Hard to Forget – Remember Me Review

Thanks to social media, almost everything in our lives is broadcasted. There are over one billion active users on Facebook putting pictures over the internet for family and friends, over 340 million daily “tweets” through Twitter, and lets not forget the ever increasing post with social sites like Reddit and Tumblr. We willingly share everything with people around the world through these sites, but we really fail to capture the moment of something important in our lives, how we feel.

In 2084 this barrier will be broken by a multi-billion dollar company called Memorize, who have built a brain implant called the Sensation Engine (Sensen), this allows 99% of people to upload and share their memories over the net, using their brain as a full on hard-drive. People can choose what memories that they want to keep and get rid of the painful ones, even to the point of buying new memories. However there is a price, that is your freedom, everything is uploaded directly into the Memorize severs, memories can be altered, erase and lost at any point and time if they so feel like it.  This sparks the freedom fighter group called “The Errorists” who fight to stop Memorize from doing this by using their own technology against them.

This is the world that Dontnod entertainment has created for us for their new game Remember Me. A 3rd person Action Adventure title that focus on Nilin, a Memory Remixer and Errorist who is put into jail for a crime she doesn’t remember. Remember tackles the a hard hitting subject that we hardly see in games, invasion of privacy (seems it couldn’t come out a better time then.) Nilin can steal memories, wipe them from existence and remix it to make people believe what they want. Throughout the story, Nilin will learn and master these techniques in an attempt to take down the corporation and retrieve her stolen memories.

Remember Me’s gameplay is standard for the action adventure genre, with heavy focus on platforming and combat. Nilin is a skilled climber and is able to scale the building around Neo-Paris with ease, this is essential for getting away from the police and various other baddies that stand in your way. The mechanic is simple and the heads-up display help with moving around the world, highlighting various climbable edges and long jumps so that you never actually feel lost in the game. Combat, however, is a little more tricky.

Remember Me takes combat hints from Clover Studio’s GodHand, in which you are given a list of attacks and have to fill in the information with attacks. Remember Me simplifies this this by giving you a set string of combos that link light and heavy combinations, you take the animations given for those light and heavy strikes and place it in to make your own combos. There is a real strategy to picking these animations though, with attacks being able to heal, deliver more power, activate a cool down or give additional power to the move before it.

You can access your combat guide at any time to switch up the animations and make Nilin deadly for those situations, in some cases you can create a vicious combination of power attacks, only to change it up to allow for a more healing or cooldown style attacks to deal with bosses or traps. Speaking of Cooldown, Nilin has 5 Sensen attacks that can help deal with multiple opponents which uses up a charge bar, these attacks tend to help out in the difficult battles and are strictly used in boss battles.

One of the new features in the game is the ability to remix memories, this happens at key points in the story, where Nilin needs to remix the memories of those around her to get what she wants. These scenes are absolutely amazing with the exception that they are extremely dark and twisted. In one Remix, you have to remix girls memory so that her husband died in a memory transplant surgery, another you force a man to kill his wife in his memory in order to force him to suicide.  I do have a couple complaints about these scenes, mainly with the fact that there are few and far between, and that the actual controls are (while meant to give you the ability to pin point exactly what you want to change) are difficult to use.

An interesting point I’d like to bring up about this game is Nilin does not kill people directly, all attacks that disables your opponents are based around overloading memories to knock them out and stun them. Firearms that are used against you cause a one hit kill to keep a sense or realism, which is a nice touch.

Visually the game is amazing, with cool pop ups happening when you come around shops and dangerous enemies appearing thanks to your Sensen implant, which gives some boss battles a real sense of danger. From the cool visual ques of memory glitches to the screaming hunter robots, the game is full of awesome imagery that really sell the game.

Remember Me gives the feeling of a Luc Besson film, it has cool quick fights with strong imagery and a compelling story that is on par with movies like District 13, The Fifth Element and Taken. The game seems to borrow heavily from his films and his style, and it works extremely well. While it does have it’s problems, Remember Me is a hard-hitting new IP that we hope to see much more of.