The best way to describe Remember Me is to recall the old adage “jack of all trades, master of none,” in that Remember Me attempts a lot but somehow never manages to do one thing great. Does this mean that the game is not worth a look, or does any one of Remember Me‘s elements shine bright enough to warrant a purchase or a playthrough? Ultimately, that is up to you to decide, as this game evokes yet another adage: “love it or hate it,” though chances are good you’ll be siding with hating it.
Set in Paris in 2084, the game’s setting evokes memories of PC cult classic Omikron or film cult classic Blade Runner as cyberpunk pervades every aspect of the setting. For some gamers, this may be enough to warrant a purchase, as the game is absolutely beautiful and each scene feels ripped from a major motion picture. You’ll marvel at the graphical quality of the title but feel saddened at the same time that you can’t actually explore these amazing landscapes. Remember Me is a fairly linear game that, despite all its focus on setting, is a strictly “Point A to Point B” experience.
But such an experience would be fine if the game’s story propped it up which sadly, it does not. Remember Me starts out strong, telling the story of an amnesiac woman who has had her memories forcibly stripped away. However, in return she now has the power to alter other’s memories. Unfortunately, the game does not use this premise to create something unique unto itself, but rather as a vehicle for trope after trope. Evil corporations, revolutions, and your character being the only one to put an end to an evil regime are all on display here. Such tropes were tiresome ten years ago and certainly don’t hold up today.
The gameplay is sadly not much better. If you’ve played any of the Arkham games, you know what to expect with combat except Remember Me doesn’t have the same polish as those games did. Combat often feels stiff, clunky, and drawn out in Remember Me, whereas in Arkham, combat was fun and fluid. More often than not, you’ll just want to skip past the combat in Remember Me as fast as possible. The game’s combo system is highly customizable but in all honesty, it’s like adding delicious icing to a rotten cake.
Remember Me also mixes in platforming segments, stealth segments and chase sequences but none of these particularly stands out. If the game focused on one aspect and tightened up its story, perhaps it could have carved out a niche and become a cult classic, much like the games and stories it’s attempting to emulate. As it stands now, Remember Me isn’t a game worth playing, much less remembering.
Remember Me was released on June 4th, 2013 for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC.