Whoops forgot to play games month: Remember Me

Yeah, kinda forgot to do much in the way of proper gaming for the month of august. I did play a great deal of MMDOC and some Beatbuddy, but neither are really worth talking about. Beatbuddy, as an ultra short review, is very pretty and relaxing but ultimately just rather dull. I'd hit puzzles where the solution was "swim very fast" and just stare at the screen in confusion. Because I was bored. Remember Me, however, is an interesting enough bit to actually get into.

I have to admit I was really excited, or at least mildly excited, about this game when I first saw images of it. The concept work is really interesting stuff, the memory ideas seemed neat as well, though it does have this sort of weirdly sanitized drug culture feeling to it. I was also really shocked at the general sentiment in the media that the main character was considered in someway unmarketable. Really? Nilin is like the best looking new protagonist design I've seen in years. Supposedly the issue is she's female, and men don't want to look at a girl when playing a third person game.

I dunno, this is just not something I'm wired to understand.

Remember Me, as to the game itself, is a touch weird to get into. The game is the strangest mix of high concept and generic video game. An hour in and it is still spewing random tutorials at you or vaguely explaining boring stuff like 'hit guy with special power up to break up the monotony!' and you're like 'zzzzz'. Nilin's gorgeous model aside, the game is pretty boilerplate. Inversely, the world of neo-Paris is fantastic, a really unique near future bit of sci-fi with lots of craziness and world building, all centered around what legitimately feels like a hopelessly defanged portrayal of drug culture.

On the other hand, neo anything feels like a dated 80s reference. Who calls anything Neo anything after the Matrix? I'm sure there's a guy in his late teens or mid-twenties who is like 'Neo-Paris? Keanu Reeves Paris? Whoa, what?'


If I was going to compare Remember Me to another game, oddly enough, the first example I could come up with is actually Darksiders 2. In spite of having wildly different artistic assets, Remember Me works around the same core idea of using combat, parkour and puzzles in varying amounts to break the game up, plus a really compelling protagonist design. There is a lot of cinematic flair to Remember Me, in much the same way DS2 did, and there's some sort of boring.

To sum this review up pretty much before I begin: Remember Me isn't good. "Mediocre" and "Unpolished" are two words I would use to summarize the production, and if you just want a quick snappy review, there you go: It isn't good, don't buy it. There's a whole host of problems, some of which are basic systemic issues and others just a sign it wasn't playtested enough. The game is, on a fundamental level, predicated on trying to be pretentious, but it isn't art and isn't a very good game as a result. You have stuff like the screen jittering and becoming hard to see when you're low on health - meaning, the game becomes much harder and actually painful to look at. Enjoy! There isn't a focus on "fun", there's a focus on flair, and flair is for movie trailers, and/or creating really boring gameplay.

Speaking of boring, the biggest problem I have with Remember Me and one I want to point out is a rather egregious issue is the way the game presents itself in basic terms of wasting my time. I understand that this is a high end, expensive production and tries very hard to pass itself as a high concept work. There's tons of talent in Remember Me, but the game just forces you to sit through things you shouldn't have to and staggers around instead of letting you skip ahead. The cutscenes are just not very compelling; the voice actress who handles Nilin is fantastic, but if I didn't get far enough to save in the next chapter, there is just no way you can justify making me sit through them or anything else again. The art is in compelling me to stop and look, not in making something you want me to stop and look at. Also it has dumb little problems like putting dialogue or tool tips right after check points, and other 15 second annoyance that drag things out.

On the topic of art, Nilin is seriously just a beautiful protagonist on a visual level. I mean yeah, she is a representation of attractive woman, but they just put in such beautiful work on her. She looks around, she actually walks down steps and walks up them, her head bobs and she just looks much closer to a person. It reminds me of why I enjoyed running around in War for Cybertron, but moreover in the detail work as representing a human character! It is nice to see a character's stance animation shift and change as the situation does, instead of the endless alpha male

Inversely, the game's combat is just ... Not quite there. I can never seem to get the timing of combos down right, even though they're just button presses in order, they seem dodgy somehow. Also the game's usage of a  hard to discern rage bar coupled with cooldown times is just moronic - well, there's actually two rage bars, or something - energy and rage, AND cooldowns AND combos... There is a fight where you're supposed to  use a cooldown to 'detect' enemy units, and I died about half through the tedium of combat. Not only do you restart the fight midway through, which is normally nice, but you start without the rage to use the cooldown. The cooldown you're supposed to use to open the fight! This happens repeatedly in the game, in all sorts of weird ways - there's an encounter right after a long string of instant death nonsense where you're fighting three enemies you simply can't damage effectively, other than just mashing the regeneration loop combo over and over which takes forever. I really just don't understand how you playtest a title and run into stuff like this.

