Remember Me by Samuel Gronseth

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.

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 games revolve around the idea of changing how things progress (or progressed) in such a way that creates an outcome that benefits the player. And fascinatingly, they also both take a fairly critical stance toward that kind of intervention, if in very different ways.

I won’t go too deep into spoilers for Remember Me, but suffice it to say that the memory-altering power controlled by the fascist megacorporation maintaining a surveillance state in the dystopian future is not portrayed as a positive thing. And even Nilin’s own efforts to change peoples’ memories rarely make the player feel like a hero.

In the first segment where Nilin alters someone’s memories, the player is tasked with overseeing a critical surgery and, through the alteration of minor elements in the memory, change its outcome in the mind of the person who holds the memory so that the patient dies.

This doesn’t actually kill a person, of course. This is just a memory. But it’s the memory of Olga Sedova, a Memorize agent who’s working with them in exchange for their continued medical care of her husband. Nilin’s alteration of that memory makes Olga believe that her husband was killed through the negligence of a Memorize doctor, and inspires her to join the rebellion against the corporation.

Again, the game’s heroine uses her memory-altering abilities to make a woman believe her sick husband is actually dead. To say Remember Me is critical of its technological centerpieces would be an understatement, which is appropriate since that cynicism toward powerful technology is a lynchpin of both dystopian fiction and cyberpunk. Life is Strange takes a similar stance toward its protagonists’ time-altering powers, though the source of this power changes the meaning somewhat. The source of Max’s powers relates not to technological advancement but to natural phenomena, and its backlash comes not as a result of misuse or overuse (or perhaps even the simple act of using it at all). Max’s mistake is messing with the natural order of the universe, while Nilin and Memorize are guilty of misusing the creations of humankind to perpetrate harm and injustice.

In both instances, there’s an implication that neither of these powers, whether altering memories or the past itself, should really be used in the first place, as the stakes are too high and the abuse (and consequences of it) is inevitable.

Despite these similarities, it’s hard to really compare Remember Me and Life is Strange in a meaningful way. Common themes and mechanical ideas notwithstanding, they’re very different games, and were produced under very different circumstances. But I will say that there’s one clear area in which Life is Strange did something similar to Remember Me, and did it better: moral ambiguity. For all of Remember Me’s cynicism toward its memory technology, it never really makes a cohesive statement about it. Nilin’s use of it leads to multiple morally questionable (at best) results, but this abuse of technology is part of the path that leads her toward the downfall of a tyrannical megacorporation. She does many things that are uncomfortable or downright wrong, but it’s all in the interest of an ultimately good resolution, and the game never really wrestles with these implications. It doesn’t help that it ultimately falls into a common trap for this kind of game, where the twists at the end muddy the whole narrative experience in such a way that makes the story and its meaning a little unclear.

Life is Strange, however, has an entirely different approach (despite arguably sharing that problem with the ending). Life is Strange heavily features player choice and branching narrative. To some extent, I would argue it’s easier to present a convincing sense of moral ambiguity when the player is allowed to make choices and confront the consequences of their own actions. The player is more easily invested in decisions they actually have to make for themselves than decisions of another character (especially a character without much presence in the story).

When something happens in later episodes of Life is Strange, the player can usually make some kind of connection back to a choice they had made earlier in the game, and it’s hard to be confident that you’re making the right decisions when you’re constantly seeing the consequences, positive and negative, of those decisions.

In order to create this effect, Dontnod had to make sure there was a clear cause and effect for the player to follow. The vague sense of an action seeming wrong wasn’t enough; the player would inevitably have to see the consequences of their actions and realize exactly what it meant to make the choice they did. This is the same logic behind Telltale games telling you that someone will remember your actions, or the various story points and graphs in games like Until Dawn. And I believe that this made Life is Strange a better story in an area where Remember Me fell short.

Some could use this to argue that branching narratives are superior to linear ones, or at least that they inherently make better use of the video game medium, and I don’t stand by that at all. But I do think, in cases like this, that the need to create a clear cause and effect in a branching system pushes the writers to establish important story points and meaning where a linear story may not have. Remember Me presented morally ambiguous situations, but it ultimately glossed over them because they were necessary to bring the player to the story’s inevitable conclusion. Life is Strange may have ultimately brought the player to a couple specific outcomes, but the freedom of choice that the player had building up to that point freed those morally questionable decision points from the expectation that they lead to one specific point in the story. The game inevitably has to address what the player does, and it doesn’t need to try to justify anything; it leaves that up to the player. And it works much better than Dontnod’s previous attempt. Remember Me and Life is Strange are both fantastically complex works in their own rights, with plenty of similarities and differences and connections, and while considering Dontnod’s first game isn’t at all necessary to understand and appreciate their defining work, Remember Me is absolutely worth checking out if you’re a fan of their other games. It’s fun to see what these people poured their hearts and souls into before Life is Strange, and sometimes it’s nice to see that some rough edges can be sanded out. Even if it doesn’t happen until a completely different game.

SAMUEL GRONSETH is the creator, writer, and host of the popular YouTube channel, “Games as Lit. 101.” https://www.youtube.com/user/gamesasliterature