I bought Remember Me off the strength of one of its trailers, and the fact that it had a woman of colour as the protagonist. That's rare in games, and I know the makers were told to have a male protagonist because it would sell better. I hope that's not going to prove true. What I will say is that the premise, surviving in a landscape where memory is mutable, makes Niilin and everyman (woman, person). From the beginning you are encouraged to project yourself onto her. The first chapter does a brilliant job of not only introducing core mechanics but also giving you a sense of scale. The makers have crafted a brilliant dystopia through their set design and sound choices. Paris was a good choice of setting, since it is associated with beauty and history. Seeing the ruins of Paris beneath a futuristic city really drives home the disconcerting feel the designers were aiming for. The city is totally recognisable too. Not to spoil, but there are moments in the game where the levels are accurate down to the colour of the tiles. It's the sort of urban ruin you want to spend time exploring, so it's unfortunate that you can't.
The level design is linear, and you'll soon find yourself frustrated by the fact that elements that you should be able to climb (fences, railings) can't be. You can jump at fences and find yourself merely moving up and down. This game could have benefited from a sandbox approach like Infamous, or at least some sort of mini-sandbox. There should have been opportunities to explore Paris beyond moving down paths and hoping to luck into secret, explorable areas. To the games credit, they do provide you with little orange guides that indicate a path forward. I just would have preferred being able to choose my own way through some more open sections. Maybe go swimming in the Seine.
The combat mechanic is serviceable, although it took me a little while to figure out what they meant by pressens (that's my bad, really, it just means button options). You can set your own combos, unlock more, and the game is forgiving enough to give you combos that restore health. Whether or not it's realistic, it's really handy, especially for players who are new to games. I wasn't pleased by some of their enemy choices. Early on in the game you are introduced to an enemy type that has been profoundly mentally disabled by virtue of the memory mechanics of the game. I don't like the way many games use mentally ill people for their villains, given that someone with a mental illness is far more likely to be offended against than be an offender themselves. They do tie into the memory mechanic, but it's a lazy choice (it's been done before in games like Borderlands). See the tvtropes page on "Insane equals Violent" to get an idea of the prevalence of the trend. I was initially expecting an inversion of that trope from the manner of the introduction of the enemy, and I feel that would have provided a lot more pathos to the characters. They do still tug at your heart strings, but they also buy into something much uglier.
There are also quicktime events. I tend to stuff those up, but I think most people are used to them now.
The secondary game mechanic, and the most novel one, is memory alteration. It's pretty fun, but it's also slow. You play through, rewind and edit a movie by focusing on pre-determined glitches. I tended not to go for obvious solutions right away because one of the ways you can lose is by killing the person remembering things. Yes, you lose, but it's narratively interesting. You are limited in the avenues you can explore, but the memory edit mechanic is still a great idea. This novelty is one of the games strengths, and it helps even out the weakness of the parkour sections (also fun but simple and not as well-implemented as Infamous).
The story is worth the view, although I do wish that some of the ethical implications had been treated with more horror from the protagonist. In a way it makes sense, it is the only world she knows, but I assume players will be more upset by the ideas the writers want to get across. It would've been nice to experience some of that with the protagonist, as opposed to around her. Still, speculative Scifi of this scope, with such an interesting set of mechanics, hasn't been seen in video games for a long time. The characters are diverse in personality, accent, body language and appearance (characters have imperfect teeth and scars, if they've had a tough life), giving a real sense of the melting pot the setting is. They feel like people, and you want to follow their conflicts and successes to the end. The writers did a brilliant job, and their work is well supported by the game's design and sound choices. The use of audio-visual advertisements throughout the game helps get across information in an organic way, although they tend to rely too much on exposition at the beginning of each chapter. I understand why, since it allows for focus on the meat of the story. They did a good job with keeping the plot unpredictable, but still comprehensible. I wholeheartedly recommend Remember Me. It says good things about the future of narrative in games.
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Remember Me (Launch Trailer)
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Remember Me - Memory Remix Gameplay
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Remember Me - Announce Trailer
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Remember Me - Trailer 2
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Remember Me: It's Time To Fight
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I want to remember it, but it's not too memorable.
