Remember Me Review

Actually, Remember Me isn't challenging in general, though you are still likely to be entertained by its combat. On its topmost level, beating up your foes is a relatively shallow button-mashing affair, but the melee combat has a few extra twists to keep it from falling into a rut. Nilin looks good in battle, tumbling, punching, and kicking with ease, each blow landing with a nice thud. You can string individual attacks into combos, and it's here that Remember Me makes its first effort to set its gameplay apart from the pack: you can create your own combos out of individual attacks called pressens. Some attacks focus on damage, while others provide you with healing or recharge the meter that allows you to perform special abilities.

You can't change the past--but you can change how it is remembered.

It's a neat system, but it's less exciting than initially meets the eye. You only get a few combo templates to work with, and you unlock new pressens slowly, so the potential of the craft-your-own-combos mechanic is never fully exploited. But the nature of certain attacks, the self-heal in particular, gives some battles a modicum of tactical dimension. Some powerful corporate guards deal damage each time you make contact, which makes that self-heal an important part of your combos. Meanwhile, a ranged gadget you collect early on allows you to knock memory-addicted leapers off of walls and fire energy charges at robots vulnerable to them. Crowded encounters and boss fights give you a good chance to break out special attacks, such as an area-wide stun, and a bomb that you can attach to unsuspecting freaks.

Battle is rarely difficult, though it does take on a nice rhythm, particularly in the final hours, when you have a greater selection of attacks at your disposal. As with the platforming, Remember Me's combat is more interested in pleasing your senses than it is in providing depth. The camera frequently closes in to show you planting a destructive bomb, or to showcase the final kick in your longest combo. It's fun to feel like a participant in a sci-fi action film, but you can't always find a good view when the tight spaces get crowded with foes. In fact, the camera might even break, forcing you to restart at the most recent checkpoint so you can regain control. You might need to contend with other bugs as well; you can break a couple of environmental puzzles if you aren't careful, for instance, or a scripted event following a boss fight might not trigger, forcing you to replay the final stretch of that battle again. Bugs aren't enormously common, but Remember Me's highly scripted design makes such hitches seem a little more egregious than they might have been in a more flexible game.

In this world, sometimes there really is only black and white.

Puzzles and stealth sections break up the pace nicely, though neither element is all that engaging on its own. You use your wrist device to manipulate sliding platforms, open doors, and transfer power from one door lock to another, and every so often, you need to move past roaming sentry bots without entering their danger zone. None of this proves very intellectually engaging however, with one exception: puzzles that require you to interpret mnemonics, and then manipulate objects accordingly. Not only do these few puzzles require a bit of brain power (provided you ignore the game's insistence on telling you the answer if you take too long), but also tie nicely into the narrative.

Remember Me's brightest spark, however, is emitted when Nilin enters and manipulates someone's memory in an effort to change their present state of mind. These sequences lead to a few of the game's more impactful narrative events, though they're best not analyzed too much, less the plot start to seem too nonsensical. More importantly, memory manipulation is Remember Me's most well-developed gameplay concept. Once you view the event as it originally occurred, you rewind and forward through the scene, seeking the telltale static indicating that you can interact with an object. You might move a piece of furniture, drop a cigarette, unfasten a safety belt, or move a firearm. Adjust the scene in just the right way, and you will change the past--or at least, the past as remembered by the mind you have manipulated--to accommodate the present you require.

Neo-Paris is burning.

Your attempts to properly shape another's memories may not go right the first few times, but the scene will still change based on your actions. The ensuing events may even lead to your subject's inadvertent death, or maybe just the innocuous fall of an object to the floor. It's intoxicating to watch an entire cinematic morph around your attempts to solve the puzzle at hand, and the final memory manipulation makes use of a delightful concept you must experience for yourself to appreciate. Disappointingly, Remember Me offers too few chances to concoct new memories for others.

The scarcity of memory manipulation isn't Remember Me's only disappointing element, yet there are just enough great ideas bubbling under its surface to give this adventure some heat. Nilin is the best reason to make this game a future memory: she's resolute, conflicted, and all too human, making her a terrific escort through this beautiful and underutilized world. Remember Me is a good game loaded with intriguing ideas; here's hoping that its sequel, should we ever have one, rides these ideas to greatness.