Also the stun cooldown interactions are just zany. Sometimes stuff gets stunned when it can't be damaged, and you just stand there while the admittedly awesome stun animation plays out.

There is a boss fight in the late game I actually straight up had to look up, because after five minutes of doing it - it is a rehash of an earlier fight - I had no idea if I was winning or losing. Because you can regenerate back to fool, combat is just an endless string of tedium into tedium into the late game. It turns out I was doing the fight properly, the enemies just have massive pools of health and infinitely spawning adds to go with them. You are just supposed to mash on them while waiting for cooldowns to come back up, then mash on them more with no attempt at articulating if you're winning or losing.

The design here is really boxed in though. Enemies can't spike you down, and you can regenerate to full, so you spend combat just mashing away, getting terribly bored as a result. I don't know how often I pause a game, put my hand to my forehead and just think - this is so bad. This is just so tedious, and so poorly designed, and just not interesting or fun, but it has been a while. Enemies in this game have sooooo much life, it just takes forever, never mind the fact I am spending entire minutes of gameplay hitting infinitely respawning adds. Infinitely respawning adds and waiting on cooldowns. In the last boss fight, enemies can actually inflict MORE waiting on cooldowns if you get hit with a special. That's their power! Waste two minutes of your life!

I mean seriously, read that sentence: In a game, there is an enemy, who can not possibly kill you unless you fall asleep, who has the special attack of wasting two full minutes of your life. Look at the metacritic score on this game. Its justified. It should probably be lower. Someone in development thought that is how fun is constructed.

I mean, the combat really reminds me of Darksiders 2, but while Remember Me has somewhat better world design and generally better Parkour, the combat lacks flow and the camera just isn't as good. The camera just feels sloppy and poorly written, often focusing on Nilin doing backflips or whatever instead of, I don't, anything even vaguely important. You can lock on, as you can in DS2, but it is unreliable and likes to out of range you on things, even when it is the only thing in the entire visual arena. Often the camera becomes locked by itself, or can't move to show things that are attacking you. You spend a lot of time zoomed in on her sculpted denim wearing ass, which while a nice sight out of context, is not really what you're looking to see when you're trying to see said ass from being violently murdered.

While the combat is pretty shallow if "alright" - some of the boss fights use the graphical flair to good effect coupled with a good mix of abilities - the game's out of combat controls are simply poor. The camera, as I said, is simply not great and when you're not in combat it gets really mediocre if not outright subpar. You're left with a lot of head scratcher moments where you're not challenged or in danger, but you need to figure out which button press does what the game wants you to. During "rememberances" your character needs to synchronize with 'memory' artifacts. This requires three things: one, hammering B for ages and ages. Two, holding down one of the trigger buttons which you will forget, and it doesn't remind you, so you're blinking and trying to remember why nothing is happening. Three, you need to line up with wherever this syncho-nonsense moment is supposed to happen, which works sometimes, doesn't work other times and frankly who cares? Like why bother putting in a belaboured QTE during this stuff? It's just a tedious time waster that comes off as an idea someone came up with and refused to leave out of their vision of the game.

It's a pity, because the core idea of stealing people's memories then re-tracing their steps is a good one. But it just comes off as tedium in execution. There's a couple bright spots where it is used to explain story elements, but usually, it is just telling you like "this is where the landmines are" and that is that?

On the other hand, I absolutely have no affection for the ridiculous "memory remixing" nonsense. For one thing, the mechanic is just what I said it is: It doesn't make sense. The amount of processing power to take a human memory and then re-write the necessary cascade of events is insane, because everything you do moves forward from each point. You don't "remember" killing someone, and then go about your day. The contradiction is instantaneous and silly, because you're going to wonder about why your brutally murdered someone, then sat in the room with the body (that wasn't there) and the police (didn't show up) and so you ... I don't know, it's just dumb and more tedium. Maybe if it was used as a tool to dig into people's minds it would have suited me, but changing people's beliefs based on false memories is so far beyond everything else in the set. The one memory remixed is like, twenty years back or something. Their entire belief system was based on it.

If you're confused as to what I mean, basically, remixing works by changing design "A" into "B". But you use A over and over, and when replaced with B, your decisions wouldn't make sense. That's an innate, insane contradiction and it feels like something - if nothing else - people would notice. Or go insane.

Also, the interface sucks, the mechanic is tiresome and frankly it is like playing a very, very overwrought adventure game puzzle. Why do I have to rewind from the beginning? Oh gracious me, you managed to bring forward the joy of re-winding video tapes when I was a child! Only more tedious! Its like re-weaving an audio cassette by hand!

