets mind, viewing their actual
memory and then changing details in that memory to change the nature
of it. For example, the first time we Remix a memory we have to
convince a bounty hunter that her husband is dead. We also have to
convince her that Memorize were responsible for his death so that
she’ll change sides and assist us.
These Remix sequences are basically
logic puzzles. We have to change many small things, such as moving a
table slightly, to alter how that sequence plays out. Although these
puzzle elements are interesting and require thought, what really
makes them amazing is the ethical connotations. Several times while
playing these sequences I got a distinct gut feeling that I didn’t
want to have to do them. Cutting off your finger in ‘Heavy Rain’
is unpleasant, but forcibly convincing a father that he killed his
child is on a whole different level of unpleasant.
These Remix
sequences are everything that games and interactive storytelling can
be, they are incredible. One nice part of these sequences is the
ability to change a single part of the memory and watch the outcome.
You can then rewind and try another changed detail. I managed to
create weird outcomes, such as killing the wrong person in the
memory. Being able to rewind multiple times without punishment, like
in ‘Braid’, is really nice.
The story of ‘Remember Me’ is
frequently criticised. The story isn’t incredibly strong but it’s
strong enough to carry the game throughout. The characters are
interesting and the story has a lot of interesting themes, so for the
most part I’m willing to ignore a certain amount of plot holes and
inconsistencies. The story elements of ‘Remember Me’ are mostly
taken from other sources, such as ‘Blade Runner’ and ‘Inception’.
That being said, the ideas being taken are the best ideas that the
films/games being referenced had. It is refreshing for once to see
ideas being referenced with an understanding of them and a respect of
why they are worth copying.
The combat of ‘Remember Me’ is also
interesting. You have a combo system for fighting that uses fighting
moves called Pressens. Different Pressens do different things. Some
heal you, some charge special attacks and some just hit harder. You
create your combos using whatever selection of these Pressens you
want, choosing how you want to fight.
The system changes the way you
play and requires frequent alterations as you go through the game.
Some enemies injure you when you attack them so creating a combo of
healing Pressens will cancel that damage out. Several bosses can only
be hurt using special attacks so reducing the charge times of these
attacks, even at the expense of healing, is a must for those battles.
This system is very unusual and makes the fighting quite
interesting.
Now the good parts of this game are
good, incredibly good. So why the doom and gloom in my opening
paragraph? Putting it simply, this game excels at everything
difficult it attempts but fails at almost every basic and
established level of game design.
For example, the Pressens do make the
fighting more interesting but the game very rarely lets you use them
effectively. Now the basic fighting system has clearly been
‘inspired’ by the Arkham Batman games. The issue is that the
Arkham games created their enemy types and layout based on making
combos straightforward and fun.
It is true that you can set up a combo
attack that is seven Pressens long but the majority of the fights
make these powerful combinations impossible to execute. Most of the
time you are being attacked by a large group of enemies; making
advanced uninterrupted combinations of Pressens incredibly hard. In
addition many battles feature ranged enemies who do area damage,
making standing still to do combos a quick way to die. The boss
battles often require long Pressen combinations to defeat them. This
makes the frequent boss fights of ‘Remember Me’ the worst boss
fights I’ve ever played, no exaggeration.
Now some effort has been made to solve
these combo issues, Nilin can dodge one attack and continue a
combination of Pressens. This dodge will only work for enemies
directly next to Nilin however and with multiple attackers it doesn’t
help at all. Due to these issues you spend the majority of the game
using the same single button, three hit combo. Why introduce such an
interesting concept and design a game that doesn’t allow it to be
used?
The repetition of the fighting is not
helped by the very high amount of palette swapped enemies. ‘Remember
Me’ has about six unique enemy types. Each of these enemies has
about three slight variations with different coloured uniforms and
hats. Even the zombie-like Leapers from the start of the game
reappear as converted slave soldiers, complete with added helmet,
later on.
Repetition is this games big flaw.
‘Remember Me’ is a really short game taking between six and seven
hours to complete. Having said that, ‘Remember Me’ is a six to
seven hour game with about three hours of actual content. Near the
end, the game has an hour long sequence that is a glorified boss rush
through a tower block, a tower block with about ten identical copy
and pasted floors. You face floor after floor of pallet swapped
grunts and bosses, who are purely there to extend the game. I
appreciate that releasing a three hour game at full price would have
got you some abuse but a three to four hour version of ‘Remember
Me’ would have been hailed as one of the best games ever made. In
much the same way that ‘Portal’ was/is.
Now when Nilin isn’t fighting or
puzzle solving, she’s doing parkour and stealth. Unfortunately
these ‘Assassins Creed’ like sequences are ruined by the biggest
floor of this game, the character movement.
Now it took me a few hours to realize
just how badly Nilin controls. Her brilliant character animation
distracted me from these control issues for a while but as these
sequences became more and more common I started to notice problems.
The control issues are very subtle but
with the frequent stealth and parkour sections of this game I found
myself repeatedly dying in cheap ways and I became suspicious as to why. Nilin’s
movements are not very fluid; they are somewhat tank-like in fact. In
addition to this, she has a very slight delay to any command she is
given. When you stop moving Nilin, she stops moving a fraction of a
second later, which makes precision pretty difficult. These delays
mean that fast parkour sequences become a real chore, with Nilin
sometimes executing movements that are no longer relevant. I found
myself having to climb a pipe, stop myself from moving completely and
then jump to a ledge. Trying to combine these into a fluid sequence
often led to my death.
These control issues are also a major issue
when fighting. Dodging attacks using this delayed movement is really
difficult and frustrating, as is trying to do time-based complex
combinations of Pressens. As much as the movement of this game is
trying to be cutting edge and modern it feels far more like the
movement in ‘The Bouncer’ on PS2.
This game has a worrying amount of
issues that could have been fairly easily fixed. You have a ranged
attack with a lock-on but it always locks on to the nearest enemy,
even if you are facing the enemy you want to lock-on to. This causes
the camera to suddenly spin and lock on to an enemy that you are
trying to avoid; an enemy you were trying to avoid so that you could
shoot an enemy that can only be hurt by projectiles. Why not
automatically lock on to the enemies that the projectile is designed
to fight?
‘Remember Me’ is weird. It’s
weird that a game can succeed where most fail and fail where most
succeed. The good points of this game are amazing but getting through
to them is a chore that makes it a hard game to recommend. It would
be like if amazing new cooking techniques were discovered on a
cannibal’s home movie collection. In that situation, as with
‘Remember Me’ it would be hard to ignore the mess that created
the brilliance.
Thankfully
‘Remember Me’ is organised into ‘Episodes’. Once beaten an
episode of ‘Remember Me’ can be replayed. I recommend finding
someone who bothered to play through the entire game like a chump and
asking them to let you play the 2/3 fantastic episodes. Play those
episodes, the ones with the Remix sequences and pretend that was the
‘Remember Me’ which was released. If you can, forget the rest ever
happened.
Now I really wish that the studio that
made ‘Remember Me’ would make a game like it but focussing purely
on the story, character emotion and the Remix sequences. I can
imagine that game having the potential to be amazing and…wait….OH
MY GAHHHHWD!
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