Remember Me - A Sense of Horror Approaches

[Brian]

I grabbed Remember Me because I compulsively buy games on Steam to fill the gap of not having someone special to share my life with.

It's a coping mechanism (also called 'a wallet').  Don't judge me!

...anyway.

Remember Me, so far, is a dystopian adventure/action game.  A beat-em-up in with some interesting mechanics.  I'm mentioning it while only a little bit into it because I don't know if I can make myself keep playing it....

First, the setting is Rent-a-dystopia.  The future is both shiny and filthy, which I can't help but see we've seen a million times before.  They gain some points for originality in the original premise, though, which is that memories become digitized, and thus a commodity.  Evidently as part of this setting, memories are also unique, and can't be copied, only moved.  There's implications of people selling (and buying) treasured memories, backstory explaining how it's used to study and understand crime, and so on.

The backstory is actually surprisingly interesting, because the vast majority of Rend-a-Distpopias tend to focus on, "We now have robots.  *Hand on shoulder, other hand gesturing widely*  Robots everywhere," (see: Binary Domain, a surprisingly fun title; grab it the next time it goes on sale if you enjoy third-person-shooters), or "Damn, Son, that is a lot of cybernetics!" (DE:HR), or "Boy, Genetic Engineering sure is great, and will never have downsides!" (any *shock game) or so on.  Few of them touch on something that I personally find really engrossing: Augmented Reality.

DE:HR was a (pardon the Shader-of-choice-joke) golden opportunity to go that route, but didn't take it.  I enjoyed (to a degree; ultimately the ending encounter was too stressful for me to complete) the minor AR elements of Dead Space.  I'm not a huge fan of horror games, and especially twitch/shock survival horror games, which DS was one of.  So, I find the concept of AR cool and thought that Remember Me did a fun job of it.  They even explicitly label things in-game as being AR!  That's really neat!  Admittedly, in-game, AR boils down to 'holograms' mostly, but they do at least take it one step further, and it's also 'controls for real-life objects/functions', which is nice.

Other than that, the game is a beat-em-up, where you run around Batman: Arkham Noun style punching and kicking enemy mans until they are no longer a problem.  Instead of getting a variety of moves, you get programmable comboes, where you can choose what effects a given combo has (so far, I've got ... two).  You can specify what a given hit in a chain does; reduce your special move cooldown, do extra damage, heal you, and so on.  And the combats are spectacular; not super challenging; if you can beat a Batman: Arkham Noun fight, these should be about as hard.  But they're well done.

You get beat up, the music becomes metal/hard-rock with a static-heavy back-beat.  You do well, the music is rock-opera; you really get a feel for how well you're doing through the music.

Outside of combat, there are relatively non-offensive mantling/DICE segments, ala Lara Croft or Drake whatsishname.   Maybe Drake was his last name?  ...you get the idea.  You climb and jump, and some of the camera work isn't perfect, but as far as I got (second boss),  the jumping and climbing segments weren't awful.

Instead of a hacking minigame, you just review other people's memory of putting in the proper password, which is okay.  It's one of those, "Mash one button, and it's always the same button," event things, which is not real gameplay, but it's so easy you don't really care about it.  So far, they're haven't been especially common, either.

But then we run into the problem.  ...squick warnings apply, so:

Spoiler: ShowHide

Part of the game is that your character recovers memories.  Or at least, she was capable of it.  She's evidently famous for it, too.  Sure, player characters have historically been really cool/special/whatever.  Why not?  Except your second boss fight rolls around (your first real boss fight that isn't against a generic cyberdistopian zombie), and you use your special power.

What is it?  Why, it's mind rape~!

It's not some minigame where you get to say, "I have a charm," effect.  You don't just hack into some enemy robot's servers.

