Remember Me

Remember Me is a game I’ve had my eye on since the second trailer. Having seen its fluid and diverse combat, the game had my curiosity. After an hour’s trial, it had my attention (I watched Django Unchained again recently). It’s a decent game with all the ingredients of a great one.

The game has “TWIST!!!” written all over it; literally, Nilin is even twisting on the front cover to see you staring at her arse. Speaking of which, I played Beyond: Two Souls right after this and it was quite unnerving to suddenly control a character with such an extreme lack of buttocks. There’s a fat (ha! Paradox) chance Ellen Page is related to Nathan Drake. Remember Me’s story is also a little similar to Drake, it’s bound to destruction. Not just the environment, but characters too; you’ll be lucky (or thick) to play through the game without cringing. “This little red riding hood has a basket full of kick-ass!” is a genuine line of genuine dialogue genuinely said out loud by a genuine posh English woman. As I mention the posh voice, it is unsuitable for the character but by the time she says her first real sentence your belief will be suspended higher than the bridge in San Francisco. The story is interesting and neatly put together, if a little badly written. However,  the game doesn’t outstay its welcome by dragging for 40+ hours, it’s straight to the point if you don’t include the intervals where Nilin debates whether her actions are right. Such discussions are futile soliloquies since she does everything she’s told (what a rebel, I guess conformism is the new rebellion) and the player has basically no say. I was faced with the old existential quandary of ‘Nilin, wat r u doin? Nilin stahp.’  

The game is set in a world where Paris has fallen and risen as Neo Paris and where memories have become a commodity. It seems that everybody has a Sensen - a floating icon at the back of their neck that stores their memory - and nobody keeps pets except for robot servants. I haven’t found any confirmation that the Sensen service required a maintenance fee but in some ways it would seem so. People whose Sensens deteriorate become ghoulish creatures unable to form sentences or say anything positive, which is a bit of a downer. They also happen to be feral, which is sad but it gives you license to beat what’s left of a living shit in them. The world is well designed but not as interactive as it appears. There are hundreds of shops you can’t use and bars you can’t drink at. It does however paint a picture of a city that was very much alive until recently. What is left of it alive is the cast of fairly diverse characters, the most intriguing of which, Tommy Super Scarface (not actual name), doesn’t get explored. 

The entire world has a strong feel of 'under-budget' and the finished product looks more AA than AAA in certain cases. It seems to me that there was meant to be an open-world aspect to this game with its many shops and potential vendors but what we're left with in the end are just long corridors with a few secrets, much in Uncharted's vein. This could've been a thriving world exploring the growing rift between the ruling and working classes in the modern world. It could've highlighted the fact that the working classes are given many advanced commodities for their work but that only serves the ruling classes to keep them on a shorter leash. We could've explored just how important memory is to us as humans and how far people might go to keep it - becoming homeless, wearing found clothes and eating basically garbage, all in a quest to remain human. Instead we have a zombie-and-cop beat 'em up with a nice background. 

Every character has a distinct cyberpunk style with a distinct mix of denim and leather. I find Nilin’s design particularly intriguing. Nilin is an attractive, strong-willed, middle-class, mixed-race woman with a white father and a black mother and able to handle herself in a fight. Until you add that she has a scar on her face, you might as well be describing Aveline from Assassin’s Creed 3: Liberation, which was also written by a Frenchman. Nilin’s features are sharp and unforgiving but also feminine and warm. She has a tight frame but an unmistakably female bottom; her sharp face is capped off by big blue eyes. Nilin is a future tramp’s Lara Croft. Your enemies consist of several varieties of robots, Gollums and Judge Dredds. The last ones come equipped with shields, batons, electric suits and a helicopter. The Gollums come in three varieties: regular Gollum, lanky telekinetic Gollum and Uruk-Hai Gollum. The robots are flying and exploding, with the latter being male (which is another quasi-feminist point scored by the game). All of these enemies have different behavioural pattern and ways of being defeated which keeps the combat fairly fresh and intetesting. Some of the Gollums are invisible in the dark and others climb walls, meaning the combat gains another dimension, however repetitive and limited it may be.  

