So, I guess I'm gonna have to get down to the dirty work of playing games, years after they've been released and everyone else has reviewed them. To note, this isn't a review for players, but rather a review from a designers perspective. While my comments may be of use to a player, I'm using this as more of an exercise and resource for myself than for my audience.
Look at Our Art
The first thing I noticed about Remember Me is that it uses a forced camera perspective fairly regularly. This doesn't change the way your character moves, but it does change the way my brain thinks the character moves, and it really messes me up. While I can understand the importance of making sure the character stays in the field of view, I feel that a fixed or player controlled perspective is much easier for a player to handle.
That's a real helpful camera angle we got going on If you can't see the character, that's her hands down at the bottom. And the area you need to jump is helpfully blocked by the text.
It does give you some very nice perspectives on the vistas of Neo Paris, but it often felt like more of a hindrance than helpful.
Press 'Space' to Parkour
Additionally, when you need to get to the destination (usually through basic "press space to parkour") your HUD lights up where you need to go. Now, this is nifty as they don't have to have particular parts of the environment a certain color, but it does make me feel like the game thinks I'm an idiot. However, I am accepting of it, as my experiences with the game are showing me that that part of gameplay isn't something that they wanted to showcase.
Now, that is a bit of a problem - I think that all parts of a game should be something that you want to showcase, but we aren't in an ideal world and so I'm fine with it. The mechanic isn't innovative and while it isn't really exciting, it also isn't boring, so I like that they just let me breeze through it. The parkour isn't the part of the game where I should be focusing my attentions.
It does regularly not accept the inputs - you need to be in the right place facing the right direction for it to work. This normally isn't too frustrating, but there are occasionally encounters where you need to run - either from someone shooting at you, or as the makeshift walkways collapse behind you. When you have a split second to not only figure out where to go, but to get into the right position, it can get really irritating.
The game is entirely linear, so there is only one route to anything - you never have to figure out the path to take, or how to get there. If you wander around where you're allowed to go, you'll rather quickly find the one path, and then you won't be able to deviate from it.
Remembranes
There's a mechanic in the game where you steal the memories of another character, and then watch them go through an environment, allowing you to follow in their steps and avoid the hazards.
This does continue the linear pattern of movement and exploration into the narrative, which is good. Sometimes it can be a little tricky to follow what they're saying, but the ability to cancel and restart the sequence at any point during it makes it fine. If you miss something, or if you want to walkthrough an action again, just hit the action button and you're off to the races.
Fighting and Combo's
I'm only about a half-hour into the game, but I think the combat is what they want me to focus on. You can fight with combos, made up of left and right clicks. What's cool about their system is that you get to customize your combos. You can decide what sort of effect you want your kicks and punches to have. At least, kind of. The combo's themselves always have the same starting move, so I can't change that, and then the other moves appear to be type-locked. This means that my first combo is three punches, and I can't change that. I can change the type of punch - to be either extra damage or healing, but I'm limited (again).
Early in the game, I only have two 'uses' of extra damage punches, one healing kick and one healing punch. This means that I can fill up my three-hit combo, but I can't have two healing punches in it. It also means that I can't fill out my five-hit combo, as it requires two kicks, and the game as decided I can only have one for now. I can use the combo, but I don't get the bonuses.
Later in the game, I'm able to customize my combo's, but the ideal method is to find the longest combo you can reliably do (actions get more powerful the further into a combo they are) and then just keep on changing it mid combat to suit the situation. The game encourages pausing it in the middle of an action sequence to fiddle around with the controls - sometimes multiple times.I ended up not playing in the most efficient manner, and despite it being the intended style (find a set of combo's you like and stick with them) since it wasn't the most efficient, I felt bad for playing that way. I think either not pausing the game in the 'Combo Lab' or not allowing it to be managed during combat would have allowed for the intended experience.