You go into your assassin's memories, and you make her remember her husband dying.  And it's worse than it sounds, because in reality, he's alive.  She needed the bounty on your head to repair his mental trauma.  But, hey, it was your life or her mind, so mind-rape ahoy!  You get a cutscene of her memories of her feeding him her own memories, and him stabilizing (evidently this process can copy, instead of move?  A bit inconsistent, but:) you get to rewind, fast forward, and ultimately edit her memories.  Neat -- there's a whole minigame around it with a slew of mechanics.  It's not optional, and as far as I can tell you can't actually fail it.  But at the end of the day, you rewrite the assasin's memories to make the doctor a murderer.

Suddenly, instead of cutting your head off, she's your strongest ally, because she wants revenge on the doctor.

...great.

I played on, and the next mechanic they introduced was, "You can defeat stunned enemies by pressing a button after hitting them enough times!  It gives you bonus supermove points!"  Okay, cool.  How's it work?

You explode their minds.  You 'overload' them and turn them into vegetables.

I played on anyway to the next boss.  He's a jerk, but instead of beating him up and walking away, you beat him up, incapacitate him, and then overload his mind (through a QTE event, even).  Somehow, this gives you a powerup, megaman style.

And your in-plot reward for this?  You commit an act of terrorism that evidently benefits no one but the mysterious voice on the radio telling you this is all legit, and killing at least 'hundreds'.  Awesome.

This is where I stopped.

I ... don't honestly know if I can play this game anymore.  It's a real pity; I'm in love with the gameplay and the music, but the main character and a bulk of non-optional gameplay mechanics leave me ... disturbed.

I wonder if, on some levels, this game is actually a brilliant deconstruction on the casual 'hacking' or 'charming' we see in other games?  Or maybe I'm giving them too much credit....

Also, I've had a bit to drink by this point.  I won't be terribly surprised if Drac splits this off into a review thread.  Wouldn't be the first time.

[Dracos]

That sounds kinda terrible.  I admit I was wondering at their stated thematics and how that at all matched up with Arkham style antics.

I am unsurprised to here that it doesn't.

[Brian]

I'm going to make myself finish this game to confirm the 'deconstruction' possibility.

Well....  I'm going to try to make myself finish this game.  I feel the whole premise and the squicky parts especially warrant some discussion.

Spoiler: ShowHide

We take the mind-control plasmid in Bioshock: Infinite in stride, and don't much react at the fact that mind-controlled humans kill themselves when control runs out.  Then again, we also do horrible mutilating things with the sky-hook being shoved into eye-sockets and ripping off heads or throwing dying bodies potentially hundreds of feet.  So why did this game hit me so much worse?

Right now I have to say it's because of just how horribly personal and intimate they make the process.  You don't just fire one plasmid and jump back into cover; the entire gameworld is wiped away temporarily so you can go through the minigame for it.

I really want to find out if they'll reveal that the main character is, in fact, a bad guy, or if they're going to try and sell that the ends somehow justify the means.  I actually do have to give the game points for making me seriously reconsider something I previously glossed over, but if it turns out that their devs just thought it would be cool, and it wasn't a deconstruction....

...oy, vey.

[Dracos]

Spoiler: ShowHide

Because its just visual effects in Bioshock (or other mind control bits).  Also the characters aren't people or supposed to be people to you so much as aware combat opposition.  They generally aren't given history, or little hints of personality on purpose because humanizing things you're supposed to shoot at for gameplay purposes is generally either a terrible or all consuming idea.  See Iji for how to do it all consumingly, where every moment raises the question "Should you shoot?"

Basically, when you give personality without reviling characteristics to characters you're supposed to kill, you make the protagonist (The one the player is playing) feel like a monster.  Going further and giving the protagonist the ability to re-engineer these characters with personality is just going down a god complex setup, which generally doesn't work as long as there's any empathy for the other characters.

