Gameplay

Being an action-adventure game, Remember Me has a lot of this going on from the jump. Platforming, beat-em-up combat and exploration are all present as well as a few extra unique systems that give the game its personal feel. Exploration is limited to finding (not so) hidden collectibles throughout the chapters and while these do increase your Health and Focus bars as well as your Journal full of lore the whole experience feels rather hollow. The scope and premise feel ambitious but the paths are generally laid out linearly and that really trims the overall product down to a manageable but unfortunate level.

Platforming in Remember Me is fluid and well animated. The paths you take are laid out quite clearly thanks to you Sensen device being able to point out your most efficient path towards your goal, any ledges you might be able to interact with as well as any hazards along your way. It really is refreshing to see this style of presentation as most of the challenge offered by most platforming of this type is the artificial looking ledges we inevitably jump towards countless times resulting in our deaths. The presentation is done very well but unfortunately it makes most of the platforming seem trivial and tedious which is unfortunate though as you advance and gain more abilities it does open up more if only slightly with some basic puzzle elements.

Combat in Remember Me is in-depth to a level few games tend to venture. As you advance throughout the game you unlock moves known as Pressens and these Pressens can be assembled into combos of your own creation in the Combo Lab screen of the game. The Pressen system grows as you gain access to moves in the different Pressen families known as Regen, Power, Chain and Cooldown and insert them wherever you like to fit your personal style of combat gameplay. Regen moves restore a small portion of HP when activated, Power moves deal additional damage while Chain abilities duplicate pervious moves in you combinations and Cooldowns restore your S-Pressen gauge which allows you to use special moves that offer a whole range of unique combat effect and are also customizable.

Combat doesn’t stop there, however, and the Pressen system and the Combo Log are simply the setup for the execution of combat. The bottom of the HUD serves as your HP display as well as the Dynamic Combo Display. The DCD allows you to see, in real time, where you are in a given combo as well as your real time button presses. To add to this quick paced, button mashing combat Remember Me has included the great ability to dodge mid combat (and you will often) and finish your combo once you leap to safety. The animations all flow seamlessly and make the combat sections in the game fluid and fun.

The last system at play in Remember Me is the Memory Remixing system that embodies Nilin’s unique power and the overall premise of the game. When prompted to, you can enter the minds of targets and foes to change their memory to better suit your needs. After viewing the memory in its entirety as a short cut scene you are given an objective to perform. Rewinding back through the memory you look for memory glitches, little things about the memory you can change, and you alter things to your own ends. The trick is finding which glitches work and which don’t as sometimes you will need a combination of the right ones to achieve your goal but every changed glitch changes the memory in some way and rewinding past a given glitch resets it. This results in the whole system acting out like a very sadistic, real-time choose your own adventure book but is very entertaining overall.