The game went through a difficult journey before hitting store shelves. It all started with the formation of the Dontnod Entertainment company in 2008, at the same moment the development process began. The game was originally called Adrift and was intended to be an exclusive for Sony and its PlayStation 3. The game was shown to the public only once – at Gamescom 2011, a teaser trailer for the game was demonstrated. But in the same 2011, something went wrong and Sony decided to close the project, at the same time breaking the contract with the development studio. There were rumors that Sony was not happy with the fact that the main character was a woman, and in general they were not happy with the quality of the game. But we will never know the truth, and it doesn’t matter. Because not even a year had passed since Capcom appeared on a white horse and bought Adrift from Sony, allowing Dontnod to continue to do his thing. And after all this, at the Gamescom 2012 conference the game was shown again, but the main concept and name changed, now it’s Remember Me.
The location of the action remains unchanged – Paris 2084 and the main protagonist – Nilin. Let’s take a short excursion into the world of the future. Memories have ceased to be something personal, now they can be digitized, bought and sold, all this became possible thanks to Sensin, developed by Memorize. Over time, memories turned into drugs. And while some are swimming in money and the most vivid memories, the majority are vegetating in the slums, suffering from meme addiction. Typical cyberpunk. Nilin, our ward, is not only the best hunter of memories, but the only one who can change them right in the head of the bearer. Naturally, there is a force resisting the powerful Memorize corporation, they are called errorists, our heroine is among them. As you might guess, errorist is a compound word made up of two words “error”, i.e.e. mistake and "terrorist". And believe me, they are called terrorists for a reason. Sometimes, because of the actions of Nilin and her leadership, hundreds and thousands of innocent people suffer. But there is no revolution without victims, right??
Before us is another game on the undying engine Unreal Engine 3. But the developers were able to tame him and rolled out a very decent picture. Character models look like real people, and not like monsters pumped up with anabolic steroids, as is usually the case. And the textures are quite high resolution. But these are all technical details. But what’s really important is that the designers did their best and created a truly beautiful and colorful world. With a huge visual difference between the poorest and elite areas of the powerful of the future. Neon slums with rubble, flooding and just heaps of garbage are adjacent to technologically advanced, sterile and sophisticated neighborhoods. Surely this is what the real Paris of the future would look like.
Unfortunately, all this beauty is nothing https://palpitoscasino.co.uk/games/ more than a golden cage for the player. After all, you will be allowed to take a maximum of a couple of steps away from the route laid out by the developers, and even then only in order to pick up some bonus or background information, which, by the way, is quite a lot here and is well developed. But this is by no means a minus of the game, after all, it’s not a sandbox, and those who like to look around will still have somewhere to direct their gaze. The game is strongly reminiscent in visual and content terms of the recent Syndicate from Starbreeze, very similar.
Remember Me is a new example of the bet-em-up genre with shooting elements. Such games don’t come out very often, and of the latest, only Batman can be distinguished. But the French did not parasitize on an already well-established combat system, they tried to introduce something fresh. In all games, combos are simply sequences of attacks of varying complexity that are given to you as is and you cannot change anything. Dontnod gave players more freedom. Combos, as before, are performed by a sequence of pressing certain buttons, which do not change throughout the game, but the attacks themselves, which open as you gain combat experience, you are free to choose and change according to your desire or circumstances. In a battle against one or two opponents, in principle, it doesn’t matter what blows you hit them with, but in battles with a large number of opponents, you will be forced to at least think about what blow, in what position in the chain, to put, because each has its own effect, such as healing or increased damage. In addition, the closer the blow is to the end of the ligament, the stronger its effect will be. There was something similar in the post-Soviet game Collapse, but in the form of regular combos, without the ability to edit them. There are not very many links themselves, and gradually opening up, they do not change throughout the game, but there are a lot of techniques themselves, even after filling out all the links there will be extra ones. Only strikes within their own group do not differ in any way in effect, only in animation. The combat system is not limited to simple combos, as Nilin progresses she will remember or gain some "special" functions of her Senshin. Like "spam" with which you can shoot. And special. techniques, the execution of which consumes one cell of a special scale, which is restored over time, or after performing appropriate restorative techniques. A warning sign, as usual for the genre, appears above the enemies before the attack, but there are no counterattacks in the game; in general, you can only gracefully dodge it. In reality it all looks simpler than in words. Overall the combat system is quite simple and intuitive. True, there is one feature that some may consider a drawback, the chain continues only when attacking one enemy, if you hit another enemy in a hurry in the middle of a violent combo, the chain will be reset and you will have to start over, sometimes this is really inconvenient.
