Remember Me, an ambitious project from Parisian studio dontnod, as well as Capcom’s new IP, should be one of the company’s trump cards – especially after the disappointing reviews of Resident Evil 6. A smart cyberpunk that raises questions of memory and invites us to think about where social networks are leading us, has every chance to more than cover the intellectual vacuum of a horror film about zombies, pretentious speeches and China, which was lukewarmly received in the press. Presented at Gamescom 2012, the game, which attracted the eye with a cute main character and an intriguing gameplay video, has since acquired a lot of details. We’ll tell you about them now – especially since the creative director of the project, Jean-Maxime Moris, opened up about Remember Me in his recent interview.
So, to the already familiar information about the place of action (Paris of the future) and the time in which the game will take place (the full cyberpunk year 2084), many details have been added about the most important feature – the ability to interfere with people’s memory and change it.
In the presentation at Gamescom, Nilin (the main character of the game) achieved the desired result by simply getting to a place where she could easily connect to the victim, penetrate the mind of the unfortunate person and mix the memory, achieving the desired result. The process itself is an enumeration of options in an interactive scene – if you guessed correctly, you return to the real world, and if not, well, you have to try again.
However, according to Jean-Maxime, in the final game it will be possible not only to win or lose by poking at the available options, but also to get different endings by overwriting the memory of the victims in different ways. It sounds interesting, especially in connection with the statement that the main idea of the game – Change your memory, change the world – invented at the very beginning of development, became a guiding beacon for developers. However, you shouldn’t expect much nonlinearity, since the developers are putting a lot of emphasis on a tough, but, according to them, exciting plot. But there may well be various funny scenes.
On the other hand, the constantly appearing phrase that making games “is very, very difficult” is alarming. Like, Mori now won’t even think a bad word about the shortcomings of any toy, because he understands how difficult it was to create this toy. Some EA would do well to learn such patience, but, admittedly, the combination of the phrase and the fact that Remember Me is the first (and what an ambitious!) studio project, makes you want to cross your fingers. For luck.
However, other Capcom studios https://playlive-casino.co.uk/bonus/ also helped with the development – even the creators of Street Fighter helped with the dontnod combat system. However, all design decisions, as Mori assures, were made directly in the studio, and Asian colleagues only helped with finalization. In this case, all that remains is to praise the creative guys – in the game you can not only weave attacks into combos, but the chains of attacks themselves, which bring certain bonuses, are built by the player from techniques discovered during the game. How it will be played is not yet clear, but in words everything looks great – combos are saved in a separate sheet and have special features. You can collect them from four types of attacks: dealing high damage, restoring health, reducing the reload time of special abilities and increasing bonuses from previous moves.
True, you won’t be able to spam super attacks all the time – special skills, like a “logical bomb”, which is hung on one of the opponents, then explodes and dashes everyone around, not only become unavailable for some time after use, but also waste one of the energy cells, of which there were only three in the videos shown. This same energy is perfectly replenished by performing combo attacks (and receiving blows from opponents). It looks very dynamic and interesting – different enemies are constantly forcing you to use one or another ability, Nilin cheerfully gives lulls to opponents, periodically being distracted by remote hacking of robots. However, outwardly everything looks slightly similar to Batman: Arkham City – the same smooth movement from enemy to enemy, finishing off weakened opponents, but adjusted for less polish and much more clumsy animation. And, just like Batman, Remember Me’s heroine doesn’t kill anyone. As Mori explains, the flying shards that come out of enemies’ helmets after a "memory overload" are just their memories, fragmented into thousands of pieces. And sooner or later they will rise. And they will remember everything.
Behind the scenes, cheerful electronic music will sound, full of references to iconic works like the Matrix, and at some moments Nilin will pathetically shout that she is here, supposedly, a hunter. By the way, it was with this phrase that an annoying embarrassment occurred – picky players had already criticized it to smithereens, having criticized not only the voice actress, but also the ability of the developers to write scripts. They responded by saying that they would take the criticism into account and think about what could be done… But at the time of inserting this fragment into the game, they did not experience any shudders and advise reminding that people have different tastes. Doubts about the quality of the voice acting, of course, are by no means the biggest question hanging over Remember Me. What’s more significant is that so far we haven’t been shown any strong dialogue – and the lack of it is disastrous for a game that tackles complex topics.
Maintaining the tone set by Deus Ex: Human Revolution, another significant cyberpunk project of the decade, the developers want to force players to think about a certain problem that is emerging right now. But they are not interested in problems of improving the body, but in issues related to the transfer of memories. Already, almost every step of our lives is immediately reflected on Twitter, Facebook* and other social networks. But what will happen when you can share not only photos, videos and music – but the most intimate? By memory. In the Remember Me world, this milestone has already been passed and people are willing to share their favorite memories. But even the desire to give someone a piece of his past does not arise; a person is not immune from the fact that someone will burst into his head and turn everything upside down.
This is what the main character of the game, Nilin, did. Once a memory hunter, she lost it herself. And now I have to look for myself again. We will find out how interesting it will be to follow her adventures in the spring of 2013. Must find out.
After all, making games is very, very difficult.
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