It Won’t Take Long For You to Forget About Remember Me
Remember Me: The PXL8 Review
It’s never fun to play a game that feels like it’s holding out on you. On paper, everything about Remember Me suggests the game should be a polished,original experience. Despite integrating systems designed to reward a little variation within the normally restrained action game mechanics, the most interesting ideas in Remember Me are relegated to menus and minigames. Meanwhile, the majority of the game is stuck in an extremely repetitive gameplay loop, even by beat-em-up standards.
In the dystopian cyberpunk future of Remember Me, the corporation Memorize offers the citizens of Neo Paris the ability to alter their memories, replacing their worst experiences with someone else’s happy thoughts. The experience is even more destructive than it sounds: The incredibly addictive pastime widens the divide between rich and poor to epic proportions. Worse still,the long-term neurological side effects of stripping one’s mind has created a race of violent sub-human “leapers” that roam the city’s slums.
Enter Nilin, a “memory hunter” with the unique ability to “remix” memories—changing aspects of a memory, altering their influence on every thought since, Inception-style. Imprisoned and stripped of her own memory, Nilin is told she was once an “Errorist,” a freedom fighter dedicated to taking down the morally bankrupt Memorize.
Despite her unique talent, Nilin spends most of Remember Me fighting the man the old fashioned way, pummeling everyone that gets in her way. Yes, most of this game is an incredibly straightforward brawler, split between Uncharted-style climbing and simple, but combo-intensive combat.
“Split” may not be the right word—The climbing is mostly limited to finding collectibles, with some occasional switch-hunting and puzzle solving. Combat bears the lion’s share of the load, so to keep it feeling fresh, Remember Me uses the Combo Lab system, which imbues Nilin’s combos with passive bonuses called “pressens.” Each successful attack in a string incurs a bonus—adding damage, healing, or reducing the cooldowns on Nilin’s special “S-Pressen” attacks. Players can change the effects of their combo any time, optimizing their moves for different situations. An early boss, for example,can only damaged by a certain “S-Pressen,” so it makes sense to switch your combos to focus on reducing cooldowns, allowing you to do damage more often, more quickly.
The Pressen system uses personal strategy and foresight to add depth to combat. Allowing players to customize combos to compliment their style of play incentivizes learning how to play the game well without enforcing the brutality of forcing inexperienced players against a brick wall the second the training wheels come off. The most interesting battles push players to read situations and adjust their strategy, emphasizing the need for one kind of buff or another, in ways most beat-em-ups rarely achieve.
After taking the time to prepare for battle, however, the moment-to-moment gameplay feels extreme simplistic. With only four combos in the whole game, playing Remember Me feels like learning “Chopsticks,” a simple template that offers a measure of self-satisfaction the first time you get it right, but doesn’t stimulate or reward like a real piece of music. No matter how often you mix those Pressens, you’re still pressing the same the buttons over and over with little variation.
The game’s enemies don’t do much to spice things up. Many of the game’s advanced enemies were designed in tandem with Nilin’s S-Pressen abilities, providing clear “lock and key”scenarios. Robots can’t be punched, but there’s an ability that’s used almost exclusively to take them down. Another enemy can cloak, rendering them invincible until players can use the specific S-Pressen made to reveal them. By the end, most enemies can’t be taken down by standard combat, forcing players to spend time battering enemies fruitlessly until they can employ the correct solution.
Those problems wouldn’t feel as glaring if the battles didn’t last quite so long. Many fight sequences throw multiple waves of enemies leading to long, drawn out battles that feel more like they’re meant to stall players’ progress than keep you them entertained. With such a limited number of combos, players will end up pressing the same few strings of buttons.
The game’s tedious combat sections feel doubly misguided, given that there’s an interesting and fun alternative already built into the game. Though they are few and far between, Nilin’s memory remixing sequences are well-placed and serve as an effective narrative tool, keeping the player involved during narrative-heavy moments that would normally be explained in passive cutscenes.
The remix is basically a logic puzzle: Players watch a memory and change various minor details that, through cause and effect, change how the scene plays out. Like an adventure game, the fun isn’t just in solving the puzzle, but tweaking the scene every which way to illicit a wide range of possible outcomes.
In more ways than one, Remember Me is a game about compromise. The narrative reduces down to a fable suggesting players remember you have take the good with the best. The innovative gameplay systems baked into a repetitive, often-bland beat-em-up show that there may room for innovation in even the most well-trodden territory. In this case, unfortunately, compromise doesn’t make a holistic game, but instead undermine a couple of bolder, riskier ideas that, under different circumstances, could have been the used to make something great.
