Remember Me arrives at the end of a console cycle, as gamers chew over the future of used games and wonder which next-gen consoles are worth their money. It’s strangely fitting that this game’s story revolves around class consciousness in a futuristic world obsessed with a dangerous but alluring technology. Remember Me deserves more than to wind up as a cult favorite in bargain bins for gamers who couldn’t afford a fancy console upgrade, but given the game’s themes, that wouldn’t be a bad hill for it to die on.
After all, the protagonist of Remember Me, Nilin, is the heroine of the underclass. It’s 2084, and Neo-Paris has been segregated by status. Everyone has a device called a Sensen installed on the back of their necks; a massive corporation called Memorize developed the tech, which lets people modify their memories. Trouble is, messing with memories causes nasty, zombie-like side effects in the long term. Everyone has a Sensen installed, but most folks can’t afford to stay human for long.
Memory alteration also seems to be addictive; the poorer districts of Neo-Paris feature men and women desperately begging passers-by for a memory upload just so they can experience something, anything. The analogue to videogames doesn’t seem like much of a leap, here.
Nilin begins the game in the Bastille with no memory of who she is. (Yes, the upper-class of Neo-Paris went ahead and called their futuristic prison the Bastille; presumably the rich hipsters in this world also wear “let them eat cake” T-shirts.) Nilin soon gets her memory jogged when Edge, an activist friend of hers from the outside, hacks into her Sensen and tells her how to escape the compound.
Soon, Edge barrels Nilin with piles of exposition and tasks to help their cause. It turns out Nilin was quite the bad-ass before the brainwash, and now her escape has rocketed her back to being Public Enemy Number One. As Nilin’s old tough act persona filters back into her memory in bits and pieces, she must choose which parts of her past she still identifies with.
Throughout the game Nilin wrestles with her past, but also with what she has done to others for the sake of the “cause”. Remember Me’s strongest sequences are Nilin’s memory remixes; she can change someone’s personality and motivations by hacking their Sensen and altering their memories of past tumultuous events. These sequences play like point-and-click adventures, in which the player must select the correct combination of objects to produce a desired result. Nilin just keeps changing the story until she gets the result she wants; she has learned how to “game” other people’s senses, as though playing their brains in a sort of God-mode.
Unfortunately, in spite of being about games thematically, Remember Me features some unfortunate missteps as a game. The combat system invites players to design their own combos, and the menu for creating these attacks feels user-friendly and simple. In practice, however, the combos often don’t work as they should; the slow-motion timing of attacks is likely inspired by Batman: Arkham Asylum, but Nilin doesn’t share the terpsichorean grace of the Batman in action. Remember Me’s controls feel clunkier and less responsive than Arkham. When fighting large groups, Nilin must spend more time leaping around than attacking in order to avoid getting surrounded. When Nilin gets encircled—and she does, often—Remember Me’s slow combat style and bizarre camera shifts drag her down.