Now you know how you can fight. It’s time to tell who you are about to face. Enemies are divided into three subspecies: people, mutants and robots. For the most part, mutants are very weak creatures and pose a danger only in large groups. But sometimes, on your way you will meet special individuals, some are very fast and nimble, others are very heavy and hardy. It even gets to the point of inappropriate mysticism, such as invisible mutants; it’s hard to imagine how an implant designed for storing and exchanging memories can make a person invisible, but we have what we have. Hostile people are also different, here there are ordinary punching bags and those reinforced with a shield. There are also enemies protected by a force field that damages Nilin with every hit, so you need to carefully calculate your combinations. It’s funny that almost all the fighters in Neo-Paris fight exclusively hand-to-hand, without using firearms. Robots are quite rare and are usually used as support for people, mostly shooting and exploding droids, but there is also a fat one here – a huge robot that even Nilin is afraid of. During the passage, one serious inconsistency will catch your eye – our brave warrior is able to kill an entire squad of opponents with her bare hands and feet, but for some reason she is absolutely powerless in front of patrolling drones, from which we can only hide, this is how the developers imposed stealth on us, it turned out not bad, but not appropriate.
After the new version of the game was first shown at Gamescom 2012, many players turned their noses up. Then a video was shown in which Nilin was running away from an enemy helicopter, using elements of parkour and all that, the problem was that the animation of the main character was, to put it mildly, not very smooth, and frankly, bad. And the episode was not chosen very well, it gave the impression of a very cheap copy of some Ancharted. But it was fixed for release. Nilin, of course, has not become as graceful as the gorgeous Catwoman from Batman Arkham City, but the animation has been improved quite a bit, although the feeling of “mechanical” movements cannot leave us, but maybe our thief of memories just has perfect technicality. In any case, it’s nice to watch her pirouettes. Speaking of parkour, it is quite simple here, everything is the same as in other games, although here you are always shown with a special symbol where to move.
Let’s move on to the sweet part, in addition to the original combat system, the developers came up with another gameplay feature, which is almost the main element and motive of the game. We are talking about Nilin’s unique skill – she is able not only to download memories, but also to edit them directly in the victim’s mind to achieve a certain result. It happens something like this: you sneak up on the victim, hack his sensein and penetrate the victim’s memory. The following shows a specific segment that needs to be changed. Nilin and you are required to find, by rewinding this fragment of memory like a video, certain entry points where you can change the reality that exists in the victim’s memory, for example by moving a bedside table or turning on some device and selecting parameters until the desired result is achieved. But in addition to the desired and initial results, there may be a number of undesirable results that should be prevented by correctly selecting entry points. Without exaggeration, we can say that such episodes are the best part of the game, but Dontnod did not shove them every five minutes, but placed them in the narrative wisely and at fairly large intervals. It’s a bit of a pity that there are so few of them. Apparently the developers didn’t want it to seem like Nilin was taking such a huge power lightly, and she herself was thinking about it.
The writers did a good job and provided significant motivation for the main character for such radical actions. The narrative can be divided into two parts. In the first, Nilin searches and collects himself and his memory piece by piece, doubting almost every action he takes and blindly trusting his partner. And in the second, she furiously tries to save a world rotting from within, due to excessive flirting with human nature using modern technology. In the infrequent breaks between missions, Nilin reflects, evaluates her actions and tries to decide whether the result is worth all these sacrifices, because even if she succeeds, in the process a huge number of people will lay the bones in the foundation of this success. As the story progresses, the huntress’s personality evolves anew. After all, in essence, memory makes us who we are. If a person loses it, will he remain the same and will he want to return the lost pieces of himself?? Perhaps this is exactly what the developers wanted to make us think about when writing the Remember Me source code.
Well, that seems to be all. The game turned out great. There are, of course, drawbacks such as an inconvenient camera at times and limited space available for walking. But excellent visual and atmospheric accompaniment with a couple of fresh ideas that are not overused as usual, make Remember Me a good choice for spending time in front of the monitor. A good and fresh combat system, a realistic world of the future and a deep atmosphere, a lively main character with an appearance that is extraordinary for the gaming industry. This game is really worth buying. But, unfortunately, it is not selling very well, we can only hope that Capcom is not as dependent on money as other publishers in order to continue releasing original and daring games.