Remember Me: I Remember When I Was Excited About This Game

So today I want to talk about a game called Remember Me, coming to us from developer Dontnod and being published by Capcom. The game takes place in a futuristic Paris, where memories have seemingly been commercialized by a corporation called Memoreyes (har har). Basically this means that memories can be extracted, implanted, and even modified. This was a concept that GREATLY intrigued me, as it sounded interesting and we haven't really seen anything like it before. Unfortunately, however, over the months since Remember Me was announced, the more I've heard about the game, the less interested in it I've become. Let's find out why that is.

REMEMBER ME. I don't know why there isn't fire coming out of her mouth right now.

When the game was first announced, they introduced it pretty much in the way that I described above. We have our main character who is kind of a 'rogue memory agent', who goes on missions to modify people's memories to ensure specific outcomes in the present. That sounds cool! And the protagonist is a female, with darker skin, dressed modestly but stylishly. That's cool too! Sounds different and interesting. At this point I was like, okay, you've got me. I'm in.

However, as we got more information about the game, there were a few things that kind of started to worry me. The first thing was when we found out that the protagonist, Nilin, is an amnesiac. I mean, I guess that kind of makes some sense in a game that's supposedly primarily about memories, but to me having an amnesiac protagonist is one of the laziest and most cliche things you can do in a story. Seriously, it's EVERYWHERE. Not that every story with an amnesiac is bad, but come on guys. We can do better!

Another thing that struck me as being kind of odd was in the first gameplay trailer for the game, we see Nilin doing some almost Assassin's Creed-style platforming. That just seemed kind of weird to me, since I was under the impression that the game was going to be primarily about like, investigations and memory-manipulations. Seemed a bit off somehow.

There was also a trailer showing some Arkham Asylum/City-style combat, which made me feel the same way. It just seemed weird to me that they were putting all this action in the game. It gave me a bit of a bad vision of something that probably happens often in the game industry, and something that I'm alllll too familiar with. It almost seemed like there were high-level executives, not involved in the actual development of the game at all, that saw features of other games that sold amazingly well (i.e. Assassin's Creed and the new Batman games) and said 'ooh man let's get that in our game'. I was like, you've got an awesome concept here with this memory manipulation thing, why are you shoehorning in all this other stuff?

Oh, and there was one more thing that I noticed about the initial set of art and screenshots that were released for the game, but I can't quite put my finger on it...what was it again...

Oh gosh, you've caught me from behind! How unexpected and unintentional!

Oh, that's right. If the lighting in that image didn't tip you off, I'm talking about her butt. Not only in this image, but there were also a few screenshots in which her butt was very...prominent. And huge. Buuut, I mean, that's not that bad, right? At least they didn't, like, put her in a skin-tight suit, and tie her up in bondage or somethi-

...oh.

Nah honestly this is more just poking fun at the game than complaining about it. Although it did kinda make me think like, do you guys feel like you need this to sell the game? Hmmmm..... Not that that's necessarily the case, but....IIIIII dunno...combined with everything else, seems a bit suspect.

So, at this point, I'm feeling a little disappointed, cause it feels like the game isn't really going to be what they'd originally made me think it would. But, it might still be cool, right? It's not like they're going to use any more borrowed ideas or cliches...right? Guys?

Zombies. Why did it have to be zombies. I'm tired of zombies.

Okay so those aren't really zombies, they're called 'leapers'. They're humans who have become 'addicted to memories', and become all husk-like as a result, I guess. And you have to fight them. So let's be honest. If it looks like a duck, and acts like the duck, it's probably a friggin' zombie duck, because oh my god.

Okay...so. Things are looking kind of grim for me at this point. But let's look for something positive, shall we? Let's see, what are they pimping here...the Combo Lab? So you can build your own combos by picking a bunch of individual moves to string together. Ohh, boy. That sounds fun for about thirty seconds. Let's take a look at the UI.

Oh, yeah, wow. That looks intuitive. Awesome.

Okay...god damnit. God damnit. But wait, we've still got the memory manipulations. There's a bunch of other crap stuffed in there too, but we still have the memory manipulations! Doh ho ho, Jamie, Dontnod says, not so fast! In an OXM article I read about the game, it said that due to the high cost of creating the memory manipulation scenes, from having to mo-cap so many different alternative situations, there will only be *FOUR* actual memory manipulation sequences in the game. Four. Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyy~

And one last thing I feel I have to point out. I absolutely cannot stand the word 'Pressen'. It is probably the ugliest word I have ever heard in my life. It is up there in the Combo Lab screenshot, but I still don't know what a Pressen actually is because every time I hear it my brain vomits all over itself and no information is allowed to enter for a significant period of time afterwards.

Okay, let's put away our panic pants for a minute here and be rational. Maybe the game will still be good and really fun. I actually hope it does well, because it's a new IP that does have some new ideas, and it's always good to see those kinds of games succeed. But I can't help but feel like this is another case where big business lorded over creativity and smooshed it into its own money-making vision. It just seems like EVERYTHING I've seen from this game after its initial announcement has been against me. I guess that's partly my fault, for comparing the actual game to the game that I wish it was, but it's hard not to do that, isn't it?

To be perfectly honest with you, I don't know if I'll buy the game yet. This might be one of those rare occasions where I will actually wait for reviews to see how it turned out. Maybe I'm being a little harsh on the game, but that's just because I saw so much potential in the original idea of the memory manipulations. Hopefully it'll turn out better than I'm expecting, though. This is one instance where I'd love to be wrong.