Review: Remember Me

French developer DONTNOD’s debut game is a violent clash of new and old, it’s a shame then that when I say old in this context I mean it’s almost archaic.

Remember Me is an ambitious game and I feel that should be rewarded.  The narrative is a frankly brilliant idea but sadly the game itself is a jumble of old design ideas that had seemingly been dispensed with years ago or newer concepts that other games have done much better.

The graphics are gorgeous – and Paris is well fleshed out for the story

The game is set in Paris in the year 2084 where M3morize, a multi-national corporation with Paris as it’s global HQ has taken over the tecnology market with it’s device the Sensen, which, as the games opening cutscene informs you, allows you to pick and choose exactly what you remember.  The device also allows for memories to be implanted which has led to a split in society (something that I mean quite literally.) The idea itself is great and one I was keen to play with after the glorious episode of Black Mirror which had a similar theme.  Sadly the developer only dipped it’s toes into the pool of the possibilities this story could bring.  Remember Me has one of the finest cyberpunk dystopias I’ve ever seen in a game, rivaling other recent games with a similar aesthetic (such as Deus Ex: Human Revolution) for the world’s beauty and depth.  The world is crisp and sharp and as you explore the world there is a feeling that everything there has it’s own story to tell.

This is one of the MANY railings in remember me that is one-directional

It’s a shame then that the level design almost actively prohibits exploration.  You may have seen some of the early game play demos where Nilin has options and seemed to have the ability to explore this future version of Paris in any way she sees fit.  That is not the case anymore.  The game is almost frustratingly linear and early levels before the shit hits the fan doors slam closed loudly behind you preventing you from exploring the area further.  One step down the wrong path and you are denied upgrades to your health, your focus or just XP which is used to unlock pressens – but more on that later.  This is a corridor platformer with parkour elements thrown into the mix, think Uncharted but with your path laid out before you by orange markers on every ledge you need to land on to progress.  Adding to the irritation is the fact that progression is often the non-obvious path, for a game that seemingly rewards exploration this seems counter intuitive at best (follow the obvious path to collect everything or actually explore to get locked out from heading back to where you were) in some cases the barrier against backtracking is nothing more than a railing, usually the very same railing you just hopped over in one direction but are unable to climb back over no matter how hard you try.  It’s little things like this that build up over the game’s duration that make it so frustrating.

The combat is, uh, the combat is ok? It’s hard to feel strongly either way, it sometimes feels too easy and then (since it’s a capcom game and there must be at least one moment in every level that makes you want to embed your controller in a wall) there are some fights that feel cheap.  Each enemy has a gimmick, the guy you can’t hit without taking damage, the guy who puts all of your special abilities on cooldown, the guy who is there for you to sponge health from, the invisible guy, the flying robot, the leaping exploding robot, the enemy that is invulnerable when there are other enemies nearby (that sometimes come in pairs – just to make your life even more annoying).  All have their unique counters and you have abilities called S-Pressens which you can use to neutralize some of the more irritating mechanics.  In all honesty if you are thinking of picking up this game purely for the combat don’t bother.  Arkham Asylum or Arkham City are bound to be on sale somewhere and the fighting in that is one of those S-Pressens I mentioned earlier.

The pressen combat system seems deep and meaningful but this is actually the extent of it.

Pressens are a strange beast.  Each regular pressen represents an attack, one button for punch and another for kick, they can be strung together in the ‘combo lab’ to create a unique set of attacks, only the punches and kicks are defined from the off and in my playthrough there were only four combos available (I used an Xbox 360 controller to play the game on PC) XXX, YXYXY, XYYXYY, YYYXXXXY each pressen has it’s benefits, red for damage, purple reduce cooldowns on your S-Pressens, yellow gives you health (?!) and blue gives you a multiplier on the previous attack, the further along the combo the more powerful the effect and the first button was just a regular punch or kick.  The game professes this is deep combat but in reality each combo is easy enough to cheese.

XXX became my OH SHIT combo, with health and a multiplier

YXYXY became my boss fight combo, filled to the brim with cooldowns since each boss requires at least 2 S-Pressens in quick succession to hurt them.

XYYXYY was the allround combo with two chains at the end to magnify damage, this took down 90% of the enemies in the game with one or two goes around

YYYXXXXY was all damage and chains and was reserved for the ‘tough’ enemies, by which I mean the enemies that needed more than two sets of the previous combo to kill

So yeah, really deep combat there.  A few minutes of trial and error and the only fights that were non-trivial were the fights where the game threw three or four WAVES of enemies at you, with more and tougher enemies in each successive wave.

Also as this is a capcom game there are boss fights galore, complete with health bars and gimmicks that would not be out of place in a mega man game.  One boss in particular has a series of ‘clones’ hit three of them and she’s invulnerable and you’re facing another wave of goons until you can get at her.  There is a trick to the fight but fuck you if you want a hint of any kind the game will gleefully let you die over and over until you figure it out yourself.  All I will say is that the S-Pressens are horrendously over-powered (except for the one that makes the fighting a little bit fun) and are phenominally useful for every boss (except for the one that makes fighting fun, or the one that allows you to go invisible, or the one that turns robots on their allies) well, two of them are useful.

The game does a good job of introducing it’s gameplay elements (there are LOADS of them by the way but I’m already over 1000 words and I’ve not really talked about the story yet.) in the context of the game and trickles them out to you across seven of the games eight levels (there is a ninth but it’s pretty much a long cutscene followed by the final boss).

One thing that I should talk about is the camera, it is 2013 and yet here I am discussing the camera.  Why are walls around the small combat zones getting in the way?  One fight was frustratingly difficult as the signals to counter your opponent were hidden behind a wall, just like the actual opponent.  I didn’t ‘die’ many times during the game but this one particular fight was ridiculous and something that was made unnecessarily more difficult because of a camera from the N64.

The memory remix segments are fantastic and make this game worth playing

The unique selling point of Remember Me is the Memory Remix.  These sections are truly great, a challenging puzzle that really does make you think about what effect tiny details will have on a scene.    You have to rewind and re-watch these short memories multiple times to catch all of the things that you can change and it is well worth making the effort to play with everything, there are some of the games best moments that stem from these parts of the game.  It is a shame then that these sequences of the game only appear four times, four times in a nine hour game, the promotional material made them seem like they’d be a focus.  They’re important plot points sure, but they’re not the driving force behind the games mechanics.  At best they’re a distraction from the mundane corridors the game is consistently railroading you down.

Also worth noting is the story, I’ve already talked about the vibrancy of the setting but there is more to it than that.  The plot moves along nicely and although it occasionally gets bogged down in some dull melodrama there are a couple of twists and turns that I genuinely never saw coming, others however were screamingly obvious from a very short distance into the game.

Dontnod have created a great world in Remember Me.  They tried to make the best game they could, from one perspective you can understand the rationale behind a lot of the decisions they’ve made but ultimately Remember Me is nothing more than a derivative mess.  You want free flowing fast-paced combat, play the Arkham games.  You want free-roaming parkour, play Mirror’s Edge or Assassin’s Creed.  The reasons to play Remember Me are few, but they’re not ignorable.  This is a mess, but it’s not a bad game, it takes some bold gambles and although they don’t all pay off I’ve always believed that taking risks like dontnod seem to have tried to here is worth rewarding.

5/10