Remember Me wasn’t all that forgettable

Nilin’s pretty gorgeous!

I remember seeing the trailer and thinking “that sounds like a really cool game!”. A year later, I knew most of the people were disappointed about what Remember Me proved to be in the end, but I still got it on Steam Summer Sale because I want it to see for myself how bad this game was.

In Remember Me you play as a female protagonist named Nilin (why is it so important that she’s a FEMALE, always makes me wonder), who wakes up in a facility with almost all her memories erased and gets saved by the mysterious man called Edge (I smell a plot twist). Being such a strong and independent woman, Nilin still remembers some things, her memory isn’t totally gone, so she manages to remember how to punch people in the face, which leads her out of the sewers and into the beautiful neo-Paris. Hint: it’s not actually that pretty.

–The Combat–

Punching people brings us to the combat. In the world of Remember Me, every human being has a brain implant called Sensen, which allows other people to hack your brain and change your memories, access codes or even kill you. Why would anyone want that, you ask? Because Sensen can also help you forget painful memories, relive happy ones like they were yesterday and ultimately makes a great Credit Card. Only 2 years-worth of memories? I’ll have that dress please!

Nilin is one of the fighters in the Resistance, a secret organization that wishes the Sensen empire – Memorize – turned to ashes making it its goal to release all the memories back into the world. So guess what Nilin’s last mission will be? Yep, you got it!
The combat was probably one of the most awkward parts of the game, but with beautiful martial arts moves and very cool combo landing music. Nilin can perform combos using pressens, which are of 4 types – Damage, Healing, Cooldown and Chain. You can guess what the first 2 do. The Cooldown one is used to reduce cooldowns on your special abilities, which have to be used wisely in boss fights, while the Chain one is used to multiply the effect of the last pressen used. Meaning that if you combo is Something-Damage-Chain-Something, the Chain one will re-do the Damage one with multiplied effect, based on its position in the Combo. The further away it is, the more effective the Pressen is.

Your combos are only fist/leg moves, which means Left-Click and Right Click. That’s right, your combos are basically a bunch of clicks in a specific order. No order, no fun. Having a successful combo gets harder as you progress in the game, as more difficult enemies will arrive, usually in packs/herds, and getting hit by someone will interrupt your combo. You can also dodge the enemies, which makes the combat a lot of going back and forth trying to avoid getting hit.

While this part of the combat is particularly annoying by nature, making it not so PC friendly, the use of the other special abilities requires some thinking, along with actually designing your combos to suit your needs. Sometimes you will need to use your abilities super-often, or the enemies will reflect back damage, so you need to carefully position your pressens in the combos in order to make the best of them.

The combat is not that bad, all in all, giving you some sort of freedom on how you wish to approach the enemies and being quite fun in the end, if your memory serves you well for those combos and you’re quick on your feet! You can be invisibile and sneak to bring down powerful enemies with one Sensen overload, trick droids to take your side, stun massive amounts of enemies and more.

There are also Quick time events which reminded me of Tomb Raider or the older Prince Of Persia boss fights.

–Story setting and atmosphere–

Moving on to the story and universe of the game, it has its pro and cons. The game looks good, with a lot of orange in it, but that’s ok, Deus Ex had yellow as its favorite. The Cons are mostly about not having much room to move around, and constantly getting guidance from your Sensen as to where to jump and go. Mind you, you can’t go anywhere else even if you want to. With a few exceptions if you are on a collectible hunting mode. So think of it as the opposite of open-world games. Restriction is the key word here!

While the game does very poorly at this chapter, whatever you do come to see is pretty marvelous. The giant newscast billboards have the Bioshock brainwashing-vibe, while great stores selling everything you would ever want to for your memories makes you wonder how far would humanity actually go? The game explores some morality questions, especially with its “Mix and match” sequences where you rewrite someone’s memories to either kill them or make them your allies. Throughout the game Nilin starts remembering part of her life and begins to wonder if she isn’t, in fact, what she thought she was. The end-game will find her facing her father, who, in a desperate attempt to keep his daughter happy and shield her from the wrongs in the world partially erases her memories during her childhood and with it probably, the REAL Nilin. She will also face her mother, but no spoilers here!

The end-game boss is the most surprising. It’s a sentient AI born from all the unhappy memories of all the people who traded their memories or just wanted them erased. Imagine that. An intelligence who has to live with all the suffering in the world. Not so pretty, ain’t it?

Remember Me will make you question humanity’s fate. It will make you shiver at the thought of dehumanization that’s partly begun in our times due to the technologic boom. It will make you look around and think “Thank God we’re not there! (not yet anyway)”.