Which brings me grammatically incorrectly onto my next paragraph:  gameplay. Here’s where I really sell the game to you (you’re welcome, Capcom). Gameplay is where Remember Me shines the brightest and stands out the most. To begin with, there’s a bit of walking and running away between cut-scenes, after which the player gets to meet the best main feature nominee – combat. The combat is something between the Arkham series and Lollipop Chainsaw with a neat touch of Godhand. As you progress the story, you unlock template combos where you can slot your custom attacks known as Pressens. There are only five combos in total but the attacks come in four categories which still allows for some creativity. Firstly, you have your power Pressens which deal the most damage and if used in succession allow you to use a finishing move on some enemies or break the guard of others. Then, there are healing Pressens which recover health with each successful hit. Later on, you discover cooldown Pressens that speed up the cooldown of special abilities. And last but by far not least, you’ll come across chain Pressens. These take the effect of the preceding Pressen and double it. The later in the combo a Pressen is slotted and the more of the same category before it, the stronger its effects. The combos can be customised mid-combat allowing for flexible tactics as you alter your attacks’ effects on the fly dependent on your needs. While in combat, you also have the ability to dodge and continue your current combo input after dodging successfully because Nilin is such an artful dancer. There is a timing display at the bottom of the screen to guide you through your heavy hitting as button mashing won’t work, although I found that as much as looking at it helps with the timing, it’s too easy to lose sight of the battlefield. In practice, the combat is fluid, fast-paced and balanced (and fucking awesome). You unlock a number of special abilities to go with your Pressen combos which include a timed Logic Bomb, Fury which gives Nilin super strength but disables combos, a robot possession ability, a stun attack that reveals invisible enemies and invisibility that allows you to insta-kill one enemy. To balance against these, some enemies are immune to the stun and the abilities have various cooldown periods. There are, of course, boss fights and it wouldn’t be a triple-A title without quick time events and so each boss fight culminates in one – press X to kick Kid Xmas in the nuts, press Triangle to shove your nuts in his face, press O to fart in his ear (I only wish).

In between all the fighting, you get to meet the extras. There is actually a fair bit of platforming which falls somewhere between the Assassin’s Creed and the Uncharted type. All climbable ledges are clearly signed so you don’t get lost and other than the unchallenging scripted jumps there are billboards that turn and throw you down so you have to start over. Despite the free-running system’s apparent rigidness and lack of freedom, it is still possible to fall to your death if you try hard enough. Holding the platforming by the hand is Metal Gear Solid style sneaking where you run around freely just out of enemy’s sight, though the enemy is a bunch of automated sentries. There’s a below-Uncharted level of puzzling to be done here and there as well. The turn on electricity to walk through a puddle kind of puzzling. Which I suppose is just a couple of pegs below Capcom’s famed find a triangular object for a triangular keyhole type of puzzling.

And now for the best supporting feature nominee: memory manipulation. First and foremost, Nilin is able to claim others’ memories to help her on her quest to save the world, or at least what’s left of Neo-Paris. This allows her to play remembrances and follow the memory owner’s footsteps. You can’t just steal anybody’s memory, mind you; it’s a set piece which happens at predetermined stages of the game. This could’ve been an immensely interesting feature if it was implemented into organic gameplay but alas, it is not. The other, more interesting and inventive, memory manipulation feature is the star of the show (much like Dr Schultz in Django). At four points in the game you have the opportunity, or duty even, to remix people’s memories and alter their entire world view and personality. Again, it’s a feature that could’ve revolutionised gaming if it fit organically into gameplay but it only occurs at four set times in the game. Nilin is able to watch her victim’s memory and change small details with major repercussions. This serves as part of the game’s social commentary, suggesting that was one to alter a fine detail in an accident, blame could easily be shifted. A lot of the alterations you can make in the remixes have little or no impact, in fact most of them don’t mean much by themselves, but pick the right combination of memory bugs and you can bend your victim to your (the writers’) will.

Is Remember Me a great game? Did it ever stand a chance of being a great game? It’s not quite Arkham Asylum or Uncharted but it’s better than most of the shit that’s out there. It’s one I’ll remember fondly and hope somebody expands on its ideas.

Remember Me is: waking up hung-over and watching a video of yourself giving a heartfelt drunken speech and then doing some amazing acrobatics/10