Maybe later the developers can successfully digitize the tedium of data entry or milking a fucking cow.

And, again, seriously: I've done this ONCE in four hours of gameplay. I need the tutorial again. I don't remember what stupid controls do what in this thing I've done once hours ago in gametime, days ago in real life. This is amateur hour design mistakes: the minigame. I would seriously skip this 100% of the time, it wasn't even interesting the first time. The control by the way is actually rolling the analog stick around as if you are seriously re-winding it and oh god why is this just so boring. If I wanted to play dumb adventure game puzzles, I would play the 56 of them in my steam catalogue I got in bundles. Even worse at the 'energy transfer' puzzles, which make zero sense and feel like the 'puzzle' is figuring out which obscured doodad is lit up and transferring the light.

No one likes puzzles like this. They're not satisfying. Where's waldo is fun when you're like four years old - an adult doesn't want to run around a tiny little rat maze looking for a lit up thing to move to another lit up thing.

Lastly if you're going to put instant kills in a game (a bad idea, unless you're making a torture platformer or something in that line) you really shouldn't put looping, annoying audio in that reloads every time you mess up on the objectionable one shot area. This game loops audio so much - crikey, how much does it cost to give your generic mooks more than 7 or 8 taunts? Do people not playtest this and go 'you know this dude mumbling the same lines over and over while you mash a button to kill him is kind of irritating?'

As for the parkour, it does remind me a great deal of DS2, and it is likely it goes back to Assassin's Creed or some other entry in the genre I haven't gotten to as of yet. It also suffers from the general problem that basically all parkour stuff in all games does - that moment where they put you in a 'parkour room' and nothing makes any sense, and you're just sort of randomly following a complete nonsense, illogical path. While that just seems to be a part of the genre I've always wondered about the mental state of this sort of thing. Like ... We navigate complex pathing in our day to day life, do we not? Why is it so hard to make parkour through terrain that makes some sort of logical sense? Remember Me is generally better about this, but it still feels extremely arbitrary most of the time - you can drop from a ledge at the exact same height as from another point, and die, because you didn't jump one foot over to the 'ok to drop from' ledge.

The core narrative of the game is rather frustrating. As I said, you're sort of presented it as high concept, really techy sci-fi stuff. But the notes it hits feels more and more like drug culture, and I don't mean people buying ridiculous bongs. The concept of the highs and lows; the denied underground, the upper class filled with drug fueled ennui and everything in between: These aren't really new areas. These are ideas influenced by drug culture, or moreover a culture of drug users if that isn't clear. The concept of memory here is also used disingenuously, characters rarely seem to reference memory which is the ability to recall and reference earlier experience but rather reference memory as some mutually agreed upon hallucination index - again, this feels more like a culture addicted to a hallucinogenic and less a culture addicted to the power of memory. Nilin herself makes good on memory as a tool, accessing and recalling other people's memories to further her goals.

It just ends up rather dull feeling, because the really scary insidious stuff about memory theft is mostly left untouched. There's some spookiness to the prison system, but ideas like copying other people or slowly blurring the lines for corporate reasons - like say, taking the skills of the person you are replacing and then finding you're slowly losing who you are - aren't really touched upon, or if they are, it doesn't feel like a core theme of the game. Addiction to a hallucinogenic is not some new area of story-telling, nor is it even vaguely sci-fi. You can go buy drugs and become an addict in the modern day, and the game stresses the dangers of the memory addiction to be pretty much the same as the dangers of a pedestrian mind altering substance. Granted apparently everyone buys into it without concern, because people just all do magic mushrooms and LSD all day every day, right???

I'm not trying to say that addictions and substance abuse are a benign element of our society, but I am saying this feels like a stripped down, sanitized version of an ongoing extant problem in the present day. Everyone is just addicted to drugs and they dump the cast offs into the gutter. To quote Bro Team "Is this science-fiction or is this every city in North America?"

Also they have robots and drones. Hell, the one series of drones one-shots you and your anti-robot attacks don't work on it. Just flat out, they're immune, you can't even enter combat with them. Why are there any other enemies in the game? That is stupid, thanks for just pooping on my immersion.

I think ultimately the best way I can sum up this game is it isn't very long but it still took me nearly a month to finish it, playing as much as I wanted each day and that wasn't much. When you take out the visual stuff, the game comes off as rather unfinished and clunky, with nothing really exciting about it. The parkour is pretty good, but parkour burns development time and isn't really challenging. I suppose you can occasionally instantly die while parkouring, but I don't think anyone is going to call that a plus or a challenge.

