Wot i Think Remember Me

Wot I Think: Remember Me

Remember Me is a sci-fi action game from Capcom and French dev DONTNOD, and it is about doing unpleasant things to people’s memories and punching other people. Mostly punching people, to be honest. Let’s see I can totally recall what I thought of it.

 
I know exactly what you’re thinking. You’re thinking “‘Remember Me’ refers to this Capcom action game’s plot and theme, concerning the technological manipulation, trade and abuse of memories in futuristic France.” You are incorrect. It actually refers to trying to remember lots of button combinations. The subtitle was originally going to be “No? Then you’re going to be rubbish at this game.” Check Capcom’s United States Patent and Trademark Office registration for this game, you’ll see.

Yes, this is one of those proverbial games of two halves. One half is punching, which I’ll come back to in a bit. The other half, on paper the most compelling to me and I suspect to a fair few of you, concerns dark science-fictional memory hacking in Neo-Paris. Remember Me sort of gestures broadly towards concepts of what memory, and with it identity, really means, especially when any memory can be altered, and has some fun depicting a society wherein the wealthy are hooked on being able to relive memories of positive experiences (primarily sex, as well as that hormonal condition you humans call ‘love’) on demand, while the memory-harvested poor are murderous, babble-spouting ghouls living in slums and sewers.

It’s very much a classical science fiction high concept – what if you could buy someone else’s memories? – but if you’re hoping for a homage to 80s camp, I’m afraid it’s a lot more like Colin Farrell Total Recall 2012 than Arnie Total Recall. An 80s sci-fi touchstone whose influence is very much apparent is Blade Runner – pan-ethnic fusion culture, giant light-billboards, metropolitan ultra-sprawl and the juxtaposition of gleaming high-tech with urban squalor and ruin. Very nice to look at indeed, and like BioShock: Infinite it’s one of those games where the artists look to have been free to indulge themselves, but in both plot and tone it does feel like it’s a collection of hoary old sci-fi tropes bolted together and then painted in particularly shiny colours.

Read More