As I progress through the game, I get better at combat, and it flows. It becomes very cinematic. To give you a chance to dodge attacks, the enemies attacks are very clearly telegraphed, with big red exclamation marks. However, dodge can be a little clunky - it has a relatively long animation, so you can't just spam it and never get hit, you need to use it somewhat intelligently. However, if you mistime one dodge, you're often unable to dodge the next attack, so one bad dodge leads to multiple hits, which stagger you, giving you a smaller window to use dodge again, essentially putting you close to a stun lock.
Special Abilities for Special Enemies
There are a variety of enemies that don't die to just being punched. Some of these enemies have shield that need to be broken, while others are invisible or simply indestructible until you accomplish a certain task. Often times, this task is on a cooldown of up to two minutes, and you won't necessarily be able to finish off your target before they regain their bonuses. In one particular instance, I was fighting enemies who were invisible until I used an ability on a two minute cooldown and another who didn't take damage until I had dealt with the rest. It took about 4-5 minutes, most of it with me just not doing anything except running in circles.
There's another enemy who damages you whenever you damage it. Thankfully, there is a combo-move that heals you, but it heals for about the amount of retaliation damage you take, so any damage the enemy inflicts themselves can't be healed up. Furthermore, since the first move of your combo can't be a special move, you're going to take net damage from that, and if you mess up the combo or it gets interrupted, you get punished further. While I learned to fight them fairly reasonably, fighting them never felt engaging, it was always a slog of using a healing combo and dealing minimal damage.Utility for Bad Players
To be fair, I wasn't particularly good at the game. To compensate for this, the game decided that I needed tutorials, so whenever I failed at a task repeatedly, it would have a small text box appear with a suggest such as 'Hold LMB to move faster while climbing.' The first time I got the message it was helpful, but only because they hadn't indicated in any way that I would need to climb faster, so I just failed because I had no instruction. When I continued to mess up that particular scenario, the message continually reappeared. However, I wasn't failing because I didn't know what to do, I was failing because either I wasn't playing well enough or the game was to unforgiving. In either situation, instructions telling me what to do were explicitly not helpful.
However, when I did fail, and Nilin died, the reload period only took a couple seconds and I ended up usually within twenty seconds of where I died, so I could easily retry the encounter. While this is a minor thing, it is something that I feel a lot of games don't do well, particularly when there are a lot of individual points of failure.
Memory Editing and Narrative Mechanics
Four times during the game, you remix another character's memories. You enter their mind and remix a memory so that they see a life event from a different perspective, as you change the way they believe the event to have occurred. It is a really cool idea, and the first time you try it, it seems fun. But that's not true.
Memory editing is a bitch.
Not only are the controls incredibly finicky, but its just guess and check and wait and retry.
Once you have made a change, you need to see how it effects the memory, which means watching the cinematic. Once you do that, repeat it three to five more times for the other glitches in the memory. But wait! Some of those glitches have two options and you can only choose one. So you have to try every combination of those. But wait! Some glitches shouldn't be turned on, so you have between two and three options for each of five glitches, which creates a bunch of different potential outcomes. After the first Memory Edit, I immediately alt-tabbed to look up a walkthrough whenever one came up. It's a really cool idea, but it is terribly executed.
While there are hints within the memories as to what you should select, it still felt like throwing darts - I didn't know if I was going to be successful or not, and when I did succeed, it didn't feel like I had accomplished anything, but rather, that I got lucky after wasting my time.
It wouldn't be as rewarding if all of the glitches need to be turned on, but it would make the process smoother. I personally don't like watching a cinematic more than once (I think only Blizzard can make a cinematic I watch repeatedly) especially in a short time frame, and this minigame is all about watching the same cinematic over and over.
Despite its flaws, Memory Editing is very good at progressing the story. As a narrative tool, I really enjoyed it, as a game mechanic, I was incredibly frustrated with it.
