Remember Me Title Splash
When I first heard of Remember Me, a game by Capcom and Dontnod, I know I liked the concept of it. It had a female lead. It was an interesting concept. Then…I kind of forgot about it. So recently, Steam had the game on sale, half off, which coincided with the game also getting a nice little reduction in price, half off. So, I picked it up. And I’m glad I did. I am very glad I did.
Nilin
You play as Nilin, who escapes after having most of her memory wiped for being a criminal. As the story goes on, you learn that Nilin was an Errorist, a group of Memory Hunters who believed that memory manipulation and erasures wasn’t a good thing and were using the tech to show how bad it could be. You learn that Nilin was the best and after a job, The storyline takes you through the elite areas of Neo-Paris all the way down to the truly forgotten areas of Neo-Paris. There is a great deal of back story explaining the history and how Paris became Neo-Paris.
Fire Underground
Graphically this game is gorgeous. Sometimes the people seem a little, shiny but the game is beautiful. It does wonderful juxaposition of the slums with the high-end tech corporations. (As seen below). I was mesmerized by this game the first time through, seeing all the ways they graphically represented this world. They easily made it so I didn’t want to go into the darker areas, fearing to be attacked by the ‘leapers’, people who’ve been so far gone on their memory issues that it’s impossible to say they’re human anymore. Look at the fire in the above image, that is some of the best fire I’ve seen in a game.
Old, New and Forgotten
I do have a knock on the combat of Remember Me. It felt, clunky, which could simply be because I’m a keyboard and mouse PC player. I didn’t try unearthing my controller and playing, mostly because I am running out of USB ports. On the mouse, you use left click to punch and right click to kick. However to string combos you had to remember your ‘Pressens’ or known combos and I couldn’t do that. I just hit things. A lot. Of course, as the game moved on, you unlocked things like a logic bomb, which is similar to a concussion grenade by overloading the Sensen (how memories are accessed). You have the ability for a DDOS attack which stuns nearly everyone and lets you whale on them for a few seconds. As the game progressed, I really relied on those more than the combos.
Another aspect of the game, which I felt was underutilized, was Nilin’s ability to remix memories. You only use it, maybe, once per chapter, and I think even then it’s less than that. You have the ability to recreate memories so that the person remembers it differently, affecting how they view you, the world and even their actions. I felt it was a unique aspect of the ame that the developers could have utilized even more than they did. They do play with the ability to ‘download’ someone’s memories and then accessing it to remember ways through areas, ways through puzzles in the game but again, it felt more like an add on and not an everyday aspect of who Nilin was.
Forgotten Past
Overall, I did enjoy this game. It was well written, gorgeous and for me, it did raise a lot of questions about how technology can advance and what boundaries do we make? The idea of the brain becoming an organic hard drive and being easily erasable, and controlled, and not necessarily by yourself, but by, really anyone with the know how, is an interesting one. How does the world adjust and cope? How does the human brain deal with the loss of memories? What happens to those memories we delete or rewrite?
Neo-Paris
Remember Me
- Story – 9
- Playability – 7
- Visual Appeal – 9
- Overall – 8.5
The Tyger's Playground 