Remember me. Forget-me[-not]

I expected nothing of Remember me. Later I looked at it again and acknowledged that it looked nice, but it still felt boring. When it came out all reviews were showing that my predictons were right and I almost forgot that it existed. But then I heard several excited opinions on the game and it got me curious. When I learned that the soundtrack was done by Olivier Derivière I got even more interested, since his soundtracks never disappoint and are consistently beautiful. Then i played the game and it wasn’t particularly great. Then I completed it.

I should start with what even those who didn’t like the game in general praised – it does look good. Not technologically amazing or anything, but stylistically. Sure, it borrows concepts from Mirror’s Edge,  Portal, Assassin’s Creed or even Mass Effect visually, but that doesn’t matter. The developers wanted to make the game look really pretty and they succeeded. And the soundtrack was as fantastic as I’ve expected. I mean, Olivier is probably one of only 2 (along with Jessica Curry) video game composers working with a choir or an orchestra, who know how to make them sound memorable and fantastic. Most people just make “generic cinematic orchestral score” and call it a day.

What is also interesting, though deeply flawed, is the combat system, which takes up around 80 percent of the game. It’s based on something similar to Batman: Arkham Asylum or Warrior Within, but also with more precise combos and the ability to build combos yourself. In reality, it’s not that free – there are only 4 combinations to pick from, but the kicker is that each combination can give you bonuses. And if you keep the combo going it will get more damaging, will start healing you get other potential bonuses. And it’s a cool idea, yet in practice what it leads to is not a fluid combat where you constantly invent combinations. Instead you just make a combo that works in every single situation and stick with it throughout the whole game. In addition, combos only really properly work when fighting a single opponent and they break for a lot of reasons, not all of which make sense. So the combat becomes a drag and special abilities don’t make it more fun, rather it’s occasionally required but mostly it’s just there to make things go slightly faster.

Despite the flaws, this combat system could be good enough for the game and simply let other things shine. Issue is – there’s nothing else to shine. It looks good, it sounds good, combat is serviceable and that’s it – despite the title, it’s one of the most forgettable and primitive titles I’ve played in recent years. It constantly feels like a game on the same level as Hydrophobia, except made with a bigger team and bigger budget. Primitive level design, primitive “puzzles”, primitive platforming. Completely pointless usage of the “memory remixing” concept that’s shown as something creative, but in reality is just one correct sequence you must combine while watching lots of tiny pointless cutscenes.

And this story… Every single time any character opens their mouth, my only reaction is “shut up!”. It’s a pretty easy tell that the story is shit. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a story this bad, this badly told and this badly written dialogues. While playing the game, I was reminded of Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, a game that I really like. It also has a very simple story and is full of very predictable dramatic moments and tropes. Yet, it’s told through characters that you grow to like and care about and voila – you care about the story as well. Remember me is about as emotional as looking at a grocery list and it’s characters perform worse than actors in a cheap porno. Just disgusting.

In addition to all that, you get a particularly “fun” type of tutorial messages that kill the pacing. Get robot enemies which can only be damaged via terribly controlled “firearms”. Get a really shitty take on the Dead Space telekinesis, which is then overused for no reason at all despite how terrible it is. Oh, and you also get QTE finishers and there’s a fight at one point with two exactly same enemies and you have to finish both of them off using the same sequence, which includes the main character getting punched in the exact same way. And it just doesn’t stop.

Remember me could’ve turned out to be something good. It has a good story setup, good visual style… It’s just that the developers didn’t seem to know what to do with all that. Lacking experience and will to do something of their own they just copied concepts from other games without really understanding why things they copied worked in other games. I guess, they expected to somehow make it all work in the end. It didn’t. So, do listen to the soundtrack of the game if you get a chance, but playing the game itself? Not worth it at all.