Nilin is the best looking and most enjoyable animated protagonist I think I can bring to mind. Her voice actor kills it most of the time (there are a couple lines so poorly written the performance just can't cope) and all her expressions, the walk cycle, the way she moves are all stunningly good. But absolutely nothing in the game lives up to her - there are rare moments of genius and the visual design is the product of a talented team, but there's just nothing in the game portion.  The game itself is simply half-baked, riddled with poor ideas and lacking a coat of basic polish. Camera issues and control problems abound, and frankly, past that there just isn't much to love. The combat should be decent, but there's so much sloppiness. I've died in sections where enemies bug out on walls and hit me with attacks they're firing off blindly. The later enemy with the 'reflect' shield is just the stupidest thing, and while this is admitting personal fault I guess I can not for the life of me reliably execute combos. The game states you're supposed to press the next attack when you hit but ... I have no idea, it just never works reliably for me. I honestly don't understand why the combos need to be so damn finicky, there's always cooldowns and focus and dodging to juggle alongside basic positioning, then enemies of different types require different attacks so why make the combos harder than doing moves in King of Fighters?

But no, seriously - enemies with a full uptime, never goes down, can't get around reflect shield? That's uniquely moronic. Did no one playtest this game? Yes, I get that you can jam a full regeneration combo together and just mash on them for a couple minutes but why? Why would you put something that tedious into the game? You seriously just sit there, hitting X X X over and over, over and over. Never mind the double mourner fight. I can not imagine anyone sat down and played this. Like I said, I'm not good at doing combos in the first place - which just baffles me, I can pull off moves in KoF games but I can't do combos in this shitty title? What the Hell? How sensitive are the prompts? But here you're against a crowd of infinitely respawning enemies, trying to put together cooldown reduction combos (seriously???????) while dodging and weaving.

Oh, and the game pops up the "how to do combos" tooltip for the entire game. It never stops popping up this "helpful" suggestion, even if you broke up the combo on a dodge to keep from dying. Just brings it up yet again, because there's no way you ever fucking tested this game and thought to yourself 'geez flashing the same message four or five times every minute for an entire boss fight is kind of awkward and irritating, isn't it?'

It pops it during the last boss! It isn't even relevant!

It makes me sad that the discussion of this game was about how Capcom didn't want it to have a female protagonist. You know what, Capcom? Maybe next time don't worry about that and focus on getting them to make a game that isn't absolutely mediocre in nearly every other respect. No one reviewed this game poorly because it had an awesome protagonist who happens to be a lady. They reviewed it poorly because it isn't a very good game.

Anyway, in final analysis, the parkour is decent, Nilin is amazing and the world you jump around in is beautiful if nonsensical. The core plot is so baffling early on - you have issues of morality when you're inflicting what amounts to severe mental illness on people, and they have robots and drones but they care about some weird zombie thing? Am I supposed to feel bad that one of my accomplices suffered severe brain damage and then I left him to die, or was it like, Well I got mine PEEEEACE?

You're implied to have completely screwed up more than a couple people's brains to the point they degenerate into subhuman status, but you ... Man, I just don't know. I feel like running around inflicting alzheimer's and schizophrenia on people is up there in terms of morality objectionable, at least pretty close to just flat out murdering them.

Actually, I'll sum this one up in three sentences. There is a cutscene into a tutorial nearly 75% into the game, shortly after a previous long boring tutorial. I died to a bugged out pair of leapers who sat there swinging blind and taking off chunks of my health. When I restarted, it replayed the entire stupid cutsence and the entire stupid tutorial for an ability that works like every other ability. Tutorials and tooltips. Forever and ever. And ever.

Why? How? Really? Like seriously, I get it. I'm not good at doing your ultra sensitive combos. Do I seriously need this stupid, doesn't make any sense tip jammed in my face over and over, even when it doesn't make sense? It comes up when you end a combo to do a finishing move! The game pops tooltips when you are doing the thing the tooltip is suggesting!

This game is simply not very good. I would genuinely state: Don't buy Remember Me, it isn't worth it at any price point. There's just so much terrible injected into the game that floats up and drags the experience down. I haven't thought so many times in a game 'Why can't I skip this?' and 'This is seriously stupid' in a long time.  I really wish developers could get it through their brains - develop a game, its gameplay and its ideas. Then build a story that fits that. Don't go on about how dangerous a slave race is when you are showing me a world filled with drones that one shot me and have robot servants all over the place. Don't show me a world where the drug of choice is so ubiquitous and mainstream then show me how it fucks your brain up anyway. Like, people don't avoid doing heroin because it isn't amazing. They avoid it because it destroys you.

Up next is an attempt to play through Final Fantasy Seven and Eight back to back, as well as (hopefully) a run through Fear 3 on coop with a friend for Scary Games Month.