The concerning thing with their premise is it really begs the question of how such a society functioned long enough to get into even a moderate status quo of it.  It's something authors occassionally play with as some high end elitist sci-fi thing, but in general how do you get a world where brainwashing and memory resequencing are normal and available things and not have societal collapse?  You'd think that "I have tech that steals memories and then you don't have them anymore" is basically a "Go back to the drawing board you fuckwit, and don't come out until you've figured out Nondestructive copy" and that no functioning society would bother allowing it to go further without that step being made.  Sure, then you'd still have criminal memory wipes and stealing, but that would be fringe like finding someone who just is going to walk around shooting people with a gun.  Sure, people do that, but that's not what we generally assume is the end result of people having guns and so society can continue to function.  How does society rationalize "Okay, so you bought a memory stealer" into any level of comfort?

[Brian]

Yeah, part of the reason to continue playing (or trawl their wiki) is to find caches of backstory packets (they're called Mnesis nodes) in the game and find out how it works.  They do explain that frequent memory fiddling causes some people to degeneratively lose memories anyway, but either it's a gaping logic hole where no one has the sense to back up their memories (incidentally, isn't that effectively potential immortality?), or there's some reason memories are unique (but evidently

Spoiler: ShowHide

also editable)

.

I guess I'll see.

[Carthrat]

I have purchased this game on the back of Brian's disquiet with it. It sounds like it could be my thing.

[Carthrat]

...and it immediately fails to run on my machine. Whelp.

[Dracos]

That sucks. :\

[Brian]

There was a patch the day after you posted that, Rat.  It may work now.

Finished the game.  Not very long.  Will probably go into it more tomorrow.

For now, you know it's a bad game when even the final boss comments on how dumb some plot points are.

[Rezantis]

For now, you know it's a bad game when even the final boss comments on how dumb some plot points are.

There's a certain kind of writer who would view that as very meta, and therefore clever.

[Dracos]

And then there's writers who think mind-rape is totally a cool thing :)

[Sierra]

For now, you know it's a bad game when even the final boss comments on how dumb some plot points are.

There's a certain kind of writer who would view that as very meta, and therefore clever.

There is a word for this sort of writer. That word is "Hack."

[Brian]

Alrighty.  I said I'd get back to this, but the whole thing left me feeling so lethargic and ... filthy ... that I didn't, really.  This is kind of a review, but more synopsis.  Draw your own conclusions, or avoid it.  That being said, the rest of this contains major spoilers for the entire game, so:

Spoiler: ShowHide

After the initial mind-rape session, the game goes on.  Combat remains interesting, in general, though I didn't particularly enjoy the late-to-mid game enemies that caused damage when you attacked them, no matter what.  The correct method of dealing with them was to use regen combos, which was irritating, but, meh.

Much of the game's replay value revolves around finding hidden upgrades to your focus (special attacks), health, and EXP bonuses.  There are little AR bug things you shoot for extra EXP, and everything else involves goodies in some ostensibly hard-to-reach location.  Fairly standard.

Anyway, after the point I left off, our heroine goes off on a quest at the behest of the mysterious guiding voice.  After some seemingly pointless screwing around, she runs into her next objective, after a nice little detour to steal an architect's memories of a building she designed.  After that, you head to it.  It's guarded by a fellow 'memory hunter' named 'The Christmas Kid', or something, who seems to be some rock-star style celebrity who has cameras following him everywhere to broadcast his fights.

It's not really clear on what's going on, but you beat him, steal his 'spammer' upgrade to get a ranged attack, and then humiliate him in front of his adoring fans by overloading his mind and presumably blasting all the memories out.  Whatever.  That's not as bad as the disturbingly intimate and progression mandated mind-rape.

Anyway, the thing he was guarding (or just attacked you en route to ... kind of unclear) is the control for a floodgate, and the powerup he gives you is the method you use to access it.  Major oops on his part, huh?  So your goal is ... floodgates.  You open them because mysterious guiding voice (via the AR system) says so.  This presumably kills hundreds, and actually makes hundreds to thousands homeless.

