Before I set the stage, let me first introduce you to our new dramatis persona: Save File Sundays, a series focused on good old games from the previous decades that either went unnoticed or we’re just incredibly nostalgic for. Anything goes here, so long as it’s relatively aged.
And for the inaugural edition of this new weekly series, we’re looking at Remember Me, a Don’t Nod Entertainment title released in 2013. It spawned concepts and ideas that would later find their way into the studio’s breakthrough episodic hit, Life is Strange, but never became as popular, though it very much deserves the attention.
Cyberpunk corporations condemning the globe
Remember Me is set in a futuristic, cyberpunk Europe. Neo-Paris in 2084, to be exact. The world has been shaped by corporate greed and overreach, and one entity in particular, a megacorp called Memorize, wants to commoditize people’s memories, erasing and bending them as it sees fit.
If you’ve ever wondered what the world of Cyberpunk 2077 looks like across the pond, Don’t Nod’s 2013 title gives you a very evocative sneak peek as the streets of Paris are equally baroque as they are sci-fi, providing for one of the more unique settings I’ve ever encountered.
You take control of Nilin, a Memory Hunter in her “past life,” whose own memories were stolen and wiped by Memorize after she was interred at La Bastille. The latter is a dystopian megaprison where each and every inmate’s memories are seized at the entrance, only to be returned (in whatever capacity the corporation wants) after they have served their sentences.
While waiting for her slate to be wiped clean, Nilin is contacted by a revolutionary called Edge, who helps her break out of La Bastille with the little identity she has left, setting her and you, the player, down a path to recover Nilin’s memory and stop Memorize’s evil plans.
It’s a simple and effective plot which flows down a linear narrative stream, with not much in the way of exploration or open levels. What it isn’t is by no means a badly-written game, with dialogues straight out of some high-class literary fiction novel, especially when Nilin, voiced by Kezia Burrows, has her monologues during inter-episodic cutscenes.
With deep philosophy, world-class writing, and heavy-hitting themes, Remember Me truly set Don’t Nod’s narrative mastery into motion.
The game unfolds episodically, which Don’t Nod would greatly expand upon for Life is Strange. The key difference here is that all the episodes are contained within one big package and not separate releases like Life is Strange has. Still, it’s a game with levels that you clear, followed by a cutscene that segues you into the next.
For a 2013 game, it’s nothing out of the ordinary. Many titles of the time and before had similar story structures, and to be honest, I’m all here for it. Games today are so obsessed with open-ended gameplay and design that they forget what is actually fun, very often giving players a massive world with nothing to do in it.
Speaking of gameplay, Remember Me is a combination of platforming, linear adventure, and action, with combat taken straight out of the Batman Arkham games.
You can craft your own combos with various different effects, use a bunch of “super” abilities, and generally spam clicks and dodge like in Batman.
The platforming bit is more Uncharted than Assassin’s Creed. It doesn’t have a lot of depth and is usually reserved for a heightened level of awe achieved through its cinematic camera. There are secret areas and items to find, including worldbuilding snippets, which usually require platforming, so it has another function as well.
All in all, Remember Me is a simple game, but one that introduced a ton of novel concepts and ideas, some of which would end up in massive AAA releases like Cyberpunk 2077.
Braindances before they were cool
Perhaps the most interesting and unique part of Remember Me is its Memory Remix mechanic, allowing Nilin to utilize her Memory Hunting skills to bend the minds of whomever she wants.
This works by Nilin taking existing memories of a person and changing some of their details, which, via a butterfly effect, makes them remember whatever she wishes them to. For example, when attacked by a bounty hunter, Nilin grabs her and starts remixing her memory, which the player does on their own.
A cutscene first plays, showing you the intact original memory, with the game then prompting you to rewind by moving your mouse in a circle. You then search for various “glitches” in the memory that you can manipulate, trying to push the memory down a new lane that benefits Nilin.
In this particular instance, you’re trying to make the doctor in the bounty hunter’s memory kill her husband, for whom she is trying to raise money by collecting the bounty on Nilin’s head. You switch up bits and pieces in the cutscene, causing her husband to get consumed by some sort of rage virus, prompting the doctor to kill him instead of asking the bounty hunter to pay up for additional healthcare.
This sort of timeline manipulation and memory alteration is something that’d later be incorporated in Cyberpunk 2077 via its Braindance mechanic, which sort of does the same thing. Instead of manipulating memories and implanting them, however, the player in 2077 just searches for additional information.
Butterfly effects, rewinding, and related ideas also ended up in Life is Strange, Don’t Nod’s next game after Remember Me, making this little tile a foundational game whose concepts eventually reached a much wider audience, even though not many remember it today.
For this series, I’ll be giving a small re-review for each game, focusing on its nostalgia factor and overall quality (impacted by how well it stands today).
So, in the case of Remember Me, here’s what I’ve got:
Nostalgia Factor: 6/10 — Not much is memorable about Remember Me, but its concepts live on in bigger franchises and games, cementing its impact in gaming as a whole.
Recompiled Review Score: 8/10 – 12 years ago, we gave it a 6/10, but so many years down the line, it deserves a bit more.
Closer: Remember Me is a great game that could’ve done a lot more with its incredibly unique concepts and ideas, but one that does not fail to encapsulate the player with its awe-inspiring world, fantastic characters, impeccable writing quality, and satisfying, if simple, combat.
Let me know what you thought of Remember Me if you’ve ever played it, or if you’re going to play it now that I’ve spent so much time convincing you to do so.