Reviewed in the United States on August 19, 2013
+ PROS:+ Interesting memory mixing concept+ Several in-game collectibles+ Create-your-own combo system- CONS:- In-game movies cannot be skipped- Repetitive fight mechanics, simplistic boss battles- The game feels unbalanced: 96% fighting to 4% memory mixingPLOT:The year is 2084. The place is Neo-Paris. The person is Nilin, an elite memory hunter who's had most of her memory erased by the Memorize corporation. She is about to head into final processing when Edge, the leader of the Errorists, helps her escape.Nilin will have to fight her way through Neo-Paris to regain the memories she's lost...but will she like what she finds out about herself?GAMEPLAY:The main portion of this game is fight mechanics. In the beginning, you start out with a 3-hit combo. Over the course of the game you can unlock 5, 6 and 8-hit combinations. This leads to 2 kinds of attacks:First, there are 4 types of power-ups called "Pressens" -(1) Power Pressen - these give out extra damage.(2) Regen Pressen - these regenerate health.(3) Cooldown Pressen - these reduce the S-Pressen recharge times.(4) Chain Pressen - these inherit and multiply the effect of the previous Pressen.Second, there are 5 types of S-Pressen attacks -(1) Sensen Fury - free flow attack for hitting enemies without pause.(2) Sensen DOS - stuns enemies(3) Sensen RIP - turns robots against your enemies(4) Sensen Login Bomb - affects all enemies in the blast radius.(5) Sensen Camo - Nilin can turn invisible for 30 seconds and overload one enemy undetected.Nilin also picks up extra abilities along the way as the game progresses.There are also elements of platform gaming, little arrows will appear to show where Nilin can jump or shimmy to hand-over-hand. These aren't too difficult to figure out.My favorite part of the game by far, is the memory mixing. When you dive into someone's mind, the setting of each memory is raw and unfinished; which reminded me of the Star Trek episode "Spectre of the Gun". We watch a memory unfold from beginning to end, Nilin is given a task to complete by changing memory elements to form a new outcome, and she can't leave until her goal is reached. Once done, she has completely changed the character motivations of the target.There are also puzzle elements where the player must pay attention to verbal/visual clues and solve the puzzles to move forward.TROPHIES:The trophies in this game aren't too difficult to gather. Several are story related and can be earned by finishing each episode, and there are a few hidden ones that can only be unlocked by meeting certain combat conditions (defeating 400 enemies, using all Pressen types, etc). There are also several memory mixing trophies to earn. A majority of the trophies are combat related and can be earned with one or two playthroughs of the game.PROS:As previously mentioned, I loved the memory mixing. It was fun to jump inside someone's mind and cause them to remember past events differently. Some of the memory elements wouldn't change things very much, while others were pivotal to completing the task. I liked interacting with each element and seeing how it affected the target's memories.In regard to the collectibles, there's a lot to find. The game advises us to find SAT patches and Focus boosts to power up our character, and picture clues are left around the levels for us as hints. The scaramechs are a little harder to find, some of these might require a lookup online. Finding these items and earning certain trophies will unlocks concept artwork and 3D models.The combo system was pretty simple to use. By unlocking and combining Pressens, we could build longer chain attacks with massive damage, speedy cooldown times, and health regeneration. If the chain is broken, the full effect was lost.CONS:I was surprised to see the in-game movies and chapter introductions couldn't be skipped. While I understand these are necessary going through the levels the first time, all it does is pad out the gameplay when you're trying to replay a level to find missing scaramechs or mnemist memories or SAT patches or Focus Boosts.While the combo system in this game is pretty unique and there were lots of combos to mix and match, I found myself only using a variation of the 3-hit combo throughout my first playthrough. I would start with Power Pressens to take out the harder enemies, switch to a healing Pressen midway through, rinse and repeat. None of the boss battles were particularly difficult; eventually the on-screen prompts gave hints if certain S-Pressens were needed to defeat a boss. If there were a lot of enemies on screen, it was rare to pull off anything higher than a 5 hit combo, even with dodging, because the enemies would swarm me.Finally, the ratio of fighting to memory mixing was horribly unbalanced. The fights felt bland and repetitive, and didn't change much throughout the course of the game. Once I figured out a particular enemy's weakness, the game degenerated into button mashing. The memory mixing, which was by far the most entertaining part of the game, only happened four times over the course of eight levels. I was hungry to twist the psyches of my enemies into oblivion with memory manipulations...and was left wanting.WHAT WOULD I HAVE IMPROVED?The game describes Nilin as an elite memory hunter, which suggests she's been doing this for a long time. However, we never get to see her at the top of her game, save for one flashback. There was an opportunity here to show past memories of her sneaking into corporate offices and convincing CEO's to sell their companies after remixing their attitudes. She could have bribed public officials by threatening to expose torrid affairs, which never actually happened, because she implanted them in their minds. Or, she could have mixed the memories of random citizens to give her access to bonus side missions. Sadly, none of this is found in Remember Me.I also would have liked to see multiple endings - depending on who Nilin remixed, if the remixes were successful, if certain people were alive or dead, these factors could have branched into several storylines.FINAL VERDICT:I REALLY wanted to like this game, and I was expecting a anti-heroine like a character in a Philip K. Dick story. Unfortunately, Remember Me had several missed opportunities. The combat system was unique, but became boring rather quickly. The memory mixing should have been the central part of the game, instead of feeling like a last minute addition on top of a repetitive street brawler.This game is an entertaining rental, and PS3 trophy hounds won't have a problem getting an easy Platinum, but I wouldn't recommend Remember Me for ownership until the price drops down.
Reviewed in the United States on August 19, 2013
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UniqueLikeEveryoneElse
Gorgeous and memorable ;)
Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on October 10, 2013Platform For Display: PlayStation 3Verified Purchase
Mike
Excelente. Enviado en tiempo y forma.
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Mario
Its nice.
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OFF
Interesante
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Noel Joestar
welcome to Neo-France!
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