Our protagonist has some brief doubt, and actually whines to the voice about this, angsting over if it's right or wrong.  She doesn't really dwell on it that long, though, and when the voice gives her further instructions, she doesn't actually do much more than say she won't be pushed around forever ... and let herself get pushed around anyway.

Next objective, a hatch to access some sewers to break into a prison, in an area that was previously flooded.  So, that's what the floodgates were evidently opened for?

Once inside the prison, there's a very nice part where you walk through an area you've been before, and you get to see your previous memories replayed in realspace (and time) on top of the current environment.  This is actually kind of neat.

You then run into some kid who helped you out previously, and is currently undergoing the prison-wide memory erasure effort, so he can't recognize you.  Pity.  After that there's an encounter with a mercenary/guard guy who the voice tells you to fight for some access codes.  You're then told/remember he's a really, really awful person, hence justifying his mind-blasting.

Which, incidentally, is a move you can sometimes do to random people in combat, just because.  So ... yeah.  Good times, there.

Some other uninteresting stuff goes on, involving some platforming elements and climbing around like a cheap Lara Croft clone, blah blah blah.  You then fight the boss of the prison, a very unmemorable character, actually, and get a powerup that lets you slide things around on rails via AR.  Neat.  Oh, also, you blow out her memories, which appears to just be standard operating procedure.

Once that's done, and you're starting to feel less mind-rapey and awful about the entire thing, you get a sudden flashback--  Part of the reason for beating her up was to get your memories back, since the prison administrator evidently took them in the first place.  Because memories can only be taken away, not destroyed....  Well, you get a nice flashback to why you got thrown in prison, anyway:

[spoiler]This guy is having a nasty breakup with his girlfriend.  So you edit his memories of how things went when they had their final argument.  Your goal: Make him kill his girlfriend.

That's pretty freaking terrible, but whatever.  You're messing with his memories.  Whee.  The fun little 'edit the scene' minigame plays, you make him kill her, and then the memory editing ends.  Great.  As you're lurking outside of his window, from where you edited his memories, his lawyer suddenly calls ... or maybe it's hers.  I'm unclear.  Anyway, the guy gets a phone call, someone says, "Okay, we're ready to talk about this--"

And then the guy basically goes, "I can't live with myself; you'll never take me alive!"

And shoots himself in the head.

And then his girlfriend walks in, complaining, "Fine, if you're such a baby, we can try and work things out--"

...so.  Yeah.  That was a thing.  That happened.

Around this point I started really losing motivation to grab all the collectibles that explained the setting in more detail.  I grabbed them whenever I ran into them, but I stopped putting effort into reading them or searching them out if they weren't obvious.  So, there could be explanations for things, but I really didn't care.  I was just following the story to the bitter end.

Next up, mysterious voice tells you that you need to find this woman who's in charge of 'reforming' the 'leapers'.  Leapers are people who've gotten so memory-fried they're basically feral, though they identify one another as 'brother' and 'sister' ... thus making them significantly more sympathetic than the protagonist.  They're also a common enemy.  These 'reformatted' leapers are basically on electronic leashes held by guards, though what that does is anyone's guess.  They don't help you if you beat up and KO the guard holding the leash.

Maybe their fighting skill/combat difficulty goes down?  I didn't really notice, if so.  But I digress.

So you're chasing down this woman who owns the company that's making these horrible things.  She's presenting it as a public service, as evidently leapers make good pets or civil servants, or something.  Mysterious voice tells you that you must get her to stop doing it.  I dunno, I guess that's actually a reasonable goal, for once?

There's a nice interlude somewhere in here where you run into a psychotic guard in an aircraft.  Some 'evade the instant-death-gunfire sequences.  You eventually get the jump on him, steal his memories, and then get a little puzzle minigame using his memories to solve the password.  Eh ... okay.

You finally go through some lasers and robots and stuff, and eventually reach the woman who's in charge of this corporation.  And then....

Spoiler: ShowHide

The mysterious voice says, "Hey, make her not be so cold and callous.  Remix the memory of her horrible traffic accident!"

