REMEMBER ME Written by Samuel Gronseth
I picked up Remember Me on a whim.
I like to think my tastes are fairly broad, and I’ll enjoy most types of games if there’s something interesting and high-quality there. But I also have my personal interests, the kinds of games I’m more willing to give a shot just because it looks like something I’d enjoy. At a glance, Remember Me appealed to me on that kind of visceral level. Looking at the cover, it sort of made me think of Beyond Good and Evil, one of my all-time favorite games that has an extremely good reputation (and finally an upcoming sequel/ prequel thing) despite, still, no one seeming to have played it. A female protagonist set against a sci-fi background, a title that hints at something beneath the surface, a AAA release despite having heard little about it before or after it hit shelves. Even just seeing it on shelves, it felt like a sci-fi cult classic, and I was more than willing to give it a shot and see how it lived up to that first impression. What I didn’t realize at the time, of course, was that the developer behind Remember Me would eventually be famous for creating Life is Strange. Dontnod Entertainment became something of an industry darling after that, but their first game didn’t manage to catch fire the same way. In fact, Remember Me’s poor sales put Dontnod in a position of near-bankruptcy, forcing them to take public funding to continue on long enough to create Life is Strange. So is the game really as bad as that would suggest? Well, the short answer is no. Not at all, in fact, it’s a perfectly serviceable sci-fi action game, and pretty much exactly what I was hoping it would be when I saw it on that shelf. It’s imperfect, unpolished, a little rough around the edges, but clearly made with love, care, and dedication by a team who set out to do something unique and believed in it from beginning to end. I could speculate about why it failed commercially, but I’m much more interested in how Remember Me may have influenced Life is Strange. And if I inspire you to pick up a used copy of this underappreciated gem, all the better.
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DECEMBER 2019 | LEVEL STORY
Remember Me is a cyberpunk third-person action game about Nilin, who works as a memory hunter in 2084 Neo-Paris. The game is primarily about memories, identity, and (being a cyberpunk story) corruption and tyranny on the part of megacorporations. The story primarily revolves around Nilin trying to recover her stolen memories and bring down a company called Memorize, which has developed technology to remove, access, and re-experience the memories of oneself and others, and used that technology to effectively create a surveillance state. At a glance, it’s a fairly stereotypical action game. Lots of button mashing, punching and kicking, and increasingly complex button combos that string a number of damaging hits together for more powerful attacks. It does have a unique mechanic that allows the player to create their own combos; over the course of the game the length of combos and number of available types of attacks increases, and the player can map out combos with different buttons in various orders to create different kinds of effects. It never gets quite deep enough to set the game fully apart from others of its genre, but it’s an interesting system I’ve not seen replicated anywhere else. But the more interesting mechanic is more closely connected to the story, and gives us a better view of how Dontnod went from the cyberpunk dystopia of Remember Me to the modern high school fantasy of Life is Strange. One of the game’s main mechanics involves an ability unique to Nilin; she can dive into other peoples’ minds and slightly alter the events of their memories, changing the way they perceive their own past, and thus, the way they act in the present. This is accomplished by replaying, rewinding, and remixing the memory; as the events play out before the player, they can stop it at certain points to alter small details, slowly creating a scenario that leads the memory to a pivotal moment that changes the outcome. It’s not hard to see some degree of a line of cause and effect between this mechanic and the time manipulation inherent to Life is Strange’s mechanical and narrative identity. Both
