Remember Me – Steam Backlog Bonanza [Blaugust 29]

Two great games in a row! Yesterday I played a cyberpunk action game called Remember Me for the Steam Backlog Bonanza. I got it in the 2015 Winter sale for $6.

I really enjoyed it. I liked it so much I lost track of time, and played for nearly two hours. It’s an “action movie” kind of a game, by which I mean it has a whole lot of cut scenes and voice acting and storytelling in between the gameplay. A good half of the game is watching story cut scenes. The music is big and sweeping, the characters are larger than life.

It reminded me a little bit of a game called Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, another big “action movie” story game that I liked. The game was intricately weaved into the telling of the story, and it’s the same here.

The gameplay in Remember Me is fairly simplistic. There is a lot of Tomb Raider-style climbing of walls and navigating around obstacles. There is little or no thought involved, you simply move the controller in the direction of the obvious yellow arrows and watch what happens.

I would describe the combat as similar to a “brawler” type of game. You basically press X or Y, and you’re supposed to use combos to chain together attacks. I don’t particularly like “combo” fighting games so that part wasn’t very intuitive or fun for me, but I muddled through it without much incident. The more you play, the more combos you unlock and you get to press X and Y in longer and longer combinations to do more damage (and heal yourself). I groused about it a lot, now that I think about it.

There are collectible items to find as you wander the city. There are environmental storytelling logs to find (text only, apparently). The usual things that are thrown into every modern game whether they are needed or not.

The setting is very rich and complex, set in “Neo-Paris” in the future. Well, I should say it looks rich and complex. There isn’t much you can actually interact with in the environment. But there’s a whole lot to stare at as you walk around. Graffiti, signs, things like that. The graphics are good for a game from 2013, but not as good as a modern game. I hardly noticed.

I found myself intrigued by the story and the environment, enough to push through the annoyances of the combat. It’s about a woman who lost her memory and is on the run from … I don’t really know what, actually. Probably a Big Corporation, because cyberpunk. I suppose that revelation will come later in the story. The voice acting is better than average. It’s definitely a pure cyberpunk affair, so all you folks salivating while waiting for Cyberpunk 2077 might like it. I personally am not a big fan of cyberpunk, but neither am I particularly opposed to it. It’s largely just a neutral background to me.

There is one other odd part that I’m not sure how to describe. At one point, I was told to “rewrite the memories” of another person. You play back a scene from the person’s memory, and you are able to fast-forward and rewind the scene and make subtle changes in the environment in order to affect the outcome of the scene. It’s an interesting mechanic at first, but it gets old fast as you keep having to rewind and replay the same scene over and over again trying to figure out how to make the “correct” alteration. It took an inordinately long time and broke up the flow of the story a bit. That and the combat combos are the only two negatives I recall.

Will I play more? Very likely. I really enjoyed it. Just need to find time for it. I’ll probably have to make a list of the games I liked from the backlog and schedule time to return to them.

Live Stream - Remember Me

Stream Production Notes: I started a bit late because I downloaded the wrong game. Then I discovered my Chromebook wouldn’t log into YouTube for some weird reason. I had to drag my main laptop in from the living room to monitor the stream. I had some trouble getting the audio balanced. I think the game sound was probably too loud. It’s really hard to balance that just by looking at the meters on the OBS window. (Because again, for the hundredth time I find myself screaming this from the rooftops, OBS does not have a realtime monitor of the audio going out to the stream, an oversight that is unfathomable to me.)

Remember Me is a CAPCOM game, which unfortunately means I got a copyright hit when I viewed one of the trailers in the game. I’m not sure about this, but I feel like I’ve heard before that CAPCOM is notorious for being picky about using their games in videos and streams. (I also had to re-edit my Dragon’s Dogma video several times to avoid copyright claims.) It’s not a “strike,” it’s just a “claim,” which only means I can’t monetize the video. Not much worry there, as I’m still about a bazillion subscribers and playback minutes away from passing that threshold.

Previously on the Steam Backlog Bonanza: Never Alone.