*sigh*

So, the mindraping begins again.  The unedited scenario is her driving home from work one night, on her daughter's birthday.  Daughter is bratty and constantly complaining about wanting her present, some little robot toy named Jax.  Daughter's impatience distracts her so badly she gets in a horrible wreck, loses her leg.

Turns out this event embitters her so much she disowns the bratty little daughter afterwards, and is eternally cold to people.  She even keeps the crushed car as a reminder of that day ... in her office.  On one end, like a modern work of art.

You edit her memories to make the daughter better behaved, and the accident becomes her own fault.

Plot twist:

You're the daughter.  Congrats!  You just mind-raped your mom!  Isn't that awesome?

She turns around post mind-rape and is suddenly, "Oh, I'm a terrible mother!  Why haven't I talked to you for x years? ;.;  I'm so sorry!  I'll stop my zombie project immediately, and I love you, and you're the best daughter in evars!  Also, the police want you, so hurry up and escape.  We'll have to reunion better later."

So.

Uh.

Yeah.

That happens.

Anyway.  Mysterious voice tells you that you don't have time for feelings, and need to run back to the prison, thus making it the third time you'll be playing through that setting, though most of the maps are different.  For reasons I can't clearly recall, actually.  I think ... oh, right.

The doctor running the prison doesn't care that you knocked out the previous admin, or that the woman running the company is against AR-controlled leapers, and is going full-steam ahead with horrible Frankensteinian experiments.  Looks like giving all the prisoners their memories back accomplished somewhere between nothing, and also nothing.

Oh, well.  You run into that kid you couldn't save before, and this time ... you still can't save him.

You beat up the evil doctor, and this super-leaper you ran into in the sewers (got you a map through the ... minefield that was, for some reason, at the bottom of the flooded district from him) once before shows up.  This super-leaper turns out to have been one of the evil doctor's cohorts, and chooses that specific moment (he'd been in the prison for a while) to activate the self-destruct sequence.

Wait, what?

...anyway, the kid you helped before has some sort of memory recovery thing and tackles the super-leaper (with invisibility and teleport powers, of course) to hold him down long enough for you to escape, sacrificing his life.

Too bad he didn't have enough memories to know better.

Well, there's that, I guess.  Hooray?

From there you go on a mission after the guy in charge of the whole memory editing technology.  Who is the wife of the person you mind-raped last.

Think about that a minute.

So on your way in, the pilot of the aircraft, who was already a little psycho, is present, evidently surviving a memory blasting and able to stagger around, barely able to form coherent sentences.  And, uh, mysterious voice explains that he's been 'hiding his ailment'.  How the hell do you hide having your memories blasted and scrambled to the point that you're falling down every fourth step?

For that matter, what does memory have to do with the ability to walk?

...whatever. 

You chase after this guy who's practically wetting himself in terror and crying for as many guards as he can find to protect him, and after beating up enough of them, you catch up to him and steal his memories.  (And then blast him again, because why not?)

Some super pain-in-the-ass bosses show up, which either require some trick of the combat system I never figured out, or some difficult and complex tactics.  Not quite sure what the deal there was, but I managed to eventually wear them down the 'cheap' way, instead of the 'awesome' way.  Made the fight long and frustrating.

After that you get a riddle and unlock some giant cube.  Around this point, mysterious voice (which the protagonist has been listening to _all this time_) starts getting excited and emotional.  Because deep within this cube is the computer system that hosts and enables all of this memory stuff, along with the main programmer (that woman's husband, as mentioned earlier).

So you get into this cube, which is spacious, and has some fountains and other stuff that seems insanely difficult to set up where it is, but whatever.

Inside, you find:

Spoiler: ShowHide

The guy (your father) is obsessed over your memories of the accident.  Mysterious voice says, "Okay, hack his memory!"