Collectibles
The collectibles that give stat boosts are easily found, as there are displays around the world with images either highlighting where the item is or what you can see from where it is. They are very easy to find, not because of the information in the display, but because the display itself indicates that there is one nearby, and given the linear nature of the game, if you don't go along the yellow brick road, you'll find the stat boost. It would be more interesting if there was more than one place for the collectible to be, but I'm fine with in-game stat boosts being easy to find.
Lore entries are not heralded in this way, but are also always just off the beaten path. These I didn't find as often, because I didn't explore, because there wasn't anything to explore - again, the linear of the nature of the game restricts where collectibles or objectives can be. As an additional comment, when you haven't found one of the lore entries it says "locked" which feels bad. "Undiscovered" or "Forgotten" feel better, particularly "Forgotten" as the game is about memory and Nilin has amnesia.
Players, Characters, and Fear
At times, the game tries to create a scary atmosphere, one where the player is hesitant and afraid of their surroundings, or at the least, cautious. Regularly, when making a jump from one platform to another, the game switches to a cinematic and has part of the structure fall out from under you, or has Nilin dangle above a lethal drop. After the first couple times this happens (during the prologue) it is easy to become accustomed to it and have it be more of a hassle than anything else, because Nilin (and therefore your time) isn't in danger. Where this falls apart is when you're given control back in situations where you do need to take a swift action. Since I got used to not having to worry about my next action, I would contemplate my options, and in that time fail - I had been conditioned to not care, and then was given a situation where I needed to.
Similarly, enemies suddenly appear in cut-scenes, but they are preluded by wide open areas as well as a change in music. Again, it appears that they are trying to create a feeling of fear and they're using surprise as their method to shock you. However, because it has no consequences and is foreshadowed, it doesn't quite work, at least on me.
This does make me think about trying to create fear in players. Using shock doesn't seem to work, while suspense (as seen in Amnesia or Bioshock) works much better. But suspense works because they are afraid of a potential surprise. What makes striking fear into players difficult is that they only need to be really worried about losing time - they aren't going to be harmed even if their character is.
The Final Encounter and the Big Bad
Jesus shit the final boss was awful. But I'll get to that in a minute. In general, I didn't like most of the mechanic aspects of the end of the game. I start off by unlocking an area that nobody has goes into and I spent the last hour trying to get the key to get in. As soon as I'm in, the game throws a handful of random enemies at me, which makes no sense. I unlocked the place and was the first one in, and yet there are enemies waiting for me? Sure.
After that, I get to the inner sanctum, where I can hear some exposition, but first I need to do some Parkour. It takes me about two minutes, as there are twenty jumps to be made as well as crawling along some ledges. The exposition was finished in the first five jumps. That didn't pull me out of the dramatic moment at all. Nope.
We then have a nice cinematic, and I get to do my final Memory Edit. As said before, I really don't like it as a gameplay mechanic, and so I alt-tabbed during the final encounter in the game to read a guide. That always feels good.
After that, I get to walk through a maze at a pace usually reserved for cinematics and sloths. It didn't create any tension, didn't build up the excitement, I just spent a lot of time walking, getting upset that I wasn't able to progress the story.
Finally, I get to the end of the maze, some story happens, and I get thrown into the boss fight. First off, it doesn't make sense from a story perspective. The enemy asks you to put them out of their misery (both in the exposition before the fight and during it) and then decides that they're going to try their best to beat you to death. And then the fight itself took at least five minutes and probably longer. It used game mechanics in new ways, and I would never have figured it out on my own. In the middle of the final encounter, wincing all the way, I paused the game, opened up a guide and read up on how to beat him.
I could have not done that, and I would have eventually figured it out, by fucking up and getting the game to tell me what to do.
At least there weren't any quicktime events. In this encounter.
Summary
Most of the time when I died, it didn't feel like I had failed, it felt like the controls had.
The Rest of the Stuff (Story, Art, World)
I'm definitely not giving this the space it deserves, but the story was good, the world was very interesting and the art was gorgeous.
