Remember Me is a game about a badass (!) non-white (!!) woman (!!!) named Nilin who lives in Neo-Paris – a futuristic city built on the ruins of the former French capital, which was bombed all to hell. She free solo climbs all over the place because this new city was constructed in such a way that makes it impossible to get around otherwise. She’s also an outstanding fighter, taking down the numerous cops out to get her and the weird mole people of the undercity with the sort of moves that could easily be interpreted in dance.
These are the skills she uses to get back at the folks who put her in a prison and attempted to steal her memories. See, the world of Neo-Paris is more or less run by a company called Memorize, which deals in memories. Everybody in the city has this weird digital thing on the back of their necks, and through these ports they can exchange, sell or buy memories. As you wander the city, you’ll notice there are even ATM-style machines that offer cash for memories. This a memory-obsessed society, and there is a subculture of folks called Memory Hunters, who can steal memories from their targets. Nilin is one of those, but she’s special. Allegedly, she is the only person in the Remember Me world who can go into a person’s memory and change it.
Wait wait wait. What is this game about again? This is a game about fighting dudes and climbing on stuff? Well, the story isn’t about that, but since you do spend probably all but like thirty minutes in the game doing those things, I should be forgiven for being confused. Four times in Remember Me, you go into a person’s head, view a specific memory and play a trial-and-error game where you change things about it until it plays out in the way Nilin wants it to. This is a fun, unique type of gameplay, and seeing the different consequences of changing all the different things is a lot of fun.
In between those parts, you spend hours walking down linear corridors and climbing on things according to the path that the game declares for you – there’s a little icon that pops up to show you where to go and there are never any alternatives to this path – and fighting hand-to-hand with numerous enemies. Dontnod created a pretty compelling combat system for these fights that takes the Arkham Asylum style and twists it around a bit, but I don’t really care about that. It turns out every fight is the same, and most of them feel arbitrary. I should also point out that Nilin is built more like an airbrushed Rosie Huntington-Whitely than Gina Carano, and so maybe I didn’t quite buy that punching a guy wearing full-body armor and a helmet would have worked out too well for her. But I digress.
To be sure, Remember Me most certainly offers something new, but the new is drowned out by Dontnod bowing to the perceived mainstream expectation of what a AAA game is. The primary experience here is something you can get from other games, and you have to grind through all that to get to the cool new stuff. And in the end Remember Me amounts to a movie’s worth of content with all the traveling between key locations thrown in to make room for the AAA staples.
It’s not like the core gameplay isn’t reasonably enjoyable – it’s fine, really – but it frankly sucks that the ability that defines Nilin is shoved into the background while the game instead turns her into just another generic protagonist who is good at beating the crap out of people and can climb as much as she wants without getting tired. Perhaps there was only so much convention that Remember Me could reasonably be expected to buck, and having a black woman as the hero used all that up.
With Remember Me, Dontnod took a compelling gameplay concept – memory remixing – and stuck it on the edges of a generic AAA game template. Some would say it’s baby steps, but I just come away wishing the compromises made for the sake of a decent budget were a bit less one-sided.