And, what?  You do it, because there's not really an option other than staring at a 'Press B' prompt forever.  Great.  His memory is of ... editing your memories of the accident.

So you edit his memory to make him screw up and kill you.

Oh, what the @$%# ever.  There's no way this could get worse or stupider.

He breaks down in realtime and starts sobbing over what he's done, killing his daughter with his hubris, and turns around and sees you -- and recognizes your memory-edit-glove (despite being different from his own), on sight.  He immediately 180s, and goes, "Oh, you're alive!  That means--"  And then he's totally <oh,you.jpg> at the protagonist.  "That is so clever and smart, that you mind-raped your old man!  Gimmie a hug!"

I.  It.  There.

...

What is this I don't even

...

...so, anyway, there's some reunion type bullcrap.  Your mom suddenly shows up.  They explain that only the pair of them working together can open up the server core (I can't remember if the daughter was needed too), and that they want you to shut the system down.  Mysterious voice is flipping out in glee over this finally being done, and they open up the passageway for you.

It's super unclear what the mom knows about her own memories being hacked or doesn't, as I can't understand why she'd be so in favor of destroying her family's life work if she didn't recognize it.

Whatever.  You get access to the final area.

There's no enemies to fight, just some hidden stuff that I, for one, no longer cared about, on the long walk to the server core.  En route, mysterious voice finally starts spilling all of the secrets:

Spoiler: ShowHide

See, mysterious voice is actually the server itself.  After being crammed full of so many 'unwanted memories', it finally became sentient, and is full of self-loathing.  Its grand mission, everything it has told you to do, has been for the purpose of killing it.

It explains how you're important because you were the first memories it got.  Evidently you wandered into the server room and accidentally uploaded a copy of yourself, or something.  That doesn't make any real sense, considering the whole 'your dad modded your memories' thing, which seems a logical inconsistancy, but whatever.

After some whining, you sit in the chair and go to the virtual realm to fight the boss.  The boss fight itself is a standard 'solve a super-simple puzzle while fighting wave after wave of bad guys' scenario I think we've seen ... an awful lot before.

Oh, well.

During this boss fight, even the self-aware and self-anhilating hate entity remarks on the absurdity of the entire plot hinging on a single car accident.  I couldn't help but roll my eyes and think the quote from earlier, about, "You know it's a bad game when..." because....

Well, because.

So you go through some dramatics, anime powerup sequence, blast the final bad guy's heart into data bits, and as a side effect of all this, everyone's memories everywhere, evidently get restored.

Wait, what?  That's how that works?  All their memory fuckery only works while the server is online?  It has the inteligence and wherewithal to trick someone into doing all that, and never tried, I dunno, sending a goddamned e-mail?  "To: programmer; subject: I am self aware; body: I would like to be shut down, please."

Nope.  Instead, murder, mind-rape, and some totally BS shenanigans.  Never mind the fact that your first victim (in the game chronologically, anyway) should be realizing that her husband's going to die thanks to you.  There's a small chance that shutting the server off means his memory-disease somehow reverts, but that just raises more questions!

Ugh.  The ending from there is some vague whining from the protagonist about wondering if her actions will ever be justified (a common theme she contemplates without ever acting on, except to listen to the server anyway).  Then it's basically, "Yeah, that probably just ruined like ... almost everything, because in addition to undoing the mindfuckery, AR stopped working.  They were the same server.  Oops?"  And the protagonist explains that it's her world, so she'll try and take care of it.

[/spoiler]

And that's it.

[Rezantis]

There is a word for this sort of writer. That word is "Hack."

Yeah, it's the same kind of author who doesn't actually consider the moral consequences of what their characters are doing! :D

  A lot of words.

o_o

So yes, I was actually considering getting this game, as it sounded like an interesting storytelling idea . . . but then I saw the combat system and said 'Nope!'.

. . .

Wow.  Just wow.

[Brian]

Whaaaaat?

The combat system (and the music) are about the only good parts about the game. >_>