If there's ever been a game I've played that feels like it should be more open in structure, it's Remember Me. I don't necessarily mean it should be a fully open-world game, but it made me hope it would have felt far less linear than it is now.
Remember Me is a beat 'em up game, with a couple of puzzles in it. Yeah, I guess that would summarize the style of gameplay pretty well. The combat itself has four basic moves: you can hit, kick, evade and you can use your overload ability. The overload can fry your enemy. There are also 4 different special moves, which need to be recharged after each use. Also, at a later point in the game, you'll get a spammer gun that's useful in puzzle solving as well as in combat.
The grand idea behind the combat is, that you can customize the combo moves you do. You can make the hits and kicks help you heal up, cause more damage or help you reload your special moves a bit faster. It's all really straight forwarded and unlike in other beat 'em ups, the actual movement you can do in the battle are relatively limited.
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| The blue thingie in the back of the head is the memory access portal. Everyone has one, which is convenient for a memory messing errorist. |
In games like Tekken, Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter your movement matters. You move left and press a hit button, you'll do one kind of an attack, you move right and press the other hit button to do another kind. In Remember Me you just evade and press either hit or kick and you'll perform the move. It's really a simplified form of a brawling game really.
The puzzles are a nice distraction from the basic brawling. There are two kinds of puzzles: the kind that happens in the world environment, like a door opening puzzle, then there are the mind puzzles. Or memory puzzles, to be more precise. You play as an errorist agent, who can enter in other people's memories and remix them in order to force them to do stuff. It's pretty scary stuff when you think about it.
See, now I've come to the point of, why I'd love to have seen Remember Me as a more openly structured: there are so few of those remix puzzles. They're the most interesting thing about it. The whole thing fully lacks morals and is the worst kind of invasion of privacy. You can make people think they've killed their loved ones, twist their recollection of important things in their past. But now, the beef of the game is in the battle. Most of the time you just push forward in these nicely executed visions of futuristic Paris. Cyberpunk abounds.
It has a pretty well-written story as well and the voice acting is pretty solid. DontNod has the visual aspects well in hand. The art style is colourful and detailed and a lot of times I just wished I'd see more of it. That I'd be given more freedom to just explore the locations at my own leisure from different perspectives. But that didn't really happen, as most of the time you just are in a corridor, that leads you to another battle arena.
Don't get me wrong. It's not a bad game. It's pretty entertaining, but at the same time, it could have been so much more. It does prove though, that DontNod had interesting ideas even before Life Is Strange. They just couldn't fully pull it off.
If you want it, it's on Steam. It should be a solid buy with a proper discount.
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