When we think of Capcom, we still think of God Hand, Dino Crisis and Onimusha. Remember Me isn’t the type of game you traditionally associate with the Japanese publisher, but maybe that’s the point – this is a company that took an enormous risk with the Devil May Cry series in handing it to a developer that some believed would screw it all up. It didn’t. It turned around one of the best games of the year, even if comment thread specimens didn’t want to believe it.
But a new IP from a new developer based on ideas that aren’t easily communicated in trailer or press
release form is a far riskier move in that direction for Capcom – and while there are signs of roughness in the overall fiction of the world and the way that’s delivered to the player, Remember Me
intriguingly uses Assassin’s Creed and Batman-style typical mechanics as the basis for rather complex storytelling and combat ideas. It’s refreshingly hardcore, with an impressively constructed linear interpretation of Paris that offers a beautiful mix of reallife and sci-fiinfluences.
We start with Episode 0, which annoys us right away (we’re just not big on prologues. Elmore Leonard says they’re a bad idea, and he knows what he’s talking about). This is titled ‘Rebirth’, and introduces us to Nilin, a young woman trapped in a lab at a company called Memoreyes who’s recently had her memories wiped.
Sadly for her captors, Nilin still has residual memories of her past life, which must be erased – you get the typical videogame ‘interactive narrative’ thing where you stagger through a corridor of nasty stuff happening, unable to really do anything but watch. Nilin manages to escape Memoreyes, which is when the real game begins (Episode 1!) – guided by a benefactor (i.e. Otacon-type guy but slightly
cooler) Edge, Nilin is what’s known as an Errorist (lol), one of a group of people who stand against Memoreyes.
This corporation, see, takes people’s memories and sells them on, as everyone in the future has brain
implants known as ‘Sensen’, meaning that memories can be deleted, instigated or remixed, which tallies quite nicely with the typical mechanics of progression in a videogame, even if the terminology leaves something to be desired.
Our hands-on starts with Nilin in the slums of Paris, where she’s faced with a group of mutants talking nonsense and generally causing a bit of creepy upset (basically like a futuristic version of Boscombe, a town near the Play offices that has a polluted cloud of vodka hanging over it). Here, we see the basics of Remember Me’s combat – think Assassin’s Creed mixed with the clearly superior counter-heavy scrapping of Arkham City, an emphasis on keeping yourself moving to avoid hits while timing delivery perfectly.
These Parisian depths feel like a beautiful amalgamation of different fictional influences, from Judge Dredd to Blade Runner with a little Mirror’s Edge thrown into the colour scheme, too. There’s a retrofitted quality to the environment, a certain basis of reality in the way Paris is presented (Dontnod, the developer, is based there, so it’s no surprise to see the architecture of the city replicated beneath the shiny futuristic stuff). Remember Me is entirely linear, the idea being that they’d rather you saw a concentrated vision of this fictional backdrop rather than having an open world for the sake
of it, and this approach works, offering a huge range of different locations throughout its first couple of hours. There’s another slightly less frenetic sequence in an Errorist hideout called the Leaking Brain, a Moe’s-style bar that again adds a sense of detail to the context here.
From dilapidated urban slums to the street level, posh bits of Paris, there is a sense that Dontnod has been carefully considerate in constructing the world of Remember Me. Indeed, that’s what impresses us most about the game so far – getting around is a slightly rigid affair, in the vein of Uncharted’s
platforming without feeling quite as light to control, but it functions well enough. Everything is signposted to the point where it’s pretty much impossible to get lost – this could do with toning down before the game’s release, admittedly, since there could be a satisfaction in having the opportunity
to feel like you’re exploring this indepth world properly.
When it comes to combat, on the other hand, Dontnod is happy to let you sink or swim. One of the founding ideas of Remember Me is the combo lab, essentially a way for players to create their own attack patterns by assigning moves to slots (a little like God Hand, but less malleable – at least in the
stages we saw), yet rather than just resulting in different animations, you can use combos to heal Nilin, too. So, you could line up a four or five hit combo where one move will do lighter damage, but restore some of Nilin’s HP on the fly, a handy mid-combat tool that keeps the flow of the battle going, as opposed to Batman where that diminishing health bar frightens the shit out of you during round four of the game’s harder challenge rooms. We can see how the combo lab could evolve into something quite in-depth as the story progresses, since even in these early stages there’s scope to
tailor Nilin’s moves to your liking.
Basically, if you’ve played the Arkham games or Sleeping Dogs (an obvious exponent of the Batman
series), you’ll get Remember Me right away. It’s paced in much the same way as games like that, too – there’s not a huge action thrust through the story, and you’re encouraged to absorb the environmental detail, which is the correct approach when the world is as welldeveloped as this.
Characters and story are the main issue with what we’ve seen of Remember Me. The game’s bad voiceacting has very much been a talking point of the game so far, and we can see why – it’s not convincing and the accents sound all over the place, the latter of which would be fine as a deliberate stylistic touch if the dialogue wasn’t delivered with a fist of ham. Meanwhile, Nilin herself doesn’t
exactly look memorable. She looks like the protagonist from Hydrophobia Prophecy – remember her? No?
That’s our point. She’s not an iconic character, and traditionally we expect that from Capcom protagonists, so it’s disappointing to find that neither the design of the protagonist or the way she’s portrayed is even remotely interesting to us. There’s a great world here in artistic terms, but the people that populate it are typical videogame archetypes. We suppose the finished product might turn us around on this, yet we’re not convinced. Then there’s another element in Remember Me that is almost entirely detached from everything else: memory remixing. These are minigames where Nilin jumps into a person’s mind to manipulate their recollection of certain events, in order to alter their personality in the present, which can work to her advantage. These function as point and click style
minigames where you experiment with cause and effect to change how a scenario plays out.
You fastforward and rewind through a memory, seeking out interactive variables here and there before activating them to alter the sequence of things going on. We don’t want to spoil the actual content of them, however, as we feel that’s the most interesting storybased idea the game has, an almost Heavy RainmeetsLinger In Shadows venture that stands in isolation.
We find it bizarre that Dontnod is succeeding with so many ideas in Remember Me while just cosmetic things are letting it down, like the writing or voiceacting. These aspects, however, are the difference between life and death when it comes to selling a title in the current market. You too may
be put off by some of these elements when seeing the game in trailer form, but there’s more to Remember Me than that, with the combo lab attempting to push that highend melee combat model forward by letting you play with its fundamentals.
It’s not an entirely straightforward experience, which is potentially risky in this genre – and we like that. We live in an age where developers are determined to hold the hands of amateur players with ultrasimplified tutorials, while more experienced players are taught how to move, aim and shoot for the millionth time. Why not release a game where players have to actually learn something in order to
make it work? There seems to be a lot of scope to Remember Me’s combat, and if this houses as much depth as it claimed to during our handson, Capcom could have a cult hit on its hands.
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