You might have heard of Remember Me. It's the game that got a tiny bit of publicity for struggling to find a publisher based on the fact the protagonist is female. (See here for more details: http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/03/20/remember-me-publisher-female-hero/) Eventually, it found a publisher and very quietly was released. It was still a smaller game and came out with little noise. Never meant to be a bigger release, how does it ultimately stack up as a game?
Well, there's really nothing about it that would merit the kind of apprehension the publishers gave it. As a game, it's totally fine. It's nothing amazing and borrows a lot of elements from other games, but it's a fun, interesting, short little game, probably better than half the crap that gets published and put out there.
You play as Nilin, a memory hunter in the future of Paris where the world has become addicted to the capturing and trading of memories. Somehow, they've managed to create technology that can remove, add, or alter a person's memories. The goal was to remove sorrow and misery, but it turned into something more. Nilin awakens in a prison where many of her memories have been removed and she is about to become "repurposed." She is broken out by the mysterious resistance leader, Edge.
You run through La Bastille and the broke, poverty-struck regions of neo-Paris, lit by bright neon lights and littered with garbage and "memory addicts." It's a bleak and sad concept of the future, but it makes sense. The people in power, controlling memories, are slowly altering and manipulating the people. Meanwhile, the broken down, poor are stuck without their memories and desperate for anything they can get. In one moment, you walk past an addict begging for "one more hit of a happy memory." Stuck in the bowels of the city and abandoned by the government and society around them, these people are desperate for a happy memory. In essence, the technology created to fight misery has instead created more.
With Edge guiding you through the missions, often speaking in riddles and poems, you struggle to get a grasp on what exactly is going on while frustratingly questioning the motives. With no sense of who you were and are, you must also find your own memories. Slowly, Nilin's backstory is filled in as she steals memories from high ranking officials, and the game ends with a few big revelations, namely that your parents are ultimately behind everything and that Edge is the supercomputer where all memories are stored. He's contained all of the worst memories that he has himself grown miserable and desperately wants Nilin to "kill him." We've seen these kinds of "twists" before, where the mysterious person who seems on your side is ultimately the villain, but here, Edge isn't a villain for villainy's sake. He's manipulating you with the intent that you kill him, knowing that by killing him, everyone else will be better off. It's a nice twist on the "big twist" ending and makes it much more interesting and compelling than the twist in say, BioShock.
Still, the story is shaky at times. Late in the game especially, it starts to feel a bit rushed with the big "connections" being a bit forced. More could have been made of Nilin's search for herself, although her doubt of Edge's goals was a welcome plot element.
The story is interesting and the it's got a cool visual look to the world. The gameplay itself is fine too. It's essentially a beat-em-up game. You fight enemies with punches, kicks, and combos. As you gain experience, you unlock "Pressens." Pressens are basically the buttons you can assign to combos. There are a variety of different kinds - damage, cooldown, and healing. The combos are always the same, but how the impact your character during combat varies upon how you assign them. If a combo were X-Y-Y, you would customize the two Ys in the combo. If you unlock a Y from the Pressens section and a Y from the damage Pressens, you could customize that so that when you perform the X-Y-Y combo, the second Y regenerates a little health and the third Y in the combo would do a little more damage and break through blocking enemies. There isn't much variety in the combos themselves, but it's up to you to determine the order of the Pressens in them. Cool down and health Pressens wind up being the most helpful.
Additionally, you gain special abilities (called S-Pressens). When you hit and get hit by enemies, your Focus Bar builds up. Gaining enough focus allows you to perform S-Pressen attacks. Most of them are primarily for use against special enemies, but a couple of them are very helpful against the normal foes. To add to it, you eventually get the use of the "spammer," which is essentially a gun that shoot digital data to overload enemies and destroy structural weaknesses in the levels.
Combat isn't overly complicated, but the game doesn't throw anything out. Every tactic you are introduced to throughout the game is important to keep in mind all the way to the end. Often, they throw you into scenarios that require you to use every technique you've learned. It can get a little frustrating at times, especially when swarmed by enemies who seem to know where you're going to dodge to before you do, but it means that you can't just button mash and hope to clear the level. You need to pay attention, dodge appropriately, and use every ability at your disposal. Nothing gets tossed out the window. This is especially true of boss fights which always test your grasp on the whole system. This might actually be an area where the game stands out from other fare. Often times, games don't require you to use the whole combat system. You can get by with a limited grasp on it. Here, you can't skate by just knowing combos.
The levels are rather straight forward. People would likely complain about the missions being too linear, but I've never had much of a problem with linearity. Giving some diversity in paths is certainly preferable, but I tend to prefer things a little bit more linear when it comes to gaming. There are secret packages hidden throughout each level which requires exploration, and there are strange parasite looking objects you can collect that require searching for, but more or less, you go from point A to point B. When you're not engaged in combat, you spend most of your time climbing things and leaping across rooftops.
There's an intriguing narrative element to the gameplay as well: remixing memories. Every so often, you can essentially hack a person's brain and alter their memories. When this happens, you watch a scene and then go through the scene rewinding and forwarding slowly until you find "glitches" in the memories. You can then change that aspect of the memory to get an entirely new ending to the scene. This doesn't change anything in "real life," of course, but it does impact all of the characters you encounter. It's eventually revealed that your big crime was changing someone's memory to thinking that he had killed his wife. His sorrow and guilt drives him to commit suicide. In reality, his wife is still alive. It's an interesting dynamic to the narrative of the game and it can be fun - if at times frustrating - to see all of the different ways you can impact a person's memory.
Ultimately, the feels like an amalgamation of different things. The gameplay is very reminiscent of Arkham Asylum and Uncharted, with hints of BioShock. The story and narrative is reminiscent of Assassin's Creed and Mirror's Edge with a hint of BioShock. And the visual look seems inspired in part by Blade Runner and Mirror's Edge. This isn't to say it brings nothing new to the table though. It does introduce its own unique elements to the equation; it's just that the influences feel a bit obvious.
I must admit, I thought it was just ok at first. It's by no means a bad game, but it's not particularly great either. It's fun and challenging at the same time, and at times the plot is a bit contrived. Some of the characters are dropped almost immediately after introductions and a couple of the chase sequences take forever to figure out. There are some good puzzles spread throughout though and the combat is fun.
It's disingenuous to credit this game at all for simply ignoring gender roles in gaming. As a game, it stands up perfectly fine on its own. There's no real reason a game like this should struggle to find a publisher, and it's a shame to think that elements of Nilin's backstory were cut do make male gamers feel "more comfortable." Still, the game does give female characters their time. Apart from Nilin as the protagonist, you get a few other critical female characters in key roles. Many of the characters - male or female - aren't given the attention and depth they deserve, but it's nice to see a game treat gender as no big deal.
The more I reflect on this game though, the more I must admit that I really liked it. It's not just a blatant rip off of other things, even if their influences are clear. And it brings a fresh new take on a few game and narrative conventions. The game is ultimately a bit too short, with characters being a bit glossed over to really be a great game. It's not a "must-play," but it is definitely a solid game.
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