Publisher: Capcom Developer: Dontnod Format: 360, PC, PS3 Released: June 2013
A recent piece by Leigh Alexander on Gamasutra, addressing how female gaming protagonists are presented compared to more dominant male counterparts, used the 2013 Tomb Raider reboot to illustrate how these heroines are drawn in damaged dimensions in order for the player to relate to their cause.
We see Lara go through hell, coming out the other side stronger but bearing bruises that will never fade. But when it’s a guy we’re controlling, their scars are often of the once-removed variety, the catalytic distress stemming from the loss of a loved one – a girlfriend, a wife, a daughter; The Darkness, Max Payne, The Last Of Us.
When I tweet Leigh to say that I’m currently playing Remember Me, and that its lead – the mixed-race, parkour-partial memory hunter Nilin – begins her story floored, writhing in agony, effectively experiencing torture, she replies: “I found I couldn’t remember anything about that game (irony).” I suspect she’s not alone.
The sole game (so far) from Paris-based Dontnod Entertainment, published by Capcom after being released from Sony exclusivity in 2011, Remember Me is a ménage of motifs drawn from myriad preceding games and movies, colliding over a narrative that skips so erratically that to brew a tea is to miss an exchange between characters of key plotline pertinence. Play it only half paying attention and it can utterly fail to engage – like a Binary Domain, or a Bulletstorm, on the surface it feels like everything you’ve seen before.
We awarded Dontnod’s debut an 8 in our Remember Me review last year.
But, just like those games, dare to get right into the inner workings of Remember Me and suddenly sparks fly forth, the gameplay begins to find compelling rhythms, and the overall effect is one of momentum. Dontnod’s vision connects and the game’s Neo-Paris of 2084 setting blooms with colour, Nilin’s athletic traversing and combo-centred combat moves assuming second-nature status on the controller.
What seemed like a shameless imitation of the Arkham series’ melee action at first finds its own beats, courtesy of editable combos mapped across two face buttons. You play around in the game’s Combo Lab, shaping Nilin’s offensive and defensive capabilities (termed Pressens), incorporating true tactics into situations that, on first impression, were little more than button-mashing set pieces.
There are still the pre-requisite quick-time events to navigate, occurring at the end of the game’s boss battles – but their moderate use ensures that Nilin never feels unnaturally buffed. Through cat-like agility and a studied move-set, she’s bettering hulking adversaries while delivering substantial player satisfaction – there are no outright spam-X-to-win scenarios, no lazy shortcuts to success.
As Remember Me progresses, so Nilin grows into a rare commodity: from victim to a strong female lead whose well-measured vulnerability is articulated only between instances of her introducing soft enemy faces to hard vertical surfaces. Voiced in English by British actress Kezia Burrows, sounding not unlike new-Lara’s Camilla Luddington (a bit posh, a bit punchy, plenty perturbed), she’s a likeable presence, even when delivering clunky dialogue: “This red riding hood’s got a basket full of kick ass,” she announces, NPCs stifling their groans.
Nilin’s intriguing characteristics – which extend, as we go on, to her family ties, culminating in a surprisingly intimate climax – can not carry this game alone, however. There has to be innovation, and Dontnod does, between its referencing of Uncharted, Mirror’s Edge, Beyond Good & Evil and those aforementioned Batman games (Nilin only knocks out her enemies, too), just about deliver it.
The game’s story surrounds memories, and the storing of them – the Big Bad is a company called Memorize, which provides ‘Sensen’ technology for customers to rewrite their own histories, blanking troubling pasts for clean-slate futures. Nilin’s USP amongst a rebellious band of anti-Memorize rebels called Errorists is that she can remix minds herself. And this she does, via sequences that ask the player to alter tiny elements of what her subject recalls of a particular event. By changing these details, the beneficiary/victim (depending on the circumstances) will emerge post-remix feeling very differently about their past, with immediate impact on the present.
Four of these remixes take place across Remember Me’s 10-hour campaign, and while they initially appear as trial-and-error of design as The Secret Of Monkey Island’s abstract puzzle-solving, once everything’s clicked and the memory plays out as intended, results are a joy to behold. They’re highlights then, but they don’t cast the more rudimentary, but wholly functional, passages of Remember Me in complete shade.
The game has its shortcomings: difficulty spikes are introduced not by particularly tough new challenges, but by simply increasing enemy numbers; boss dialogue can be a drag, as drawn-out battles are backed by the same three cackling quips; and its attempts to generate player sympathy for a couple of ill-fated NPCs fall flat. Its story rushes in the final third, too, the pacing all over the place, and the vocabulary can grate. But its richly detailed world – the external areas of Neo-Paris dazzle, and collectible historical documents reveal the timeline to this dystopian mega-city, where the rich build their towers upon the wretched slums of the poor – is a fascinating one, a place that merits revisiting.
Which it almost certainly never will be, as Leigh’s tweet makes abundantly clear: not enough people got Remember Me for its legacy to be anything else than an opportunity missed. There are more great stories, the stuff of sequels, to be set in this reborn Paris, where the Eiffel Tower stands dwarfed by 21st century skyscrapers and the once-essential Metro lies flooded, abandoned. There are loose ends to be tied: Nilin’s allies Olga Sedova and Headache Tommy play the briefest of parts, their futures uncertain, but the former could have been a better-realised friend/foil here, as Jeanne is to Bayonetta. Remember Me’s timing was bad, too – it came out the week before The Last Of Us, and sales flat-lined.
And yet it does deserve a chance amongst those who simply passed on it the first time. A new IP, arriving at a late stage in the PS3/360 cycle, featuring a lead of substantial potential (not to mention publisher-worrying originality) – Remember Me should be played, properly, at least once. It will reward the effort in surprising, affecting, unlikely to be repeated ways.
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